The Best And Brightest? Or The Most Enlightened?

An article that appeared in Sunday's Boston Globe describes how a disproportionate number of people hired by the Bush administration since 2001 are graduates of Regent University. Many of those people received degrees from Regent's law school, which, according to the article, is a "fourth tier" law school, ranked lower than 135 other law schools in the United States, and where, as recently as 1999, sixty percent of graduates failed the bar exam on the first attempt.

Now, I'm not going to be a Harvard snob and insist that the only people qualified to work in the federal administration and those that graduate from my future alma mater (or our less enlightened brethren who earn degrees from institutions in New Haven or Palo Alto). Many brilliant minds and diligent workers come from all sorts of law schools. However, the skewed number hired out of Regent suggests some funny business is at work. Sure enough, Regent's chancellor is none other than Pat Robertson, the politically-connected minister who has been best friend to the Republican Party for decades. As the article details, Regent's law classes take the traditional law school doctrine, constructed over two-plus centuries of American legal history, and supplement it (or in many cases, supplant it) with a moralist Christian spin. At Regent, the court of last resort is not the U.S. Supreme Court -- it's Jesus.

As an American citizen, I want the most qualified attorneys working for my government, not the most religious. Given the faith-based policies of the Bush administration (or the favoritism shown to Christian conservatives, depending on the way you look at it), I can't say I'm surprised. But I believe Bush is doing the nation a disservice by filling his administration not necessarily with the best people, but with the people who share his own, personal, religious mindset.