Courtrooms and Classrooms

In Courtrooms and Classrooms Scott M. Gelber explores the history of courts’ “academic deference”—their tendency to defer to the special expertise and autonomy of colleges and universities. Legal scholars and higher education advocates who assume academic deference was a long-standing tradition unseated by the tumult of the 1960s have gotten this history wrong, he argues, for the principle of academic deference has been more fluid and is of more recent origin than previously realized. The core of Gelber's analysis is the approximately one hundred state and federal appellate cases addressing college admission, tuition, and expulsion—including desegregation cases—that pitted students against institutions from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. With careful attention to the doctrinal intricacies of each area of case law, Gelber examines each body of cases in turn and frames three periods: before 1910, Gelber argues, courts were inconsistent in their deference to universities and in their protection of students’ rights; from 1910 to 1960, courts more consistently ruled against students and exhibited greater deference to institutions; after 1960, courts layered greater protection of students’ due process and equal protection rights in these types of college access cases. If a golden age of academic deference can be said to exist, it was a relatively brief period in the mid-twentieth century, Gelber argues, and consequently present-day appeals for courts to return to this deference are historically inaccurate and fraught with problematic implications

Autonomy · Deference · Political science · Sociology · Academic Freedom and Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms