Tribute to George Dent.

• Author: Wood, Peter W.
• Position: Testimonial

George Dent is a longstanding member of the National Association of Scholars ("NAS"), head of NAS's Ohio chapter--the Ohio Association of Scholars, a member of the NAS's board of directors, and a member of the steering committee on that board.

The NAS membership by itself testifies to his contrarian side. The National Association of Scholars--founded as the Campus Coalition for Democracy in 1982 and reorganized as NAS in 1987--quickly gained a reputation as the voice of neo-conservatives in higher education. Though NAS resisted that label and worked hard to encompass a broader swath of the political spectrum, the organization was unmistakably a center of opposition to the identitarian left on campus. George joined the NAS not long after it was founded and soon emerged as one of its regional and national leaders.

I know George wholly in this context, but it is a rich context--one that offers glimpses of his courage, energy, imagination, and perseverance.

The issues that first drew him to NAS, and that he made his own, were the fight for academic freedom and the fight against identity-group preferences. These overlap when colleges and universities obstruct the freedom of faculty members to criticize group preferences. George was clearly thinking about these matters well before he joined NAS. In 1988, for example, he published a law review article, "Religious Children, Secular Schools," (1) which examined possible ways that the state could accommodate the education of religiously observant people. That topic was well outside of George's main professional specialization in business law, but it proved to be part of an enduring interest. He would write again in "Of God and Caesar: The Free Exercise Rights of Public School Students" in the Case Western Reserve Law Review, (2) and on other aspects of religious freedom in law review articles such as "Civil Rights for Whom?: Gay Rights Versus Religious Freedom." (3)

George's concern about religious freedom, however, is of a piece of his larger defense of freedom of expression--and his critique of campus ideologies that impede such freedom. Among his notable contributions to NAS's journal, Academic Questions, was "Political Discrimination in the Curriculum: A Case Study." (4) The case in question was that of sociology professor Richard Zeller at Bowling Green State University. Zeller had heard complaints from his students who said that "their grades would suffer if they criticized abortion or...