I think part of what’s going on is that with super-elite law schools, the competitive part is getting in as opposed to passing all your classes. Assuming for the sake of argument that your typical Yale Law School student has an IQ of 145, this doesn’t mean that someone with an IQ of only 125 is going to fail out. Especially since Yale Law School doesn’t have traditional A, B, C grading. Someone who is reasonably intelligent should be able to get passing grades.

By contrast, at a lesser ranked law school, someone with an IQ which is 25 points below the average is at serious risk of failing.

but if it comes to pass that their career may be endangered by working a law school job, the supply of adjuncts may dry up

In theory this is true but as a practical matter most attorneys are not going to worry about it too much. Because it’s still not that hard to stay out of trouble. If you are teaching a class on real estate transactions and the subject of race comes up, you just say that it’s a hot-button issue so you prefer not to discuss it.

This is virtually impossible. Even if you own your own business, people can be persuaded to stop buying what you’re selling.

That’s not necessarily true. For example, if you are a plumber or a landscaper with hundreds of customers, it would be difficult to track down and contact all your customers. At least for now, nobody is going to bother doing that over some casual racist-adjacent remark. Almost all targets of cancel culture are either (1) people who are already famous; or (2) people associated with Cathedral institutions such as universities, newspapers, etc.

Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose this woman were not an adjunct professor but just an ordinary attorney and she’d publicly stated that it was unfortunate that black professional students tend to get poor grades. Would anyone have cared? Maybe if she was at a white-shoe law firm, but otherwise, probably not.

It seems to be a universal principle that the more elite you are, the more strictly you have to conform to the orthodoxy.