If you missed this yesterday my rundown of what happened is here. A lot of it is in the form of tweets or updates because more news about it kept coming throughout the day. Very briefly, Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit was invited to speak at Stanford Law School by the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. Protesters were expected but Judge Duncan thought they would be respectful enough to allow him to give his prepared remarks.
Instead, he was heckled nonstop and after several minutes he lashed out at the students calling hem “juvenile idiots” among other things. He also called for an administrator to intervene. The administrator who came forward (there were several more in the room who did nothing) was Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean of DEI. She went to the podium and opened a folder where Judge Duncan could see she had a prepared speech. She spoke for about 6 minutes, alternately defending free speech and lecturing Judge Duncan about the harm he was doing by being there. The core of her message was the folksy question: “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” “Is it worth the pain that this causes, the division that this causes? Do you have something so incredibly important to say about Twitter and guns and Covid that that is worth this impact on the division of these people?” she said.
After Dean Steinbach finished many of the protesters left the room. Judge Duncan tried again to give his speech but the hecklers wouldn’t let him. He finally gave up and moved on to a Q&A which was full of loaded questions which the judge later described as being of the How often do you beat your wife? variety. Effectively the heckler’s succeeded in shutting down the event and Judge Duncan was escorted out of the building by two US Marshals.
Afterwards, Jenny Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law, put out a statement which some saw as a solid defense of free speech and others saw as an attempt to avoid any real commitment to consequences for anyone involved. “However well-intentioned, attempts at managing the room in this instance went awry,” she wrote. Hugh Hewitt called it a statement designed to “survive the news cycle.”
It is not an “excellent statement,”
not remotely descriptive of the breach of ethics and decorum, contains no apology to the judge and does not indicate any discipline of anyone. It’s a statement designed to survive the news cycle and hopefully appease donors. Shouldn’t work. https://t.co/u8JMTPDPFr— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) March 11, 2023
National Review’s Ed Whelan was very critical of the statement.
2. No, Dean Martinez, “attempts at managing the room” did not go “awry.” There were no such attempts, much less “well-intentioned” ones. Rather, your DEI dean was intent on chastising Judge Duncan. Have you actually watched the video? https://t.co/PrfovwmMYj 3/
— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) March 11, 2023
4. Dean Martinez’s claim that freedom of speech is a “bedrock principle” for Stanford law school is belied by her abject failure to signal any intent to protect it. 5/
— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) March 11, 2023
In sum, it sure seems that Stanford law dean Jenny Martinez is afraid to stand up for free speech and to stand against her DEI dean and the student mob.
— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) March 11, 2023
For his part, Judge Duncan gave several interviews last night including to Reuters:
Law student Tessa Silverman, who attended the protest, told Reuters that Duncan himself appeared angry and called some students “idiots,” something Duncan acknowledged and repeated during Reuters’ interview.
“They are idiots,” he said. “They are hypocrites and they are bullies.”
He also criticized a Stanford official, Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, who in a video of the event posted online by the conservative publication National Review addressed him and the crowd before the judge spoke…
“In my view, this was a setup, she was working with students on this,” he said.
In an interview with the Free Beacon he called for Steinbach to be fired though the story doesn’t quote him directly on that point.
The real bottom line here, at least for me, is Steinbach’s question: “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” It’s not an outright denial of someone else’s right to speak, it’s more of a plea for self-censorship. But that plea doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a fairly well defined pattern of leftist behavior that has been built up over the past decade.
The juice in this case is the free speech of the individual, but the thing it’s being weighed against in Steinbach’s formula is the harm caused to the people who don’t want to hear it. The “squeeze” is the emotional pain caused to those who disagree, whether they are present or not.
The logic of Steinbach’s argument is not so different from what some people tried to argue after Islamic extremists murdered a bunch of cartoonists in Paris for depicting Muhammed on the cover of their satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. Even after that terrorist attack in Paris, there were some timid souls who suggested we shouldn’t exercise our rights in a way that deeply offended others (and makes them want to kill us).
Some will qualify this by saying people should be free to punch up (at the government) but not down (at minority groups). The problem of course is that the question of who has the power is situational. In his courtroom, there’s no doubt Judge Duncan has a fair amount of institutional power. Anyone shouting at him in that setting would soon regret it. But in the setting at Stanford, the power dynamic is quite different. It’s literally 100 to 1 against him, with most of the crowd and seemingly the deans in the room all against him. In this situation, Judge Duncan has no institutional power, certainly not at Stanford. He can’t do anything to these students except speak up about what happened. On the other hand, Dean Steinbach did have institutional power there. She chose to use that to berate the judge and not really defend his right to speak. She may have said the words but the bottom line is he was never able to give his remarks. She not only sat there and let it happen. She encouraged it.
In short, the students and administrators had the power in this situation and used it to deplatform Judge Duncan when he refused to self-censor. Ed Whelan broke the DEI logic into two parts which don’t really add up to anything more than my way or the highway.
DEI illogic:
1. Your very presence on campus is a threat to our safety.
2. Our vile in-your-face abuse shouldn’t upset or anger you.
— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) March 11, 2023
I think that’s pretty much how all of these campus disruption incidents go. The hecklers want to shut someone up by any means necessary. The only difference in this case was Dean Steinbach’s plea for self-censorship as a way to avoid the heckler’s veto. If you just give up, we won’t have to shout you down. That was the core of her appeal to him.
Judge Duncan tried to point out to the students that, given the power to determine how things would operate (in that room Thursday), they had decided to make it a circus. Hence his concern about what the legal profession might look like once these Stanford law grads are in charge. “If enough of these kids get into the legal profession, the rule of law will descend into barbarism,” he said. It’s hard to see how he’s wrong about that.
