UW-Madison law professor Leonard Kaplan lectured Wednesday on issues of teaching legal process and addressed the controversy surrounding his alleged racist remarks about Hmongs last semester.
“My comments were misreported in the student e-mail correspondences that became public and were published in the local press,” Kaplan said at a Rotary Club of Madison Service Club luncheon. “As a result, the distorted view of my Feb. 15 class became national news.”
Kaplan, a rotary club member, issued a written statement March 5 about the controversy after several Asian students accused him of making “hateful” statements about the Hmong people during his class.
In the letter, Kaplan stressed his discussion of Hmong society in the United States was intended to show the failures of the U.S. government, not deride Hmong culture. According to Kaplan’s statement, the government fails to respond adequately to poverty and the demands of a multicultural society.
The students accused Kaplan of saying, “Hmong men have no skills other than killing and … Hmong men’s only roles are as warriors and killers.”
Kaplan denied these statements in his March 5 statement, saying he did refer to Hmong men as warriors regarding their status in Southeast Asia but that he did not use the term to suggest Hmong men are violent.
At the luncheon, Kaplan said he used the problem in his February class of integrating cultures to highlight the problem of unjust formalism. He said he discussed Muslims in Amsterdam and Algerians in Paris, along with the Hmong experience in Wisconsin.
“My class on February 15 was intended to be sympathetic to the Hmong people,” Kaplan said. “I still am.”
He said his point was that if a formalist legal system treats everyone similarly, new immigrant groups could suffer injustice.
Kaplan also stressed the law school’s obligation to present information truthfully, even at the expense of offending sensitivities.
“Learning to question assumptions and values can be painful,” Kaplan said. “But if professors avoid certain issues because they may offend someone’s sensitivities, we will cease to be university in all but name.”
