Bullying woke Stanford Law students and DEI dean beclown once-proud institution

Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down last week at a Stanford Law School event sponsored by the Federalist Society chapter. The disruption of Judge Duncan’s remarks was supported at the event by Associate Dean of DEI Tirien Steinbach. The wild suppression of Free Speech prompted a high profile apology from Stanford's president, but is it enough? David Lat's exceptional Original Jurisdiction has the whole story; excerpts below.

Congratulations, Stanford Law School. You’re the nation’s new top law school—when it comes to free-speech debacles.

Members of Stanford FedSoc are entitled to invite Judge Duncan to campus, but they are not entitled to have him be well-received or to have their decision to invite him go unquestioned (or to be protected against mockery in satirical fliers). Liberal and progressive students have their own free-speech rights, which they are free to exercise as long as they don’t prevent others from speaking or otherwise violate university policy.

Approximately 100 protesters lined up outside the event to boo those who entered, with some students calling out individual classmates—e.g., “Shame, John Smith”—à la Cersei’s Walk of Atonement on Game of Thrones. Another 50 to 70 students came into the room where the event took place, compared to about 20 FedSoc students (if that). The protesters carried signs reading "RESPECT TRANS RIGHTS," "FEDSUCK," "BE PRONOUN NOT PRO-BIGOT," and "JUDGE DUNCAN CAN'T FIND THE CLIT" (among others), along with trans-rights flags.

But here’s where things went off the rails. When the Stanford FedSoc president (an openly gay man) opened the proceedings, he was jeered between sentences. Judge Duncan then took the stage—and from the beginning of his speech, the protestors booed and heckled continually. For about ten minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protestors simply yelled over him, with exclamations like "You couldn't get into Stanford!" "You're not welcome here, we hate you!" "Why do you hate black people?!" "Leave and never come back!" "We hate FedSoc students, f**k them, they don't belong here either!" and "We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!"

Throughout this heckling, Associate Dean Steinbach and the University's student-relations representative—who were in attendance throughout the event, along with a few other administrators (five in total, per Ed Whelan)—did nothing. FedSoc members had discussed possible disruption with the student-relations rep before the event, and he said he would issue warnings to those who yelled at the speaker, but only if the yelling disrupted the flow of the event. Despite the difficulty that Judge Duncan was having in giving his remarks, plus the fact that many students were struggling to hear him, no action was taken.

Eventually, Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to help him restore order. At this point, Associate Dean Steinbach came up to the front and took the podium. Judge Duncan asked to speak privately between them, but she said no, she would prefer to speak to the crowd, and after a brief exchange, Dean Steinbach did speak. She said she hoped that the FedSoc chapter knew that this event was causing real pain to people in the community at SLS. She told Judge Duncan that “she was pained to have to tell him” that his work and previous words had caused real harm to people.

“And I am also pained,” she continued, “to have to say that you are welcome here in this school to speak.” She told Judge Duncan and FedSoc that she respected FedSoc’s right to host this event, but felt that “the juice wasn't worth the squeeze” when it came to “this kind of event.” She told the protestors that they were free to either stay or to go, and she hoped they would give Duncan the space to speak—but as one FedSoc member told me, the tone and tenor of her remarks suggested she really wanted him to self-censor and self-deport, i.e., end his talk and leave.

“This invitation was a setup,” Judge Duncan interjected at one point while Dean Steinbach criticized him. And I can see what would give him that impression: as you can see from this nine-minute video posted by Ed Whelan, when Dean Steinbach spoke, she did so from prepared remarks—in which, as noted by Whelan, she explicitly questioned the wisdom of Stanford’s free-speech policies and said they might need to be reconsidered. (At least at Yale Law School, Dean Heather Gerken had the decency to criticize disruptive protesters, instead of validating them.)

As you can see from the video, about half of the protestors eventually left at the direction of a student protest leader, with one of them charmingly calling the judge “scum” as she walked out. Yet the heckling continued, and still the administrators did nothing to intervene.

Not getting traction trying to give a speech, Judge Duncan moved on to the question-and-answer session, and the protestors quieted down enough to ask a few questions. The questions—and answers—were generally contemptuous. As the judge put it to me, while he’s usually happy to answer questions when he speaks at law schools, the questions he received at Stanford were not asked in good faith; in his words, they were of the “how many people have you killed” or “how many times did you beat your wife last week” variety.

At one point during the Q&A, Judge Duncan said, “You are all law students. You are supposed to have reasoned debate and hear the other side, not yell at those who disagree.” A protestor responded, “You don't believe that we have a right to exist, so we don't believe you have the right to our respect or to speak here!”

What did Judge Duncan have to say for himself in general? In a phone interview this afternoon, he made several points to me:

• “I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me because I had to endure a bunch of people jeering at me. I did think it was outrageous and unacceptable, but nobody should feel sorry for me. I’m still going to be a judge, and I’m still going to decide my cases.”
  

• “I do feel bad—and outraged—for the Stanford FedSoc students. They are awesome people who just want to invite interesting judges to come talk to them. They’re a small group, obviously way outnumbered. They are the ones who lack power and status at Stanford Law. It’s ridiculous that they can’t get treated with civility, and it’s grotesquely unfair.”
  

• “I get where my critics are coming from, and I understand why they don’t like me. They claim that I am marginalizing them and not recognizing their existence. But this is hypocritical of them, since that’s exactly what they are doing to their classmates in FedSoc.”
  

• “I get the protesters, they are socialized into thinking the right approach to a federal judge you don’t agree with is to call him a f**ker and make jokes about his sex life. Awesome. I don’t care what they think about my sex life. But it took a surreal turn when the associate dean of DEI got up to speak…. She opens up her portfolio and lo and behold, there is a printed speech. It was a setup—and the fact that the administration was in on it to a certain degree makes me mad.”
  

• UPDATE (3/11/2023, 6:41 p.m.): A big update in this story (via Ed Whelan):

I’m pleased to break the news that Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Stanford law school dean Jenny Martinez have issued a joint letter of apology to Judge Kyle Duncan for the violations of university policies on speech that disrupted his talk on Thursday.

The letter reads, in full, as follows:

Dear Judge Duncan,

We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School. As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus.

We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event” whether by heckling or other forms of interruption.

In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.

We are taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again. Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle for the law school, the university, and a democratic society, and we can and must do better to ensure that it continues even in polarized times.

With our sincerest apologies again,

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Ph.D.
President and Bing Presidential Professor

Jenny Martinez
Richard E. Lang Professor of Law & Dean of Stanford Law School

This article originally appeared in Substack. Read the whole thing here.

This article is part of an Opp Now series on the Stanford Law free speech scandal—and its aftermath:

• Tim Rosenberger, Jr., president of Stanford Law’s Federalist Society chapter, breaks down Stanford’s dangerously “comfort”-driven student/faculty culture.

• Campus Reform reports that a group of Stanford students are urging the university to dismiss DEI Dean Steinbach.

• In the wake of Stanford University’s free speech colloquies, Daniel McCarthy of the NY Post digs into Leftism’s aversion to differences.

• Opp Now analyzes Stanford Law’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Spoiler alert: They, and heckler-sympathizer Dean Steinbach, may not be doing all that much.

• TXEER Politics and Religion Board user pvbmtnr considers the binary thinking separating free speech and DEI—as especially located in Dean Steinbach’s WSJ defense piece.

• Tim Rosenberger, Jr. assesses why a few prominent judges have announced they will stop hiring Stanford Law grads.

• John Banzhaf is brandishing the potentially career-killing threat of bar complaints against Stanford Law students who heckled federal judge Kyle Duncan.

• Reason's Josh Blackman unravels how DEI has stuck its nose into all issues possibly correlated with discrimination (big surprise: it's most of them).

• Campus Reform breaks down DEI Dean Steinbach's rampant—and easily accessible—history of opposing law enforcement, criminal justice systems, and, yes, the “patriarchy.”

• Stanford's Federalist Society student org president Tim Rosenberger, Jr. discusses how labeling all nonconformists as “far-right” is divisive.

• Althouse explains why these university scandals continue happening: As the extremists get louder, the moderates get quieter.

• After Stanford's free speech disaster, many are questioning if DEI jobs belong in education, including past USD board runner Zoila Herrera Rollins.

• The Free Press’s Bari Weiss unpacks why we should pay attention to universities’ free speech incidents: Young people are powerfully shaping our institutions—and our collective future.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity

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