Edmund Burke said of one of his adversaries that his malice was "disappointed by [his] absurdity." The same might be said of the so-called letter of protest over the visit of Justice Antonin Scalia, signed by 16 of my colleagues-though I haven't counted them, or at least, not all of them, as adversaries. Several, indeed, I've counted as friends quite apart from the things that divide us, and I must believe that they took leave of their better judgment when they were moved to sign that letter. Most of them would not pretend to have studied the writings of Justice Scalia, which the letter was purporting to characterize in extracts drawn from those writings. But even the casual reader would recognize that those snippets cited in the letter were passages lifted from their context-and from a vast body of writing. The reader might even suspect rightly that Scalia did not exactly say the things attributed to him in most of those passages, when quoted words were mingled with the words supplied by the composers of the letter. The most extended quotation involved a statement on religion and the law, in which Scalia essentially reflected the understanding contained in the Declaration of Independence. That was enough to draw out, from the writers, not a critique of the Declaration but their contempt for the convictions springing from that Jewish and Christian tradition.

Most of the signers would not claim to know well the writings of Scalia. What moved them to sign, apparently, was the fact that Scalia had taken positions quite at odds with their own on abortion, gay rights and capital punishment. The protestors declared that they would "not offer a tacit endorsement of this man's presence on campus." Endorsement? The protestors were not only declining to attend; they were encouraging others to follow their example by calling into question the very legitimacy of Scalia's "presence" on the campus. Of course, the writers affected to be concerned for what they called Scalia's "vitriolic name-calling," a posture that made him unqualified to engage in the exchange of ideas at an academic place. But this facile move could fool no one. The passages cited were spirited, but hardly vitriolic, and they could not come close to the vicious, hateful things, bordering on libel, that were routinely said about Justice Scalia on the campus. When I returned from Princeton University this fall, I found a campus in which President Bush was being compared with Hitler, both by faculty and students, and one staffer in the dean's office was referring routinely to "homophobes." Talk about "respect for persons:" people reluctant to endorse the homosexual life were treated, not as persons bearing reasons, but as people affected with a psychological disorder. The hard fact of the matter is that name-calling has become, in fact, the mode of discourse typical on this campus; a feature that sets this place apart from every other college or university I've known.

But with this recent letter, the protest of the appearance of Scalia on the campus, every pretense to liberality has now finally been dropped. In removing the mask, the signers have also made some critical things jarringly clear: If it is illegitimate for a Scalia to have a presence for one day, giving one talk, it would be quite as illegitimate for someone sharing Scalia's perspectives to be speaking on this campus, every day, as a professor. Some of my colleagues rather downplay this letter as a gesture without consequence. But two of the signatories of the letter are members of the Committee of Six, the committee that passes on questions of tenure. Nor did it go unnoticed by the students that the signatories of the letter included four out of five members of the Department of LJST. The message was plain: A Scalia had no chance of being hired as a professor in that department. That was hardly news, but it was now made clear in a way that even alumni distant from the college could understand.

Evidently, people were condemning Scalia's judgments on the hot issues of the day even though they knew little of the reasoning that produced those judgments. If students had even a faint notion of Scalia's reasoning in the cases, they might have known that the differences running between my old friend and me may be deeper than the differences that separate him from other people on this campus. Scalia, as a legal "positivist," has been quite dismissive of "natural rights" or "natural law," and that may account for his own willingness to enforce the most liberal laws on abortion if they were adopted within any state. As my students know, I've taken a position at odds with Scalia on the cases involving the burning of crosses. But in his willingness to protect these gestures of expression, he has been working in the currents of liberal jurisprudence over the past 30 years, and his arguments are thoughtful, densely argued and worth reckoning. When I heard Scalia denounced in the most thoughtless, caricatured form by a former student of mine, alert to all of these things, it was a clear sign that partisanship had dissolved any sense of integrity.

One reason, I suppose, why the opponents may not be inclined to offer an account of Scalia's reasoning is that they attribute his moral judgments to his religious convictions. That too is a facile move to reduce moral judgments to what they call "beliefs." But if we put aside for a moment everything that is reductive and false in that account, it is even more telling to take the writers at their word: They must be aware that the positions they hold so firmly on abortion and gay rights would not be accepted by students who hold to the traditional Jewish and Christian teaching here. The message on this point was quite as clear as it was about professors: Jewish, Christian, and, yes, Muslim students who hold to this traditional teaching are either unwelcome on this campus, or they are welcome here only with the recognition that they must decorously shut up. For them to express their views openly is to leave them open to the charge that they are wanting in a "respect for persons." They could come under charges, and they know now that they could be subject to the same scathing caricatures that were leveled at Justice Scalia.

Now that the issue has been made jarringly public, it becomes important to raise the matter with the Committee of Six: What is the box score there? How many people on that Committee share the understanding affirmed in that letter of protest? How many profess no judgment at all when the question is posed? To profess no judgment on this matter is, in fact, to register the most telling judgment. We advertise our openness to hiring without invidious discriminations. But for the sake of "truth in advertising" now, we ought to make this political and moral discrimination utterly clear for those who might be led into a charade of applying for a job here.

Regardless, though, of how this question is met or finessed, that letter of protest has now made its way to a larger world outside the campus. What was on display, in the reaction to Justice Scalia, was the ferocity and the state of mind that has made Amherst a seminary of intolerance that will brook no trace of arguments on the other side; that will feel threatened by the presence of a Scalia even for a day. For people of this disposition, there is nothing any longer that connects us in principle as colleagues. I don't hold grudges, but I think I'd have to let some time pass before I participated with any of them in a public meeting: To adopt the reasoning from their letter, I would not want my presence to be taken as a sign that I "endorse" their principles. I hope they will understand, even as I don't think they were fully alert to the deeper implications of what they were signing. Their main mistake, I fear, is that they let themselves be led by a hand other than their own, and by some little engine of malice that knows no rest.

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence.