The search for a new dean at the University of Arkansas School of Law took two years; conservative extremists in state government torpedoed the new hire, Emily Suski, in less than a week. As culture warriors yip victory and advocates for constitutional rights and academic freedom wring their hands, a heaping load of criticism is piling up.
The New York Times weighed in last week, classifying the unceremonious dumping of would-be Dean Suski “the latest example of how politics is influencing university decisions about faculty hiring, once the exclusive purview of academics.” Times reporter Stephanie Saul noted the university’s about-face on Suski resembles the almost-hiring last year of Santa Ono, a former president of the University of Michigan, to be president at the University of Florida. The pick was overruled by the Florida Board of Governors, who rejected Ono over his past support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
In Arkansas, Suski’s rejection is based ona different culture war landmine. Suski’s interpretation of the law surrounding the rights of transgender athletes, which she shared in an amicus brief, differs from the opinions of Republican state Sens. Bart Hester and Dan Sullivan, Attorney General Tim Griffin and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Hester seemingly threatened to defund the university if it didn’t bend to his will, though he claims he didn’t. “There’s just a basic understanding that the legislature controls the purse strings,” he told the Arkansas Advocate.
Hester and Sullivan are not lawyers, but they are leaders in Arkansas’s years-long campaign to discredit and alienate gender-nonconforming people. In recent years, Arkansas passed laws barring teachers from respecting trans students’ preferred names and pronouns, barring gender-affirming care for transgender youth, doing away with the option to use “X” as a gender marker on state-issued ID, and policing where transgender people can use the bathroom.
The handful of Democrats in the Arkansas Legislature have been loud and clear in their dissent. State Rep. Nicole Clowney of Fayetteville, who teaches at the law school, was first out of the gate with a full-throated objection to what she called a “horrifying, unprecedented, and absolutely unconstitutional abuse of state power.” Other Democrats, including Reps. Ashley Hudson, Andrew Collins and Tippi McCullough of Little Rock and Rep. Denise Garner of Fayetteville, are swinging away as well, warning that Suski’s un-hiring tarnishes both the law school and the university system as a whole, leaving a black mark that will repel top talent in the future. Will students — those who aren’t conservatives, anyway — want to study there? Will professors want to teach there?
State Sen. Clarke Tucker, a Little Rock Democrat, seemed flummoxed by the university’s quick surrender without any sign they put up a fight. In a telephone interview on Friday, he called the rescission of Suski’s job offer “a betrayal of the core mission of the institution. Freedom of expression, academic freedom, intellectual integrity. These are the core tenets of a free society,” Tucker said. “Nowhere is that more important than on college campuses.”
But the apparent total capitulation makes more sense considering the Republican supermajority in Arkansas’s Legislature has shown repeatedly in recent years that they relish the opportunity to threaten, browbeat and punish the state’s educators and schools. Public colleges and universities can’t operate without public funding, and as Hester reminded everyone this week, he, Sullivan and their pals hold the purse strings.
In the 2025 legislative session, Republican Rep. Ryan Rose of Van Buren was not coy at all when he threatened to withhold higher education funding over gender studies classes he said were divisive and would not help students find high-paying jobs. “If we pass these appropriations, we fail to hold these institutions’ feet to the fire,” Rose said at the time. Lawmakers eventually funded the appropriations, but the message was clear.
Arkansas lawmakers also passed Gov. Sanders’ Arkansas ACCESS bill in 2025, a package of changes to higher education that included limitations on activism on campuses and barred “discrimination and indoctrination” in college classrooms — as defined by the Republicans who control the state, of course.
The state’s other law school, the Bowen School of Law in Little Rock, doesn’t offer a much better alternative at the moment, having fired a Black woman professor this fall over her unapologetic social media posts in the wake of campus provocateur Charlie Kirk’s death.
According to the attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, rescinding Suski’s signed job offer was not just icky, but also unconstitutional. Suski was rejected because of her speech, they say — a First Amendment violation. “Under this logic, any public worker could be punished for expressing a belief unless it has first been approved by politicians,” the ACLU said. “That is not governance — it is ideological control.”
A conservative law professor who’s one of the state’s most prominent self-styled free speech advocates disagrees with contentions that Suski’s First Amendment rights and the university’s academic freedom have been violated. Robert Steinbuch, a staunch conservative columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and an outspoken critic of what he sees as liberal bias in academia, offered a counter-narrative both to the Democrats upset about Suski’s fate and to the reasoning for the university’s flip-flop on Suski’s hiring.
Steinbuch told the Arkansas Times it’s appropriate to consider a job candidate’s politics because law schools should pursue a diversity of thought that he says is currently lacking in academia. “Legal education is failing to educate students in a fashion that reflects the realities of how the law actually operates in America,” he said. Steinbuch says law schools need “creative, out-of-the-box leaders capable of breaking the current monoculture.”
Steinbuch rejected the idea that vetting candidates’ opinions and giving preference to the conservative ones is akin to considering race and gender in hiring and admissions decisions, something he’s vociferously opposed in the past. “I do think there’s a difference between seeking diversity based on physical features versus diversity of thought,” he said. “But even there, hiring based on merit without preferences should produce an intellectually diverse community.”
In Steinbuch’s view, pressure to ditch Suski centered not on Suski’s past legal opinions but on a more general wish to pursue diversity of thought. That assertion is hard to square with statements Hester and Sullivan gave to multiple media outlets last week.
“There’s no way the people of Arkansas want somebody running and educating our next generation of lawyers and judges [to be] someone that doesn’t understand the difference between a man and a woman,” Hester told reporters at the Arkansas Advocate.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that Sullivan lobbied university leadership to rescind Suski’s job offer with a document he titled “My research,” which summarized some of Suski’s legal work and concluded that her “views appear to favor progressive legal interpretations.”
Steinbuch said he had not followed Hester’s recent statements to the media, but that he believed Hester “generally shares my view on the need for structural changes in the legal academy.”
Steinbuch’s lengthy emailed response to questions about Suski’s hiring is included in full below.
“In my view, legal education has been broken for some time. As an example, legal academics overwhelmingly dismissed the conservative argument against the Obamacare mandate as frivolous, yet the Supreme Court ultimately adopted precisely that position.
Legal education is failing to educate students in a fashion that reflects the realities of how the law actually operates in America. As another example, I just returned from a conference of legal academics, and the overwhelming message that I heard was a political one–the need to train lawyers to pursue a progressive social-justice agenda. Legal education needs to be broader than that. Students should be given the tools to pursue any approach to the law, not just the one that overwhelmingly dominates the academy.
So when stakeholders in the legislature and executive branch observed that the university was perpetuating the status quo in its search for a new dean, they expressed their desire to move beyond the legal-academic echo chamber. There is a strong belief among many, including me, that law-school leadership across the country should better seek to incorporate into legal education the broader-legal landscape of the country.
I do not believe this issue is centered on a candidate’s specific political ideology or the legal briefs she signed. Rather, the primary concern is about changing how legal-education institutions operate. We cannot achieve dramatic reform by hiring individuals deeply embedded in the status quo, regardless of their fine academic credentials. Legal education today demands creative, out-of-the-box leaders capable of breaking the current monoculture.
While it would have been more effective for elected officials, as those who set the direction for state entities, to be involved earlier in the search, it appears the school did not reach out to them. Consequently, they only became involved once the university announced its offer letter (which coincided with a FOIA request I made, incidentally).
At this juncture, I hope all voices will be heard as the school moves forward with the process.”
