Universities are known for taking pains to avoid bad publicity, so when a top university makes an unforced error in its treatment of a student, it’s always interesting to ask why. A petition to allow a pregnant second-year law student to move up her final exams at Georgetown Law School made headlines on Friday. School administrators eventually caved to public pressure and allowed the student, Brittany Lovely, more flexibility for scheduling her exam, but not before giving Georgetown’s PR team a doozy of a day.
Lovely said she had been fighting with the administration for months but was told she would have to take the exam in person 11 days after her due date, with two extra hours to allow for breastfeeding, the Washington Post reported. Lovely’s request to take the exam early or at home was denied for being “inequitable” for her fellow students, according to the petition. Luckily for Lovely, her classmates came to her aid to protest the possible Title IX violation, and a bipartisan crew of pro-natalist conservatives and pronouns-in-bio liberals raised an outcry online.
How could a group of highly credentialed and presumably intelligent school officials have handled this situation so poorly? Leave aside the fact that Lovely is a black woman facing an unplanned pregnancy (her partner, fellow Georgetown Law student Tyler Zirker, spoke in support of her to the Washington Post). Leave aside the fact that at-home exams were more than good enough for the university during the Covid-19 lockdowns (Georgetown University’s student body wasn’t allowed back on campus until the fall of 2021). To anyone with common sense, telling a nine-months-pregnant woman that she must appear in person for anything on a specific day sounds crazy. Not to mention it creates more complications for everyone when said woman fails to appear because she’s in labor.
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The administration’s response to Lovely’s initial request shows just how disconnected from reality those in the ivory tower can be. Can you imagine telling a woman who gave birth three days ago to haul a screaming infant to campus for an hours-long exam? Apparently, these administrators can. It boggles the mind that otherwise well-informed people can conceive of birth as something that can simply be scheduled between Thanksgiving and Christmas break. Surely at least one of these administrators has been in the vicinity of a newborn baby before. To riff on the title of an old Firing Line episode: Why are our university administrators so dumb?
In that 1981 episode, communism critic Paul Hollander discusses why American intellectuals were taken in by the dystopias disguised as utopias they saw in places like Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba. “Though Hollander notes that one might expect intelligent people to see issues clearly, he shows that education and intellectual brilliance is no guarantee of political or practical wisdom,” author Harvey Klehr wrote in a review of Hollander’s final book before his death. Sadly, our university administrators have little to no practical wisdom, and they have much smaller aims than the starry-eyed intellectuals of the past. They don’t dream of utopia; they’re satisfied with HR policies that get a thumbs up from a DEI consultant. Now our so-called intellectuals pursue equity through policies no one asked for and no one wants—case in point, accommodating Lovely.
There’s a silver lining to Lovely’s kerfuffle with the administration, as it showcases that society still does value making allowances for pregnant women—giving up your seat on the bus, metaphorically speaking. By speaking up on Lovely’s behalf, pronatalist scholars like Leah Libresco Sargeant showed that they have common cause with many on the left who mistakenly believe that pro-lifers want to control mothers instead of empower them. I’m not a betting woman, but I’d wager that Lovely, who describes herself as a “formerly incarcerated abolitionist,” identifies with the political left. Perhaps the support she received from the right-of-center will one day inspire her to be an abortion abolitionist, too.
