On the 250th Anniversary of American Independence, Penn State Dickinson Law Seeks to Restructure Society.
Posted by Ed Folsom, May 30, 2026.
“Equality, I spoke the word, as if a wedding vow. Ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Bob Dylan, My Back Pages
Equality and the Declaration of Independence.
This year marks our 250th anniversary as the United States of America, a history that began on July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of independence, which declared 13 British colonies “the thirteen united States of America.” The Declaration explained, “[A] decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that [the people] should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” So it declared the causes of separation, with the following as preamble to the particulars:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Because the Declaration declared it a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, it’s easy to say that America began on a principle of equality. But, equality in what respects?
Is the equality principle underpinning the Declaration of Independence solely that all people are equal in the eyes of God, their “Creator,”equally endowed by God with certain inalienable rights including the right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness?
Or is it broader than that? Was the Declaration of Independence intended to say that everyone is endowed with the right to an outcome equal to all others in all endeavors? Did the signers believe that all people have a right to enjoy equal amounts of happiness, or equally long lives, or an equal quality of life? How about an income equal to everyone else’s?
The Declaration of Independence was not meant to declare any of those things. It promises nothing, and it certainly promises nothing of the kind. The “self-evident” truth, that all are created equal, expressed the then-prevailing belief that nobody is created to rule over others and that nobody is created to be ruled by others without their consent, “the consent of the governed.” It also expressed the then-prevailing belief that all are born with natural rights that include the right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness; that governments are formed to secure those natural rights; and that when a government instead works against people’s natural rights – is “destructive” of their natural rights – the people have the right to abolish the government and form a new one to secure their safety and happiness.
These days, radical leftists, many of whom don’t believe that anyone is born with natural rights; don’t believe that there has ever been a God in existence to create anyone or anything; believe that the only rights anyone has are rights granted by the government; tell us that truth itself is nothing other than what those with power declare it to be; who insist that boys can (be) turn(ed) into girls and that men can get pregnant, and wherever they hold the power to do so bully into submission anyone who dares to say otherwise, would have us believe that the equality principle underlying the Declaration of Independence demands the restructuring of American society to conform to a DEI agenda.
What is Government’s Proper Role in Ensuring Equality?
In whatever respects the drafters and signers of the Declaration of Independence believed that all men are created equal, what is the proper role of government in ensuring this equality? Is government’s proper role limited to ensuring that the laws that government makes apply equally to all, or is government instead required to adjust the way the laws are applied to certain groups, to ensure equal outcomes between groups?
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, provides in part:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
What does it mean to say that no state shall deprive any person of the equal protection of the laws within its jurisdiction? Does it mean that the laws must not be applied to favor certain individuals or groups over others, whether by creating an advantage for some or a disadvantage for others? Or does it mean that the laws must be applied to make all group outcomes equal, that unequal outcomes demonstrate that those with poorer outcomes have not received equal protection of the laws?
For example, if I am poor, I probably drive an old car. Old vehicles have old bulbs that burn out, old exhaust systems that rust out, old bodies that deteriorate structurally, etc. Vehicle safety laws turn mechanical problems into violations of law, so I might find myself violating the law largely because I have no choice but to drive and can’t afford a newer vehicle.
A wealthy person probably drives a new vehicle that has none of these problems. A cop on patrol is much more likely to find reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause of a vehicle safety violation in the condition of my old car than in the condition of a wealthy person’s new vehicle. So, I am much more likely than the wealthy person to have vehicle safety laws enforced against me, much more likely to be pulled over in a traffic stop based on reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause of a vehicle safety violation. Is this a systemic inequity? Does this violate the 14th Amendment?
Does it matter that poor people in fact violate vehicle safety laws more often than rich people because their cars happen to be more worn out? Applying the standards of reasonable articulable suspicion and probable cause equally to rich and poor (equal application of the laws) disadvantages poor people by exposing them to greater enforcement of vehicle safety laws. If we use unequal outcomes as our measure of unequal protection, we might claim that poor people are clearly denied equal protection of the laws. We might even claim that the only way to honor the equal protection clause is to abolish vehicle safety laws.
Now imagine that we are not even allowed to suggest that the unequal outcome between rich and poor arises from poor people violating the vehicle safety laws more often than the rich. If we limit the range of mentionable causes, we might come to believe that the disparity results from police simply discriminating against poor people for being poor. This might lead us to conclude that (as many self-styled “anti-racists” have told us in recent years) “all cops are bastards (ACAB)” and the only solution is to abolish the police.
If we draw on the teaching of the Declaration of Independence that everyone is created equal and therefore begins life equal to everyone else, we might take the bare fact that some people are rich and others are poor to demonstrate fundamental, systemic American inequity. The poor are poorer than the rich, which isn’t equal. The laws therefore do not provide equal protection for the poor. Abolish capitalism!
In this construction, since everyone is created equal, unequal outcomes can only result from systemic inequities, which must be corrected. But how are they to be corrected? How can we possibly achieve equal protection of the laws until we achieve equal outcomes? In the meantime, we must struggle to eliminate everything that stands in the way of equal outcomes, because this is what America’s founding promise of equality and the U.S. Constitution, especially the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, require.
Penn State Dickinson’s Mission to Restructure American Society.
Some of you might think this sounds crazy, but something very close to it is being taught to students at Penn State Dickinson Law School in their mandatory first-year class, “Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws” (REPL). The class is a pet project of Penn State Dickinson’s Dean, Danielle Conway, previously dean of the University of Maine School of Law from 2015-2019. Conway describes what goes on there as follows:
“We use critical pedagogy to analyze how a governing system founded on a pledge of democratic ideals produces systemic inequity when legal, social, economic and civil obstacles limit liberty for those othered in society.”
As recordings of the first 2 sessions of the 2026 REPL course show (here), students were told they are part of a broad coalition, working “to build a more anti-racist, equal-under-the-law approach to our law and legal system.” Membership in the coalition requires them “to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism, subordination and oppression” as a starting point.
Students in the 2026 class were also told, “Our criminal legal system is not about keeping families and communities safe, it’s about keeping Black people in their place.” And they were told that the systemic inequities will continue “unless we abolish white supremacy, unless we eradicate patriarchy,” and that the reason the course is mandatory is that fighting injustice “is not just one way to be a good lawyer,” it is a requirement of being a good lawyer.
In other words, the course teaches that anyone who fails to accept as a starting point that America, its laws, and its legal systems are shot-through with systemic racism, subordination, and oppression cannot ever be a good lawyer. Students can either accept DEI as the path to “anti-racist” salvation and be welcomed to the fold, the movement, the coalition, or instead meet their fate as threateners of the rule of law and democracy. There is only one true path, illuminated for them by the clerisy of Penn State Dickinson.
How is the “anti-racist,” DEI battle for the elimination of “systemic inequity” to be waged? Evidently by using the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, with disparate outcomes as proof of unequal protection of the laws.
According to a news account, in May of this year, Penn State Dickinson released a “Strategic Plan Update” that summarizes the school’s mission as promoting, “a Historical and Contextual Understanding of the Power and Promise of the U.S. Constitution to Restructure Society Along the Lines of Systemic Equity, Justice, Equality, and Fairness for All.”
In other words, Penn State Dickinson is on a mission to restructure American society along the lines of DEI.
The “Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws” course does not present any counterpoints to its agenda. But after all, how could the school present counterpoints against something that it teaches everyone must accept to enter the path to “anti-racist” salvation? In fact, for reasons Herbert Marcuse long ago explained in his leftist clarion call “Repressive Tolerance,” in matters such as these, the new orthodoxy requires that all counter-speech must be snuffed out.
Sure, as Dean Conway tells her students, it’s alright for certain Supreme Court Justices, for instance, to have a “learned opinion” contrary to her own. But Conway’s fellow clerics make clear that counter-opinions are not much tolerated inside the “anti-racist” DEI temple. And since counter-opinions threaten democracy and the rule of law anyway, anyone who holds them should probably just keep them to themselves.
In case you might think this is a small deal, confined to a relatively small cell of leftist guerillas swimming in the friendly but isolated waters of Penn State Dickson Law, consider that: (1) Conway has made her mission, to restructure America along DEI lines especially by use of the 14th Amendment, very clear, so the rest of legal academia must be well aware of it; and (2) in January, Conway was elected to serve as the President of the American Association of Law Schools, which implicates legal academia more broadly in the subversion.
None of this is the promise of America, and it isn’t what the equal protection clause calls for or even allows.
In 1840, sixty-four years after the Declaration of Independence was made, Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America, Vol. II,” was published. De Tocqueville had traveled to America, from France, to study the American people and their new form of government. Near the end of his book, he made the following incisive, predictive observation:
“The first, and by the way the only, necessary condition for arriving at centralizing public power in a democratic society is to love equality or to make it believed [that one does]. Thus the science of despotism, formerly so complicated, is simplified: it is reduced, so to speak, to a single principle.”
Today’s American despots understand this well, and so they pretend to love equality and to stand for it above all else (and Democracy™ and the Rule of Law™ too!). Of course, to achieve the equality that they preach happens to require them to amass power and control and to centralize it in their own hands as the necessary means of leveling outcomes. It isn’t the end that they covet. It’s the means. And if you think they will ever consider you their equal, you are deluded, comrade.
Through their grimacing smiles and abundant slather of passive-aggressiveness, “Vengeance is mine,” saith the leftist, “and just you wait.”
