In February 2007, Leonard Kaplan, the Mortimer M. Jackson Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison unwittingly ignited a firestorm when he used Hmong Americans as a case example in his lecture on legal formalism. While the exact language and context of his statements is disputed, no one debates that he depicted Hmong men as warriors and killers, and referred to a high level of gang activity among second generation young men, among many other comments. Hmong law students in the class protested his characterization of the Hmong, and demanded an apology. Students met with deans, with the professor, filed a legal complaint with the University of Wisconsin and posted a Web site.

On Feb. 24, 2007 the Chronicle of Higher Education’s News Blog reported Kaplan to be “in full apology mode.” Suddenly, however, dialogue came to an abrupt halt. Students organized a public forum which Kaplan agreed to but did not attend. He then sent a letter to his dean for public release denying that he had made some of the comments and asserting that context was “critical.” The students were increasingly dismissed as taking his words out of context, of being “oversensitive” and of pursuing identity politics by making ungrounded accusations of racism against a sympathetically inclined professor.

In December 2007, controversy was reactivated when Kaplan gave an invitation-only talk at the Madison rotary club. Press coverage of the event was unilateral, implicitly championing Kaplan’s courage in having taken full advantage of academic freedom to pursue controversial issues. Even as he invoked truth to characterize his own language, Kaplan criticized Hmong for a kind of hypertrophied political correctness: “Students and society are harmed if professors avoid controversial material in deference to accepted or imposed correctness or an apprehension that a topic may offend sensitivities,” The Capital Times of Madison, Wis. reported Kaplan as saying.