In an obvious reference to DEI dean Tirien Steinbach’s bizarre six-minute scolding of [Judge Kyle] Duncan, their letter observes that “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.”
As you know, I defended Tirien Steinbach.
I didn't find her speech "bizarre" or a "scolding of Duncan." Read my post, here. I didn't like what the students did, but student protests are part of free speech, though they shouldn't be allowed to deprive the willing listeners of their right to hear the speaker and the school needs to be able to assure speakers that their effort to make an appearance will not be in vain. Steinbach stepped up as an intermediary, and her remarks leaned in favor of empathy for the protesting students, but, in the end, she reclaimed the space for the speaker and those who came to hear him.My first question is whether Ed Whelan got it right: Were the president and the law school dean — Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Jenny Martinez — apologizing for the way Tirien Steinbach spoke? Let's read their letter, here.
They apologize for "the disruption" of the speech, which I think refers to the student protests. They attest to a policy that requires students to protest speeches without disrupting them. But then they say:
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.
Did anyone other than Tirien Steinbach "intervene"? I think we have to interpret that as an accusation that Steinbach's short speech was "inappropriate" and that it was "inappropriate" because it did not adhere to the position established by the law school's policy. Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez are, I think, saying that the administrator enforcing the policy must adhere closely to its terms and not expound on other ideas and policies — even if the administrator enforcing the policy is the DEI dean and the additional ideas are the very substance of DEI. I guess the point is that policy against disrupting speakers entails a commitment to getting the speech back on track and ending the disruption quickly and without giving any reward or comfort to the disrupters.
So while I reject Whelan's characterization of Steinbach's speech as a "bizarre six-minute scolding," I agree that Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez apologized for it. They hung Steinbach out to dry. There was not a word of encouragement for the DEI mission, her mission.
Whelan calls attention to an earlier statement from the law school dean alone to Stanford law students — in two parts. That statement was more sympathetic to Steinbach. It credited her good intentions but said she "went awry." Whelan — who wants Steinbach fired — asks:
Why did Stanford president Tessier-Lavigne sign the apology to Duncan, rather than just leave it to [law school dean Jenny] Martinez to do so? One obvious possibility is that he was disappointed with her excuse-mongering for Steinbach and didn’t trust her to issue a proper apology.
Excuse-mongering?! To say that Steinbach meant well but went awry isn't to proffer an excuse — and it's certainly not "excuse-mongering," which would require some sort of trafficking in excuses. But it's interesting to speculate whether Tessier-Lavigne had to intervene because Martinez couldn't get it right on her own. That sounds very insulting to Martinez!
Anyway, I don't see how a school can have a strong commitment to DEI and not give more support to Steinbach. Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers. Is that not an ongoing issue for legal analysis? I would prefer to see schools protect the invited speaker's forum, but that doesn't keep me from seeing the room for continuing debate. On the contrary, it's a lively issue that law professors ought to encourage students to delve into.
Posts
150 comments:
As we know, you picked wrong.
I don't see how a school can have a strong commitment to DEI
Do schools actually have a strong commitment to DEI, though. That's the question. Or are they just hiring people to do the work, and not really caring if the work gets done? I know I'm cynical but a lot of it seems like checking off boxes to me.
"So while I reject Whelan's characterization of Steinbach's speech as a "bizarre six-minute scolding," I agree that Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez apologized for it. They hung Steinbach out to dry. There was not a word of encouragement for the DEI mission, her mission.
The DEI "mission" is to facilitate precisely what the maoists did and to drive "equity" (equality of all outcomes based on identity politics alone) and to send a message that any non-leftist speech is "literally violence" and destined for the dustbin of history with violators sent packing off to reeducation "centers".
Yes, I realize that my comment above is going to send lonejustice right over the rails...though lets admit it, he/she has probably been teetering on the edge for quite some time now.
Elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers is an ongoing issue for a lively debate BUT perhaps the continuing debate should not take place in front of the invited speaker —in place of the invited speaker’s prepared remarks.
“ They hung Steinbach out to dry.”
Disagree. Steinbach should either be fired or get a suspension without pay. It happens all the time in the NFL and MLB.
Law schools shouldn’t have DEI deans. A total waste of money. The students have lots of things to learn in law school and DEI isn’t one of them. Try Negotiable Instruments or Future Interests.
Eliminating the misbegotten job of DEI dean would be a good first step. That woman expected to be hailed as a heroine for what she did. Somewhere, some basic liberal values have to be upheld by the institutions that supposedly live by them. Identity politics and hyperpartisanship inherently war with liberal values. I hope the Stanford University president can see and act on that lesson from this episode.
" I would prefer to see schools protect the invited speaker's forum, but that doesn't mean this is not a matter for continuing debate.
'Debate' - Now, that's a funny word to use for what happened. Is there any truth to the reports that Steinbach read from prepared remarks, and had a hand in organizing the heckler's party that then laid the groundwork for her speech?
Would that be called a 'debate', or a 'setup'?
I don't think any of your readers would object to the notion of healthy and reasoned arguments over live-wire issues, as a way of getting at the truth of matters, but that's not what this was - and I would bet that most of your readers see it that way. Debate, among other things, honors the conventions of urbanity and good manners, and confines the contest within the arena of intellect, vocabulary, and rhetorical skill. That's the institution's obligation. If the audience insists on taking the argument outside and lays plans for mayhem, then all bets should be off. If I were in the shoes of a visiting contrarian like the judge, I'd be traveling with my own goon squad. Level playing fields, and all that.
MOST people when they are making unplanned ad lib remarks to something they knew nothing about..
DON'T read from a prepared speech
Is this the best you can do perfesser?
Perfesser is not a misspelling in this case.
If you ever hear of a legal debate on the right to prevent invited speakers from speaking vs. the DEI regime please let us know of it.
Today's trolling reeks of desperation. Especially that last paragraph.
"even if the administrator enforcing the policy is the DEI dean and the additional ideas are the very substance of DEI"
The very substance of DIE is barbaric and evil, and has no place in any American institution.
"I don't see how a school can have a strong commitment to DEI. Do schools actually have a strong commitment to DEI, though. That's the question. Or are they just hiring people to do the work, and not really caring if the work gets done? I know I'm cynical but a lot of it seems like checking off boxes to me."
That's the doubt I intended to sow.
I don't think they do. Critical studies theory tells us to look at what they are doing as just another way to maintain the power of the existing order.
From the post:
"Anyway, I don't see how a school can have a strong commitment to DEI and not give more support to Steinbach. Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers."
So-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is joined at the hip with radical leftism. I say so-called, because in practice, it is Conformist, Equality of Misery and Exclusionary (of whatever it deems to be thoughtcrime). Its underlying assumption is that the solution to class struggle is enforcement of its tenets.
If it were really diverse it would allow expression of dissent, by all people regardless of color or ethnicity.
If it were truly equitable it would be more about equal opportunity rather than outcomes enforced by diktat.
If it were inclusive, no one would be excluded from decision making, least of all people who have at least as much a stake in the effects of those decisions.
Arguments to elevate DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers would achieve the same results as what happened beforethe DEI dean intervened. Shorter version: lip service.
Time and place, professor. The place for Steinbach to discuss appropriate protest, free-speech, and inclusion is later, when those students are attending their mandatory training in respect and the values of a free society that is given to them as part of their punishment for their violation of the rights of Judge Duncan, the Federalist Society, and the overall student body. This event was not the appropriate place and Steinbach’s words, while perhaps not bizarre by the bizarre standards of today’s universities, were inappropriate in this time and place.
She ignored her duties in favor of her personal values and preferences. The apology is a good start.
"Law schools shouldn’t have DEI deans. A total waste of money...."
Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers. Is that not an ongoing issue for legal analysis?
Put down the shovel Althouse.
Even if you believe this, she did so at an inappropriate time and manner. She could have addressed the protesting students before the speech, and warned them that they must behave, and that they had an academic responsibility to listen to and consider the judge's argument, even if they disagreed with it. (This is a standard you endorsed two days ago) She had prepared remarks, the students' behavior was not a surprise to her.
She chose to allow the students to disrupt the speech, endorsed their refusal to listen to the judge's argument, and then suggested the protestors leave instead of sit quietly and listen to the judge's remarks with an open mind. She endorsed, excused and supported the student's rude, immature and non-academic behavior.
Your suggestion that the student's DEI "concerns" could be elevated by argumentation to supersede the right to hear invited speakers is precisely the problem, and the most disappointing part of your position. The students should instead have been told that they need to consider the possibility that they were wrong to try to prevent the speech.
I agree that the president and law school dean in their letter to the judge are explicitly reprimanding the actions of law school staff for not upholding free speech policies. As to Stanford’s DEI policies, I don’t know what they are, but they might require that students of all types, genders, age groups, residency status, etc. be treated with neutrality—even cruel neutrality—respecting the free speech rights of others. And that would be a good thing from a pedagogical point of view.
I appreciate your willingness to defend the antics of this DEI dean, but she failed the basic test of courtesy to this guest speaker. She made a series of Oprah-speak allegations about this judge without hearing him out. She pandered to the biases of the students. She isn’t good at her job. She is spreading darkness where there should be light. She doesn’t get the importance of free expression in a law school. The students aren’t children. They are all over 18, and probably 21. They should be able to handle it.
More recent developments include the Judge’s statement accepting the apology and adding other trenchant comments and numerous calls for the SEI Dean’s firing / resignation.
Ann Althouse wrote: "... student protests are part of free speech, though they shouldn't be allowed to deprive the willing listeners of their right to hear the speaker ..."
I'm sorry, but this just doesn't compute.
The entire point of the "protest" is to prevent the speaker from speaking.
If he speaks, the argument is made, then "harm is done." To prevent the "harm" we must prevent this person from speaking, is their stupid argument.
That is the protest. And it's how their thinly-disguised "protest" is carried out.
And Ann Althouse knows it. She knows that the protest doesn't work if the speaker is allowed to convince others of the rightness of his position.
This university's students are very close to getting booted from judicial circles because it the school is allowing a very small number of people who probably won't even become lawyers to ruin their law school. Judges take notice, and will be rethinking whether they want to have a bunch of these types of people in their offices and courtrooms.
And Ann, stop pretending these "protests" aren't direct efforts to censor people and prevent their speech.
Even Homer nods.
That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
Nope. Oberlin college found out that "Woke" deans can be very dangerous. This was following the Oberlin path.
A DEI official is a party official.
Similar to the Communist party officer that would show up at workplaces in the Soviet Union to make sure that everybody was toeing the party line.
I'm not a professor but I suspect that many professors secretly loathe DEI deans and other administrators who are not there to help teachers, or the university.
Certainly they are not there for free speech, but to correct speakers, silence speakers, and otherwise scare the crap out of people.
DEI officials are party hacks and should be seen as such.
Republicans loathe them (obviously) because we are not in that party. You will see more and more liberal voices loathe them as well. Similar to the way Democrats booted the Commies out in the 1950's.
Althouse said...
I think we have to interpret that as an accusation that Steinbach's short speech was "inappropriate" and that it was "inappropriate" because it did not adhere to the position established by the law school's policy.
Another possibility: The president and law school dean may have additional information they prefer not to disclose or investigate further.
“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.”
That nebulous language does not exclude Steinbach's prior collusion with the protesters, including orchestration of the interruption itself, before she rode to the "rescue" as the voice of mediation.
Diversity Equity and Inclusion
Sorry - that only means one thing. NO Diversity of thought. NO Equity or equal respect given to diversity of thought.. NO inclusion of ideas that veer outside of the (ever moving target of...) narrow leftwing thought-crime narrative, and the assumption that all ideas outside of that narrative are evil and wrong.
Thus - University = Angry shouting students unwilling to listen or develop the skills to debate.
And those that shout-down ruin the experience for others who are open-minded.
Critical Studies Theory integration of Critical Studies with inequity and exclusion explains its adoption and advocacy of the wicked solution, class-disordered ideologies, political congruence, cancel culture, wars without borders, [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] immigration reform, etc.
“she reclaimed the space for the speaker and those who came to hear him.”
Yet the result was not reclamation of the space but the speaker being escorted out by Marshals. Perhaps the Marshals decided it was dangerous for the Judge to be there, I have no information about why he was removed, but the space was not reclaimed for him in my opinion. It was reported that the Judge did not give his speech due to the chaos.
The only way for universities to putt a stop to this is a Zero Tolerance policy for the Hecklers Veto. It is 110% unacceptable in an institution that professes to better the world thru free inquiry.
Althouse is going on what women always go on, namely whether she seems to mean well. Guys and maybe lawyers regardless are interested in the structural stability of the system.
If you go on feelings, soon your system is 100% perverse side effects.
Ann Althouse said...
"Law schools shouldn’t have DEI deans. A total waste of money...."
Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
******************
SHE didn't have to brow-beat the judge, but SHE did.
It's YOU who are wrong.
That's the doubt I intended to sow.
Skepticism is the male fault; for women the corresponding fault is foolishness.
Ms. Althouse: It seems to me that, like a dog with a bone, you are unable to walk away from continued justifying of your obviously erroneous defense of the indefensible actions taken by the Stanford law DEI dean. Your position seems to be premised on the assumption that DEI is a necessary and good thing, and that the dean was just carrying out her mission. There is a time and place for challenging an *invited* speaker's remarks *after* those remarks have been made, and the Q & A phase, if any, begins. The central issue here, however, is that the dean misused her office to lecture the speaker instead of stopping the protest, and only as an afterthought assured the judge that Stanford supports free speech. Inviting the protesters to leave only after the disruption in which she herself participated is patently reprehensible.
In my opinion, the mission of any institution of higher learning is to challenge the closely held (and often unexamined and erroneous) thinking of students. Coddling them against "unpleasant" concepts by wrapping them in the DEI flag would seem to be the antithesis of actual higher learning. DEI has no place in the rigor of a law school environment.
The grudging admission you make that Whelan is correct about what the apology was for, but then doubling down on your support for the associate dean's unwarranted and ill-considered actions, leads me to imagine with some trepedation how you would have handled differing student opinions in your constitutional law classes, particularly on issues of great import to you, such as abortion and LGBT +++. I suspect I would have been disappointed in those discussions.
When the event turned into a woke shout-fest featuring left-wing students trying to shout down the invited speaker, Stanford should have prioritized enforcing its prohibition against shouting down speakers. It could have sent someone in to take video of who was doing what in the disruption, and simultaneously told the disruptors to knock it off, or go home and get packing. Why did they feel they had to suck up to students who violated their policies and were subject to expulsion for doing so? It shows extraordinary weakness.
Ann Althouse said...
"Law schools shouldn’t have DEI deans. A total waste of money...."
Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
Agree with the first part about Steinbach taking the job.
But if the actions of the DEI Dean (as I speculate above) require invoking the Eichmann defense on her behalf, maybe "she's one of the baddies"?
DEI is a cancer that has spread rapidly in American institutions - government. military, schools, businesses. My former employer, where I worked over 40 years, has followed other companies in forcing a DEI function - headed by a VP - on the employees. This is a company once run by great chemists and engineers, now run by a financial guy with a Harvard MBA. The DEI he has implemented is ruining the company. I see week after week on various social media people I formerly worked with bailing out via early retirement or just quitting and searching for a job elsewhere. These are people in their mid-to-late 50s, in their peak earning years and peak value to the company, just walking away. I've gone over some of the DEI training with a close friend, who hasn't left yet, and it is appalling. Glad I have been gone now for some time so I didn't have to put up with it.
And last fall, when on my college's campus for a football game, I noticed the office formerly known as "Dean of Students" is now the "Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion". When I walked through the recently renovated student activities center it just reeked of DEI everywhere. I may quit sending them money.
I don’t think Steinbeck went “awry” in any sense - she had prepared remarks in the form of a printed speech she read, meaning it was a planned ambush and hit job. You may pretend that she’s “merely enforcing” her DEI insanity, but to the average person it was clear she was just playing to the mob as well as supporting their silencing the speaker. She needs to be terminated and the other admins present need to severely reprimanded for not doing their most basic jobs - maintaining an academic atmosphere.
I have seen the judge lambasted for actually fighting back instead of “standing in dignified silence”. You DO NOT stop bullies by giving in to them and his characterization of the mob there is correct. More shameful is the public posting of images of the group putting on the event to mark them as “targets” as well as the abuse they spit at the President of the society ( double points of course for the gay insults since he is gay). Hilarious too was the judge being lambasted for an opinion that he dissented from.
This whole episode is the distilling of DEI - speech is “ hurt” and must be silenced when it doesn’t conform to the CorrectThought of that moment and that merit ( a judge) is overruled by feelings.
Quite a prepared speech Steinbach, the opportunist, had ready and waiting.
I thought yesterday, and still think today, Althouse is trolling us.
When I think of the time I have spent over the years sitting in meetings where the most empty pablum has been thrown up by HR consultants, book authors, political activists from the left and the right, civil rights guilt-trippers, propagandists, apologists for top management, Occupy Wall Street/BLM grifters, student activists, representatives of the Cook County Democratic Party, and proponents of ooey-gooey Oprah talk, I think that even the most fragile students at Stanford Law School should be able to tolerate the appearance of occasional speakers with whom they disagree.
That would be true DEI.
For me it’s about time and place. It was not the time and place to expound on DEI. I don’t care if she is the DEI Dean. She was supposed to follow the rules and get the scheduled event back on track. She can schedule her own event to discuss DEI. In my opinion she wanted to have her cake and eat it too.
"It takes a lot of moxie to drink Moxie" - ted Williams
Tirien Steinbach helped arrange for the protest behavior in advance. She knew there would be a shout down and had her speech prepared. Ann, I am not sure I have ever disagreed with so much on an issue.
"Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns" - I guess that explains the “I fuck men, I can find the prostate… why can’t you find the clit” comment to a federal circuit judge.
Pretty sure that would not have been tolerated when I was at HLS. But times have changed.
I'm surprised that you still support the DEI Dean and her unfortunate propoganda speech? Why, Ann, do you support DEI? Is not Diversity, Equity, Inclusion for everyone just a propoganda push for the Leftists. In fact, this example exhibited no DEI. Stanford Students and the DEI Dean only cared about Leftist DEI not Conservative DEI. But you being a former Law Professor and big LGBT+ activist your bias falls into the Leftist sphere Clan, against all those on the Conservative sphere Clan.
This whole discussion hinges on the absurd proposition that Stanford University is something other than a Communist shithole. Should the murderous gangs plundering Haiti have a DEI officer? Who cares?
You're still completely wrong. This woman emailed students prior to the speech and told them they had permission to disrupt it, and she clearly came prepared to engage in a stealth attack and orchestrated struggle session, and the quick response to her by some students strongly suggests that she colluded with the people screaming things like "your racism is showing." If that's in her job description, well, punish everyone involved in that job description, including her.
Screaming pejoratives at someone is simple assault, not practicing DEI, and, if motivated by race, which seems pretty clear, potentially fitting the California definition of so-called hate crimes enhancement too (most so-called hate crimes are vandalism or simple assault). The hostility in that room was dangerous, and her involvement in orchestrating it is now documented. She came prepared with a pre-written speech to berate that specific speaker and falsely accused him of being dangerous to her. This is what an "action" looks like, and everyone but you seems to have no problem seeing it. In the context of physical attacks on other conservative speakers, she and the students were terrorizing this man and may have all broken the law in a variety of ways by doing so collectively, with pre-meditation, in a confined space.
Universities are not foreign countries exempt from following the law. They just act that way. Conservative speakers needing security guards is insane. This isn't some kind of learning moment. Many of these assaults turn violent. If screaming "your racism is showing" isn't fighting words, what is the definition of fighting words?
Just because she was hired to be a fascist doesn't make being a fascist right. I'll agree with you that she shouldn't be scapegoated: everyone involved in this attack including her should be investigated, and the guilty fired or expelled. All the way up the sickening food chain.
At the beginning of the post, you say that students shouldn't be allowed to disrupt speakers, but at the bottom of the post you say that such disruption should be open for continuing debate. Which is it?
Oh, for fuck's sake. Steinbach was lecturing the invited speaker for not being sensitive to his heckler's feelings. If this is what she had to do to get the audience to allow him to speak, then it isn't worth it because it makes her look very bad. What she was doing was giving the hecklers exactly what they wanted and enjoyed- dressing down the speaker. The principle of allowing an invited speaker to speak is what she should have been defending right from the start, without equivocation. If this failed to quiet the hecklers, so be it. Duncan displayed a lot courage accepting the invitation to speak, and deserved far better from Steinbach, the university's representative, than what he received. If I had been in Duncan's shoes, I would have walked away from Steinbach the moment she started telling me that I needed to consider the feelings of the hecklers- that has the matter completely ass-backward.
This was clearly a setup, as the Judge even recognized.
These events have a format. Sometimes, there's just a single speaker and some Q&A. Sometimes, it's a debate, often between an outsider and a professor. Sometimes, there's a combo of both with an invited speaker and a professor who provides some commentary on the subject. This situation was an invited speaker, a Federal Judge. The DEI Dean clearly wasn't invited to speak or comment, but clearly she instigated the disruption so she could give her own PREPARED REMARKS, which was a part of the disruption. It was not her place to validate the disruptors' ignorance-fueled feelings in that space during that time. Her job, and that of the 4 other law school administrators who were present, was to keep the peace, not take advantage for her own political purposes and to question the policies she is supposed to be enforcing.
That said, if Stanford does not wish for this to happen again, which is what it claims in its apology letter, it needs to dole out some harsh punishments to the students who violated school rules and the administrators who were derelict in their duties or worse.
AA: I don't think they do. Critical studies theory tells us to look at what they are doing as just another way to maintain the power of the existing order.
********************
Who are the "us" and "they" in that murky sentence? When you were a con law prof, were you an "us" or a "they"?
Anyone who has read CRT screeds and heard its proponents' "arguments" knows that it is not subject to refutation.
For example, "Affirmative Action" was just Whitey's way of mollifying blacks and changing nothing.
Any person denying that claim automatically identifies himself as a white oppressor or, if herself black, an Uncle Tom. And that's it.
What's worse, subjecting law students to this crackpot dogma does nothing but foster cynicism and contempt toward our legal system.
(Has Jonestown moved north, to Madison? Lotta poisoned Kool-Aid being drunk up there lately.)
I can't remember Althouse ever admitting she was wrong. Can anybody?
Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers. Is that not an ongoing issue for legal analysis?
I agree with the other commenters who have said "Wrong Time, Wrong Place".
But I do agree that it is an ongoing issue for legal analysis.
why are lectures a one-way street? The person non-leftist gets the lecture.
The lecture should have been directed at the angry yelling immature mob.
Ann Althouse said...
Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
this is fun!
Beria isn't the one who created this position and hired him. That's why scapegoating him is wrong.
Mengele isn't the one who created this position and hired him. That's why scapegoating him is wrong.
These people were Just (showing initiative while) following orders. They CAN'T be held to blame!
The DEI mission is racism. Who in the 21st century can be in favor of racism? Why are YOU in favor of racism??? I thought you were a liberal, not a tribalist.
She could have addressed the protesting students before the speech, and warned them that they must behave...
Ann likes the student's free speech but I don't. At my and many of my friends undergraduate institutions there existed a code of conduct that would have prohibited the heckling of an invited guest. We had some controversial guests for sure but I don't think any of us felt stifled by administrators. There was never a suggestion students shy away from tough questions to invited speakers. I recall some gasps at a question I asked of a certain Chilean pension originator...
The shit these kids are doing is just that- shit. The heckler's veto. It undermines the institution they attend. The deans aren't helping with that either...
I suppose Steinbach did defuse the situation, and perhaps to do so in today's university does require pandering to woke groups, but she actively took the side of the woke group, talking about "this side" and "the side that I'm on" and telling the exiting protestors to "leave your signs where they can see them" [maybe not exact quotes, but I'm not going to watch the video again].
The university and the law school did right to apologize, and if they are really apologizing for what they have become, for how people behave and must behave in academia today, that's also right and deserved.
There was not a word of encouragement for the DEI mission, her mission.
Good. Her “mission” is an Orwellian-named evil. Sure the Stanford president is a plagiarist and asshole but even bad guys are correct sometimes. The DEIdean needs to go.
I made the decision about 50 years ago to avoid, as much as possible, lawyers and law students, and when the lawyers of Althouse start in on one another I congratulate myself on my good sense.
If I were a state rep, I would zero out any line item with DIE in it. It has to be drowned in the bathtub. Same as if I were a trustee of an institution.
I see in David Lat's article at Original Jurisdiction on Substack that Judge Duncan says he spoke at Stanford in 2019 without incident.
I wonder what changed? Well, different students, and the judge has a longer track record--although as often happens, the student activists distorted his record through either incompetence or malice. Example: they claimed that he was on a panel that deprived blacks of voting rights. He asked for a cite. They provided one that he did not remember. He looked it up later. He had dissented from the decision.
Also in play are the goals of the DEI department. Here are Dean Steinbach's thoughts on here office's mission set forth in an email to the students before Judge Duncan's arrival.:
"1. To listen to community members and work to support a culture of belonging for all – where people feel that their unique contributions are recognized and respected. "Belonging" does not negate disagreement, nor discomfort - those are necessarily part of how we learn and grow as a community dedicated to teaching and training a diverse group of future lawyers and leaders. However, creating "belonging" does mean acknowledging and rectifying historic and current ways that whole groups have been excluded or marginalized within law schools and legal practice, often based on racial/ethnic identity, disability, socioeconomic status, religion, veteran status, age, and LGBTQ+ and gender identities. Creating a culture of belonging in a law school also requires exploring the many challenging ways that the law is so often an exercise in balancing “freedom to” and “freedom from,” or aligning intentions and impacts.
"2. To support and model principles of free speech and academic freedom – SLS is committed to promoting intellectually rigorous open inquiry, aligned with the University’s statement on Academic Freedom: “Stanford University’s central functions of teaching, learning, research, and scholarship depend upon an atmosphere in which freedom of inquiry, thought, expression, publication and peaceable assembly are given the fullest protection.” Moreover, as a law school, SLS is particularly invested in upholding First Amendment principles and protections, and has a responsibility to seriously consider the danger of actions that have the potential to chill speech. And while there may be differing views on how best to address speech that is abhorrent to some or most people, one generally agreed upon way to address harmful speech is through MORE speech, rather than censoring speech (that is within the bounds of constitutionally protected speech)."
Number 1 is blather. Law school is tough. It is based on argument. Success is defined by persuasion.
So, how did Steinbach do on Number 2? Althouse says she did great. The law school dean and the president of Stanford say she failed.
Steinbach could have adopted cruel neutrality so that all could hear. The event ended 40 minutes early, with Duncan never getting to give his prepared speech and with a brief, futile, mutually contemptuous Q&A.
That sounds like failure to me.
"They hung Steinbach out to dry."
Well, she was madder than a wet hen. Here's a Youtube video about the idiom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmqfNeRit18
Just admit it. The DEI “mission” is exactly the performance we saw: disrupting people like the judge and then blaming the victim for what happened. She followed her script to the T. And you eat it up because “feminism” or something. It’s strange. But I also have blind spots so I’m trying to be respectful in my disagreement.
"her remarks leaned in favor of empathy for the protesting students"
While the students were violating Stanford policy.
Anyway, one question for us observing the posts is whether this is just one more idiosyncratic case of Althouse being unable to concede that she might have been a tiny bit wrong, or whether we should read her stubborn rationalizations as a general indicator of the willing accommodation by nice liberals to the ongoing progressive assault on the institutions they once cherished.
The late David Graeber, a lefty anarchist anthropologist, postulated that there were five types of what he called "bullshit jobs". DEI jobs certainly seem to be instances of that. Graeber had five categories of BS jobs. Here they are, as lightly edited from Wikipedia:
1. flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, door attendants, store greeters;
2. goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, telemarketers, public relations specialists;
3. duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
4. box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers;
5. taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.
Some DEI personnel manage to include themselves in 4 of those 5 categories.
BTW, Graeber's writings are absorbing, even though they invite quite a bit of skepticism.
"There was not a word of encouragement for the DEI mission, her mission."
These administrators are coming to realize that DEI is really an IED in their midst. Yes, they are producing the future devoted slaves of some despot in the same manner that the survivors of the German Youth Movement prior to WWI (thankfully a lot of them died in the trenches) were devoted slaves to Hitler, then Stalin and the Stasi. They were the bureaucracy behind the Final Solution.
The Stanford and other students learning the DEI mission will be no less murderous if they gain power. So the solution is to destroy the schools promoting it. Not physically destroy but see them for what they are and stop giving them money. And ruin the "status" their magic parchment gives their indoctrinated.
Peaceably protest is protected by the First Amendment, but shouting down speakers like toddlers is not. Everyone of these students and those at other schools should bear the mark of screaming toddler. Instead, they will be running the great government bureaus in 20 years and may provoke a civil war with their oppressions.
"I would prefer to see schools protect the invited speaker's forum, but that doesn't keep me from seeing the room for continuing debate"
The irony, it burns . . .
To the extent that I can affect this, no, there will be no continuing debate about the value of the heckler's veto, because - living now by your standards - I will show up and stop that debate from happening by shouting you down.
The judge did NOT give his speech. He WAS shut down. This wasn't a case of one side registering its disapproval and then the other side continuing. They shut him down. The dean was complicit in this.
Althouse seems to be arguing that this was just a medium-sized quashing of free speech, and so long as speech wasn't completely quashed, no harm.
She got her facts wrong - it was shut down - and she wants security rather than liberty. She'll get neither.
Steinbach is deserving of no support, Professor. Whatever her purpose, per Stanfords policy, was in being at the event and her role once she stepped to the podium, she failed miserably. Again, and per my comment yesterday, context matters and her acts prior to the event, both those stated and no telling what she communicated to students directly/not memorialized, show a possible set up where ideally she could have just moderated things with little commentary, even just directing the “hurt” students to the safe space and alternative programming SLS had running counter to this speech.
And I am really trying to see your perspective and sympathy to Steinbach and I just can’t. I’m in sales (was tracking to law school in SMU undergrad, PLSC BS/Hist,Reli, minors, but money and fringe were much better in sales) and my job is to manipulate folks with both reason and sometimes emotion. I’ve been quite successful at having been top segment seller for a $20bn+ company several times and also it’s Employee of the Year.
She is putting one hell of a pitch out there for the hurt folks and it is an extremely manipulative display, a well rehearsed oratory and artfully presented. But it’s still antagonistic towards the guest speaker and not fit for any type of event on the campus of any college, let alone a school such as Stanford. I don’t know that she deserves termination, but I think she should apologize to the FedSoc group at minimum and Judge Duncan potentially. And Stanford Law should do an audit of what their DEI department is doing and shake things up a bit once done.
"1% of employees are now DEI Officers within the slowest-hiring organization in America, the Federal government."
Is it possible that the school did not support the DEI Dean because the “inappropriate” they refer to is her injection of her DEI agenda within a space where it was inappropriate? Or maybe they know that the encounter was a set up but are unwilling to publicly acknowledge that? Either way, those are reasonable surmises regarding how the apology was phrased. These are legal oriented people. If something is ambiguous, it is probably purposely so.
DEI SUB NUMINE VIGIT - motto of Princeton
The entire incident should be investigated.
If it is found that the DEI enforcer was actually in on a setup she should be terminated. If no evidence she was ‘in on it’ she should be severely censured for unbelievably poor judgment causing reputational harm to both the institution and to students.
If Martinez didn’t take steps to find out whether or not Steinbach was in on it prior to issuing her halfhearted statement then she too should be severely censured.
I find the use Of The plural "staff members" in the letter intriguing. Tessier-Lavigne was an acquaintance back in the 00s, and I knew him as articulate, precise, and careful with language. I suspect he and the law dean have evidence that there was a multi-person effort by administrators prior to the talk, to arrange events as we saw play out.
Ann (in your post opening this thread): “… Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers. Is that not an ongoing issue for legal analysis?…”
I am simply gobsmacked. Insofar as Steinbach might have been attempting to do what you say, she (and you) just demonstrate how readily you and she and all the acolytes of DEI will sacrifice free speech on the altar of victimology, where self-appointed censors pile their self-serving claims that ideas are hurting them, that words make them feel unsafe, and the whole wide world can just shut the hell up.
Sorry, I just can’t follow you into that swamp.
I didn't like what the students did, but student protests are part of free speech, though they shouldn't be allowed to deprive the willing listeners of their right to hear the speaker and the school needs to be able to assure speakers that their effort to make an appearance will not be in vain. Steinbach stepped up as an intermediary, and her remarks leaned in favor of empathy for the protesting students, but, in the end, she reclaimed the space for the speaker and those who came to hear him.
1: ALL calls for "empathy" are bullshit. They are nothing but justification to abuse power to support the people you like against the people you don't like
She had NO empathy for the invited speaker
She had NO empathy for the students who came there to listen to the speaker
Her only "empathy" was for the bullying, free speech hating thugs and scum who share her vile views.
In a moral and decent society, her actions would, properly, be considered vile, inexcusable, a nd grounds for being fired
2: "student protests are part of free speech"? Not when they're preventing the free speech of the person who is the invited speaker.
Showing up to prevent someone else from speaking / being heard is not part of "free speech", it is evil thuggery and scum bag behavior
Ann Althouse said...
"Law schools shouldn’t have DEI deans. A total waste of money...."
Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
******************
So Steinbach is basically the scorpion in the fable about the frog and the scorpion. The law school administration created the DEI position (or the university mandated it), the admin hired a candidate to fill it, and the admin actually knew (or should be charged with the knowledge) what they'd set themselves up for the consequences.
I guess the DEI dean maybe should get a bonus instead of criticism.
ALSO: The judge was Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee. Here's his Wikipedia article where you will easily find material that explains the students' hostility.
The fact that the students are intolerant and hate filled bigots doesn't make their actions any better
Core reality: Interfering with someone's scheduled speech is not free speech. It is a complete and utter violation of all principles of free speech
You dont' like him? Dont' go to his talk. That is your right
I dont' give a flying fuck how much you "hate" him, you don't' have the right to stop other people from listening to him
Further to Madison Man's comment at 10:20, I think having DEI policies and staff is a mix between box checking and paying off the protection racket. When something controversial happens (or a manufactured controversy arises), they can hand it off to the DEI staffers and essentially ignore it. The DEI people can continue to put out nonsense that is ignored by most people, even those who vaguely agree with some of it.
Who, if anybody, told the students that Kyle Duncan was racist?
The moral of planned DIEversity is that any "burden" (e.g. human rites vs human rights, political congruence vs equal treatment, inference vs deduction, models vs observation), perceived or real, may be aborted... uh, cancelled.
As James Lindsay said of the shameful, destructive defenses of the DEI dean, "The fact that what we're watching unfold is American Maoism remains elusive to most of the people who should be able to see it most clearly."
It seems like the underlying problem is not being addressed here. That is, what is the limit on a protest at an event that is controversial? I say protesters can have their signs outside the venue, but cannot make noise, and cannot interrupt the venue. This issue is far wider than the Stanford law school event and has been going on for decades.
Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez are, I think, saying that the administrator enforcing the policy must adhere closely to its terms and not expound on other ideas and policies — even if the administrator enforcing the policy is the DEI dean and the additional ideas are the very substance of DEI.
That's right. because DEI is not more important that respect for the law, and respect for freedom of speech.
In this case there were rules that Steinbach violated, which is to say she privileged DEI above the law
Of course the should be reprimanded for that
I guess the point is that policy against disrupting speakers entails a commitment to getting the speech back on track and ending the disruption quickly and without giving any reward or comfort to the disrupters.
No shit Sherlock.
There was not a word of encouragement for the DEI mission, her mission.
That because Steinbach, and apparently you, conceive of her "mission" as being the complete and total destruction of freedom of speech and rational argument and discussion.
Once you've eliminated those, you have no need of a law school, because the law, rights, etc no longer matter, All that matters is who has the power
Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Jenny Martinez understand they're not going to like the world where that is so
You should, too
One obvious possibility is that he was disappointed with her excuse-mongering for Steinbach and didn’t trust her to issue a proper apology.Excuse-mongering?! To say that Steinbach meant well but went awry isn't to proffer an excuse
Yes, it is
Because she didn't mean well
She supports the destruction of free speech and free inquiry. That is the diametric opposite of "meaning well"
But it's interesting to speculate whether Tessier-Lavigne had to intervene because Martinez couldn't get it right on her own. That sounds very insulting to Martinez!
Is it "insulting" when it's true, and well deserved?
Anyway, I don't see how a school can have a strong commitment to DEI and not give more support to Steinbach. Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers. Is that not an ongoing issue for legal analysis?
No, it's not, because there is no way any legitimate educational institution can privilege ANY ideology, and that's what DIE is, just another ideology, over "the right to hear invited speakers".
Anyone who supports that is a monster who needs to be driven away from education.
Allowing that is the death of education
When you play in the big leagues there are no do overs. You are judged by your performance in the moment. Welcome to the big leagues deans Steinbach and Martinez. Be thankful that you are not demoted back to the minors.
The tradition
Whatever his substantive domain, whatever his school of thought, and whatever his inclination to piety or impiety, [the lecturer] signs the same agreement and he serves the same cause : to protect us from the wind, to stand up and seriously project the assumption that through lecturing, a meaningful picture of some part of the world can be conveyed, and that the talker can have access to a picture worth conveying.
Erging Goffman, "The Lecture," Forms of Talk p.194
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.
1: She had a prepared speech. because first she organized thugs to shout down a speaker she didn't like, then she publicly assaulted him, using the excuse of her brownshirts trying to stop his speech
2: "lecturing Judge Duncan about the harm he was doing by being there." What about the harm SHE was doing by being there?
3: "Is it worth the pain that this causes, the division that this causes" Is SHE worth the pain that this causes, the division that this causes? Oh, wait, that's right, those who disagree with her aren't really people, so hurting them is good
4: "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?” Do you have something so incredibly important to say about DEI that that is worth this impact on the division of these people?” Oh, wait, that's right, those who disagree with Steinbach aren't people, so the "impact on the division" of them doesn't matter.
The only way that Steinbach's claims can have any meaning or value is if you start from the position that no one who disagrees with her matters
Or, if you start from the DIE position, which is that racism and sexism are good, and racially and sexually discriminating against "whites" and "males" is good and right and appropriate.
I do not see how any decent human being defends such thuggish, racist and sexist trash
Anyway, I don't see how a school can have a strong commitment to DEI and not give more support to Steinbach. Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers. Is that not an ongoing issue for legal analysis? I would prefer to see schools protect the invited speaker's forum, but that doesn't keep me from seeing the room for continuing debate. On the contrary, it's a lively issue that law professors ought to encourage students to delve into.
This reminds me of the type of equivocating that's led to the destruction of businesses and orderly civic life in Portland and other American cities.
It's a window into how so many liberals are worthless as guardians of our civic institutions. While they don't prefer riots, there are lively debates to be had. But the woke left doesn't want space for lively debate, they want power. They turned Portland into an actual and Stanford into a figurative garbage dump of DEI intersectional power games. Picture Rodin's The Thinker but with Molotov cocktails.
Figurative ones--so far--for the Stanford Maoists.
Meanwhile, damn right we should "scapegoat" Steinbach as well as the parties who created the position. What, we can't scapegoat bombthrowers if they didn't assemble the bombs?
I wonder if our hostess had actually watched the video rather than just listening to the audio if would she have a different view of what happened? Apart from the clear evidence that this was a planned hit job, a viewer can see her place her prepared remarks on the podium and then turn to her left to directly deliver them to the judge.
To accept Ann's interpretation, one would expect the DEI dean to have spoken to the room in a more oblique manner rather than turning to the guest speaker and offer her pre-rebuttal to him directly even before his case in chief. She was clearly scolding him for his views and his work, and the rest of it was performative horseshit. This much can be seen in the video.
- Krumhorn
Our Hostess: "There was not a word of encouragement for the DEI mission, her mission."
Why SHOULD there be?? DEI is evil, racist and should not even exist in its current form, much less be a paid position forced upon staff and students. Her DEI mission was WAY inappropriate to expound upon at the lecture, which really didn't happen.
And Althouse tries to excuse the evil person practicing her despicable stock-in-trade by saying she is a "scapegoat" in all this? W.T.F.? You presenting Steinbach this way reminds me of the defense attorney pleading for leniency for his parent-murdering client by describing him as "an orphan." Lawyers....sheesh. Does Steinbach have you under retainer?
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
So my take on your reasoning for your initial position based on the above comment: the school had hired her to perform duties as a DEI dean. Her speech was both in keeping with DEI principles (based on critical theory) and restored conditions to the point where the speaker could continue. From that reference frame, I can see yours as a reasonable conclusion.
From the perspective of how I see a notional university treating an invited speaker (and a dean in her position is speaking in an official capacity for the university) I completely disagree that her speech was appropriate, focusing on the part where she claimed he had and was causing harm.
Words mean nothing. Unless action is taken, their 'apology' means bupkis.
Yes exactly what the CCP board members placed in companies do. Exactly. Enforce party policy. And like CCP it’s not MY party.
So, Steinbach was afforded an opportunity, and rather than resolve DIEversity, she embraced it, languished in it, and normalized a popular consensus of selective splendor in political congruence ("="), albinophobic imagery and rhetoric, Levine's personal affirmation, class-disordered ideologies, witch hunts, warlock trials, and abortion... cancel culture. He was a "burden" brayed the democratic consensus.
planned... nay, Planned Presenterhood.
"I dont' give a flying fuck how much you "hate" him, you don't' have the right to stop other people from listening to him"
To be fair, it has been conclusively established by all right-thinking people (maybe that should really be "left-thinking", but whatever) that Trump is literally Hitler, making the judge "literally Hitler-adjacent". How can you NOT hate him? And doesn't that justify any effort to silence him?
So far as I can tell, there was never any pretense of a good faith debate on behalf of the student mob. The subject of Judge Duncan's talk was apparently"The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, guns, and Twitter."
There is no hint that he was allowed to even begin this discussion, much less that any of the "protesters" took issue with anything he had to say about that subject. Instead, their actions seem wholly based on a desire to prevent him from speaking on anything because of who he is. The whole intolerant speech suppression enterprise was nothing but an extended ad hominem attack. Ann admitted as much yesterday when she said that the basis for their "hostility" (her word) could be found in the Wikipedia entry for Judge Duncan.
Exclusion of diversity of thought and intolerance to those not enslaved to Wokeness is indeed part of the core job of DEI commissars, so Steinbach was acting in congruence with the job she was hired for. Especially so, since an implicit basis for the mob action was hatred of those students who dare to belong to the Federalist Society, and to invite speakers to discuss topics such as that planned by Judge Duncan.
Good job sticking up for her, Ann.
Also, I find the Dean's Barney The Dinosaur approach to dealing with the adult law school students, as displayed in her rant, disturbing.
I love you
You love me
We're a happy family
With a great big hug
And a kiss from me to you
Won't you say you love me too?
(except for those who don't agree with us).
It's not a church and it's not a kindergarten. Treat them like small children and, of course, they act like small children.
Did you notice at the end of the video the second administrator throwing kisses to the protesters as she ordered them to tone it down a little so that things could proceed as planned?
Owen said...
"Sorry, I just can’t follow you into that swamp."
************
Me neither. The idea that a retired Con Law professor could entertain and sympathhize with the idea that law is nothing but an instrument for maintaining white supremacy is so...loathesome....that it destroys whatever respect I had for our Perfesser.
She just revealed that she will "sell you down the river" (to use a phrase from slavery's days)....if you're white.
"Cruel neutrality", my ass. From the start, she said she DEFENDED the DEI race pimp.
And NO, she never admits she's wrong. If you disagree with her, it's YOUR problem.
I am hoping this incident is a sort of crossing of the Rubicon, or at least sticking an initial toe into it. That is, I do not know of another instance where top school administrators actually go after and criticize a DEI coordinator. Sure, they make nods to free speech but never criticize the thought-commissars they have set up inside their institutions. If they fire this inquisitor, that will be more than a toe -- maybe a foot or half a torso. The full-fledged crossing would involve tossing the entire DEI engine of thought control out. Cross the river. March on Rome, I say.
Steinbach invited students to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers.
Himmler invited Rohm's Brownshirts to use their legal training to consider and develop arguments for elevating Nazi Party concerns over the right to hear invited speakers
What part of that sentence do you find to be evil?
How about if we make it Stalin and Communist Party concerns?
Or how about if we have it be Trump, and US Constitutional concerns? You know, so a complete ban on all speakers supporting "gun control", with students showing up to shout them down, and Administrators showing up to lecture them, on the grounds that anyone who opposes our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is divisive and hurtful, and so shouldn't be allowed to speak at a law school?
Do you really not understand how insane, and evil, her call is?
I've got a thought: how about when the GOP takes over the gov't in 2025, they announce a new rule that absolutely no Federal funds of any sort (no student loans, no research grants, no scholarships, nothing) can go to any "educational institution" that practices DEI, on the grounds that DEI is antithetical to free academic inquiry, and therefore no one who has a DEI department is actually an educational institution.
Oh, and implying anyone who has worked for a DEI unit, no matter what their job title then or now, qualifies as "having a DEI department".
Would that be reasonable?
Why or why not?
Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong.
Steinbach is the one who defines her position has being entirely contrary to Stanford Law's professed academic mission.
If is your position that DEI is inherently contrary to Stanford Law's professed academic mission, then it was a failure on Stanford's part to create the DEI department, and it's time to destroy it.
Which action starts by repudiating Steinbach's actions.
If your position that DEI is NOT inherently contrary to Stanford Law's professed academic mission, then we're left with the reality that Steinbach is personally opposed to Stanford Law's professed academic mission. Because you can't educate people while completely locking out the opposing point of view, and people who can't handle hearing an opposing point of view have absolutely no business being in Law.
If Steinbach can provide a transcript of her job interview where she said that she was a nasty fascist who favored stamping out all opposing points of view (not very "diverse" of her, if so, and certainly not very "inclusive"), then Stanford is "scapegoating" her after having hired her.
But if she didn't tell the hiring committee that her conception of DEI was that there's "one true way", and that she would use her position to try to stamp out all presentation of anything other than her one true way, then punishing her for acting that way is not "scapegoating", it's Stanford's President deciding to protect Stanford's Academic mission from an enemy
Professor Althouse seems genuinely unaware of what went down here. The DEI dean mobilized her student soldiers to attend the lecture and disrupt it; the DEI dean then stepped in to castigate the invited speaker in an extended prepared statement before finally giving her soldiers the sign to walk out of the lecture before they faced disciplinary action. Why Stanford pays someone to engage in this behavior is Stanford’s business, but we shouldn’t be naive about what’s going down.
Contemporary reports noted the presence of four other high-ranking administrators, none of whom performed their duty to preserve the right of Duncan to speak.
I suspect that Stanford's prexy and Martinez realized that with that incident Stanford risked being put on the list of law schools from which many judges will not hire. Being blacklisted by half of federal juiciary in terms of internships will not attract students to Stanford.
Nor will it attract checks from alumni.
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/03/11/more-on-the-stanford-law-school-mess-is-the-juice-worth-the-squeeze-n536337
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.
So your headline "Did the Stanford president and the Stanford law school dean apologize for what the DEI dean said to calm the students who were shouting down Judge Kyle Duncan?" is false. Because she didn't even get her Brownshirts to shut up and let him speak
I completely disagree that her speech was appropriate, focusing on the part where she claimed he had and was causing harm.
1: If hearing an opposing POV "causes you harm", then you need to go back to kindergarten, and stay there
you most certainly dont' belong in law school
2: Every single Soros Prosecutor has "caused harm", by virtue of the criminals they let out who then committed more crimes. So under that standard no person who ever supported any of those policies can be allowed to speak, anywhere.
Because they speech clearly "causes harm"
I'm surprised Ann is doubling down here; cruel neutrality has gone the way of the Stanford Law students' manners. The latest post begins with the assertion that Ed Whelan "asserts" something when he does no more than report the straight facts of SLS's reaction to the DIE Dean's coddling of the insurrectionist students.
What is a pure assertion, made in the face of the evidence is "in the end, [the DIE Dean] reclaimed the space for the speaker and those who came to hear him." A little research into an interview done by the Washington Free Beacon with the judge would show that was nonsense: the speaker was given no space to explain his position. Another inconvenient fact - the judge had to be escorted from the premises by Federal Marshals: is that consistent with being "given space"?
“Students at Stanford are expected to show both within and without the University such respect for order, morality, personal honor and the rights of others as is demanded of good citizens. Failure to do this will be sufficient cause for removal from the University.“
Any and all students who participated in the heckler’s veto should be dismissed.
There's been plenty of debate about DEI and its relationship to free speech, with one obvious conclusion: the two values are inherently incompatible. Free speech is the fundamental ethos of the Enlightenment. DEI is an instrumental value of authoritarianism.
No university administrators want to admit this, so they try to straddle the two ice floes. Stanford's own policies on freedom of expression are a perfect illustration of this (compare the "fundamental standard for student conduct" with the "protected identity harm reporting" process). The Assistant Dean for Diversity clearly thinks that DEI outranks Free Speech in Stanford's hierarchy of values. The President and LS Dean made clear that this is not their view of the rank ordering of the two values.
Their clarifications did not "hang Steinbach out to dry", but rather informed the Stanford community where DEI stands in relation to Free Expression.
BTW, a believer in DEI should be careful about using the word "hanging," which conjures up images of lynched black bodies, in reference to what may or may not have been done to Dean Steinbach. She could quite likely suffer severe emotional harm from that.
I think this is a Follow the Money situation. The protestors and the DEI administrators could have gotten away with these antics before a lesser mortal, but they chose this CCP performance in front of a Circuit judge. Circuit judges bring prestige by their mere presence and are used to obsequious deference. Circuit judges confer prestige on the school by hiring law clerks. Prestige brings alumni money, Big Law law firms, top students chasing clerkships. Circuit judges know exactly how to bring financial pain on the university, including refusals from other judges to attend symposiums, blackballing the school for law clerks, and dropping a word in the ears of former clerks in high places that Stanford isn’t what it used to be.
DEI tried to bully the wrong guy. I think they are about to get smacked in the eye on this. Support for DEI is a mile wide and an inch thick.
When I was in college in the 50s we were dismissive of Stanford students. I went to USC, a big football rival, but we considered ourselves much more sophisticated. Stanford students went around in jeans and t-shirts. A classmate in medical school was a Standford zeta psi, the most rowdy and uncultured fraternity in California. They amused themselves shooting machine guns at gasoline cans. His wife was a Stanford student, as well. Her stories of Zeta Psi parties are not safe for work. No sororities at Stanford so the girls were on their own.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard made Stanford respectable. They both got EE degrees in the 30s and their success, which had little to do with Stanford, made the college reputation.
Althouse disdains normies of all stripes.
Ann, I don’t give a rat’s patootie about what went down at Stanford. It is just part and parcel of the woke mob we have been forced to suffer. Nothing new.
But what I was hoping to hear from you today was how you, as a person, reacted to the almost universal negative response from the commentators on your blog.
You don’t owe me or anyone else anything ( do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law ). But just doubling down today on what happened yesterday is a little strange.
I believe this whole episode shakes down to this: ANN Althouse was a crypto-fascist.
Now she is openly and notoriously a bull-goose totalitarian.
From now on we will all remember how she stood defiantly with the enemies of Free Speech.
We will also wonder how many of her Con Law students were subtly INFECTED with her enthusiasm and advocacy for teaching the that LAW is "only" racial and power politics.
FUCK YOU, ANN.
The DEI commissar hung herself out to dry, and Stanford forfeited any perception of promoting free speech. That's all that happened here. Once more, the fascists showed their hand, and leftwing apologists like Ann are left to try and reason away Stanford's guilt.
Students at Stanford are expected to show . . . respect for order . . .
Some people call that Civility Bullshit.
Let's check the headlines to answer the question posed here:
Stanford APOLOGIZES after pious dean of 'equity' joined her woke student mob in taunting a Trump-appointed judge who was invited to speak on campus
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11851449/Stanford-APOLOGIZES-pious-dean-equity-joined-woke-student-mob-taunting-him.html
Yep, Stanford apologized.
Doesn't matter how YOU want it framed. That's not how it's BEING framed.
"Althouse disdains normies of all stripes."
Disdain doesn't come close to what the deplorables in flyover country think when they read about these sorts of antics (yes, unlike the products of the dystopian "education" system in Democratic urban strongholds, they can read).
If you want to know why college is expensive, look at the increase in positions like this one. DEI administrators and the like have increased in number dramatically over the last 30 years in colleges. And they don't come cheap. My guess is that Ms. Steinbach makes a healthy six figure salary and has a well paid staff. Many of these positions are mandated by the Department of Ed. Colleges are offering early retirement packages, and if the things my friends in academia are seeing, it's faculty and longtime staff in traditional positions--admissions officers, etc.--who are being cut and replaced by less expensive, younger people. These newer, feel-good admin staff positions are, for now, safe. There are, of course, other reasons for the high cost of college, but cutting this kind of fat would help reduce budgets.
As for this woman, she was, unfortunately, following protocol for this kind of job. She got to the point of defending free speech, but took the long way around the barn. Part of her job description is to not offend students and to help retain students who meet certain criteria (probably as defined by the DOE). Why should this even have been her responsibility? Surely the law school president or some other executive there should have handled this. The correct thing would have been to firmly tell law school students that their training includes learning to listen to the opposition's points in order to formulate an argument against them.
Gordon Scott said...
I suspect that Stanford's prexy and Martinez realized that with that incident Stanford risked being put on the list of law schools from which many judges will not hire. Being blacklisted by half of federal juiciary in terms of internships will not attract students to Stanford.
Good point, but it's even worse than that from Stanford's POV.
The left wing bigots are going to take from Yale, Harvard, & other Ivys before taking from Stanford.
So I expect that more than 1/2 the judges who currently take interns from Stanford are ones NOT on the side of the anti-free speech fascists.
As Silicon Valley Bank has discovered, you can go into a death spiral VERY quickly
ALSO: The judge was Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee. Here's his Wikipedia article where you will easily find material that explains the students' hostility.
The link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Duncan_(judge)
Thank you for the link. I now know that he's an awesome judge and was an awesome lawyer before that (yay Hobby Lobby!), and only a Maoist scum bag would hate him.
Which explains that actions of Steinbach's Brownshirts
The Althouse blog has turned into a place where lots of smart, well educated right leaning people gather. Is it at least possible that our hostess doesn't like how that has turned out? And that in an increasingly fractured society, she is finding it increasingly difficult to navigate Madison, WI as a result? If so, chasing us all off and destroying her blog in the process would be rational. And frankly, it would explain a lot.
I can’t hope to improve on anything Greg the Class Traitor has written, and am at risk of repeating Owen.
Nevertheless, I will make an appeal to first principles. The Constitution is a product of Enlightenment era natural philosophy. Axiomatically, all of us are morally equal. Deductively, then, we are all equally entitled to decide *for ourselves* what we hear and read. (And are equally entitled to meaningful self defense, but that is somewhat OT.)
DIE stands in direct opposition to that. DIE-ism is an assertion that a self selected few are entitled to make the decisions most essential to our personhood for us. Dean Steinbach embodies an ineradicable contradiction between DIE and the freedom to possess our own consciousness.
That makes Dean Steinbach my enemy. That isn’t scapegoating, that is straight forwardly noting that Judge Duncan has no need to ask permission of Cultural Revolutionaries before speaking, nor Federalist Society advocates before listening.
There is no cruel neutrality available here.
Imagine Althouse putting up with this sort of thing in her own classroom.
Wow, I really didn't expect Anne to be such a fan of the heckler's veto and at a law school no less.
This was nothing more than the left silencing alternative view points and has no place in a civil society. Name and shame them all so law firms know they may be hiring weak minded drones.
>effinayright said...
FUCK YOU, ANN.<
I'm not what one would call a big Ann Althouse fan and I am appalled at her view of this Stanford story. That said, you, sir, are a primitive jerk.
I highly commend to all the essay by Herbert Marcuse, the famous (he made the cover of Time Magazine) Maoist philosopher who laid the foundations for today’s post-modern leftists to suppress conservative voices. Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance (1965). Everything the leftists say today was said by Marcuse. In arguing against the traditional understanding of free speech, he wrote, “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean tolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” That is exactly what the students at Stanford believe, whether or not they’ve read Marcuse.
They amused themselves shooting machine guns at gasoline cans.
I detest Stanferd but you’re making it sound great.
What a hypocrite Althouse is. Do you guys know WHY comments here a now moderated?
Because a guy named Fen did to Althouse what these students did to the judge.
"Maybe it’s better for the greater good of society to let Stanford Law School bear the consequences of its obsession with DEI, rather than removing a figurehead and pretending that the problem is solved."
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/03/firing-diversity-dean-over-judge-shout-down-may-help-stanford-law-school-escape-consequences-of-its-toxic-dei-culture/
To correct my Marcuse quote above, he wrote “intolerance against” the Right.
Some thoughts: The Professor never admits she is wrong. It's one of her super-powers.
However, she does moderate the comments, and she published all of these negative comments, as well as those on the previous thread.
So maybe she doesn't buy what the DEI people are saying, and she's trolling people into dealing with the DEI argument--that in order for society to be "just" it is necessary to prevent "bad ideas" from being voiced.
That is, of course, an appalling and pernicious doctrine--which everywhere has led to tyranny and opression. This should be self-evident.
It is easy to see the effect of such a doctrine as applied to speech. We are seeing it played out in DEI, the Twitter files, and the like. The Professor is surely not oblivious to this (Are you?).
Now try it with the Second Amendment. If we take away arms from the bad people, we can achieve what we want.
See where this goes?
buster said...
Imagine Althouse putting up with this sort of thing in her own classroom.
imagine Ann having the job as the DIE dean... Pretty Easy to visualize, isn't it?
I made the comment above about this possibly being a crossing of the Rubicon. From what I read this morning, it appears Stanford is determined to lift its toe up out of that stream and leave it at that.
I remain astounded by Ann's blindness about DEI and the nature of the fundamental threat it poses to academic core values. Pandering to totalitarian student mobs is only a trivial manifestation of it. Try for just one small instance the diversity pledges people applying for positions have to include now. This is a way in advance to weed out any and all possible critics of the DEI ideology ahead of time. But it is that ideology itself that is a mortal threat to academia. It is a hermetically sealed system in that it DEFINES AS PROOF OF ITS PRINCIPLES ahead of time any objection to its principles. If you question it, that proves it is right. And this rejection of core intellectual ground rules is NOT being confined only to matters of student life, etc. The academic subject fields - including medicine and other sciences - are being encroached on and corrupted by the utterly evil and alien system of thought.
"Imagine Althouse putting up with this sort of thing in her own classroom."
Put up with what? A DEI dean speaking for 10 minutes to the students who have been disrupting my classroom after I specifically asked for an administrator to help me with the problem? Of course, I would!
You're making the fundamental mistake of not seeing what Steinbach did as different from what the students were doing.
I'd also put what the student did into 2 parts: an initial protest and the continuing disruption.
Your failure to keep the issues in an orderly form makes it tedious for me to respond to the many comments... in case you want to know what I'll "put up with." But I am approving these comments, which really don't even engage in the questions I'm trying to examine. I know you feel the need to stay on your absolutist track, but to me, it's part of the larger problem of people in this country cocooning and talking past each other.
I am just gobsmacked. It is simply astonishing to me that anyone could misunderstand so badly what Steinbach was doing there. Steinbach should be fired today.
"Steinbach isn't the one who created this position and hired her. That's why scapegoating her is wrong."
I agree completely. As I noted earlier, she performed the task within the boundaries set by her job description. As I also noted, someone else should have handled this question. I don't see it as a diversity issue--unless you include diversity of opinion as part of her job, and I'm willing to bet it isn't. This is a Roberts Rules of Order issue or a campus rules question or even a "this is not proper behavior for lawyers" teaching moment. In other words, not a DEI problem.
We now have Stanford's response to the Federalist society.
https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FW-Aftermath-of-Thursdays-Events.pdf
It is entirely couched in the therapeutic lingo that is one of DEI's preferred modes of speech. Stanford treats the Federalist society students has helpless, "harmed," unsafe pussycats, rather than as citizens whose fundamental free speech rights it has suppressed. This attempt to divert public controversy into private therapeutic treaatment is as Soviet style a form of totalitarian thought control as one can imagine. And among those who they recommend the students go to for such paternalistic soothing, the very DEI Dean who chastized them and the judge for their bigotry.
IF the people who're roughly on your side disrupt and attempt to prevent someone from speaking via a heckler's veto and IF that speaker asks for assistance from the purported authorities in ending the disruption THEN it's ok for you, as one of those people in authority, to take the speaker's place and time to deliver your own speech AS LONG AS the topic of that speech is one the Nice People like Professor Althouse think is important and germane.
I think I've got that right. What would be an unconscionable interruption (rude, contrary to the ideal of free speech, bullying, etc) in almost any other context becomes good and praiseworthy here by virtue of meeting all these criteria. If the situation were different in any way--if the speaker's ideology were different, if the beliefs of the hecklers or the interloping speaker were different, anything--then of course this would be bad, but in this one specific instance it's good and the DEI dean who used the opportunity to give her own speech should be praised and thanked--I think that's what's being argued here.
You're making the fundamental mistake of not seeing what Steinbach did as different from what the students were doing.
Except that the evidence you choose to ignore is that she was part of what the students were doing, and to some extent appears to have been the instigator. You have chosen sides in the neverending, ever-escalating culture wars, and you’re on the wrong side.
Elevating DEI concerns over the right to hear invited speakers is an ongoing issue for a lively debate
What would Nice People allow to be substituted for "the right to hear invited speakers" in the formulation "DEI concerns should be elevated over X," I wonder.
Hey, it's a lively debate after all! Free speech and freedom of association are definitely up for grabs--in the mind of the DEI Dean it's almost certainly true that "DEI concerns" are more important than either of those. Equal treatment before the law, probably. What else?
It's funny to watch the Left shift their fidelity to the very idea of principles when topics change. On "trans rights," for example, the Left and Nice People often take the position that "our existence isn't up for debate!" and refuse to discuss any number of topics--they label open discussions hateful speech, lobby sponsors, threaten venues, etc. On other topics they say that BECAUSE there's a "lively debate" over the issue they themselves should be allowed to set the terms--to be allowed to shout down speakers they don't like, to give their own speeches during the time allotted to other speakers, etc. Their opposition CREATES the debate and that debate itself REQUIRES room be given to them to participate/take over. They'd never allow anything like that for their own speeches, of course--imagine if a group of Right-leaning law students interrupted a DEI-approved speaker! They'd all be expelled and the Nice People would weep at such hateful conduct.
Anyway it's nice that these people don't pretend to revere free speech as a concept--their support for free speech is conditional on it being useful as a weapon for them. If free speech helps people they oppose (like the speaker here) then it's fine to ignore; if free speech might help them then it's sacred and must be respected. The Nice People go along with this, of course (since it's a "lively debate!") and in doing so show how shallow their principles are, too.
Ann states "...Your failure to keep the issues in an orderly form makes it tedious for me to respond to the many comments..."
Sorry Ann, even if everyone viewed your 'sense of order' (form) the way you wish, we would still have a problem with this Dean. The Students Protested, Continued to Disrupt the Judge, and then the Dean - Steinbach - got to the podium and began to lambast and criticize the Judge's record. So maybe your sense of order misses the whole point and your using it to deflect the harm this Dean caused to 'Free Speech' and Stanford University. Your personal bias agrees with the Mob - which in this case includes the Dean. You're lost in your cause - good for you - bad for Society including the Law Students at Stanford. Chalk off another Judge - Duncan - who will hesitate to hire any Law Student from Stanford.
It’s been suggested by some that Althouse is trolling us here. I hope that is the case. I would be pained to learn that I’ve spent the last (nearly) 19 years reading and often admiring the writings of a person now revealed as just another academic that has allowed herself to absorb and come to believe ludicrous ideas that the less “well-educated” can spot as baloney from a mile away.
I wonder how many commenters here have put Althouse's face on the Fonz's as he jumps over that shark?
I know I have.
Well I suggested that Althouse was trolling. But in the very next post she tripled down.
I’m with you, Charlie. This is strange.
Cruel neutrality was just a ruse. Althouse can't hide the fact that she's as left-biased as MSNBC.
You're making the fundamental mistake of not seeing what Steinbach did as different from what the students were doing.
Well respectfully I’d say that most of us think you are making the mistake of believing that she wasn’t colluding with them, while trying to provide herself plausible deniability by claiming that she does believe in free speech.
I do think other commenters are over-interpreting your degree of support for DIE. I noted (please correct me if I’m wrong) that you:
1. Praised her attempt to calm the room. My response to that is that you mistakenly said that she was able to reclaim the space for him to speak. That did not happen, he never was able to deliver his prepared remarks and ultimately had to be escorted out by federal marshals. So even by that metric she failed.
2. Mentioned that she was just doing her job. Aside from the comments already made about Nazis following orders, there’s also this- there were at least three other administrators in the room so if her job position made it inappropriate for her to reprimand the unruly protestors in a straightforward manner then someone else should have stepped up. The fact that she had prepared remarks and students used her race as a shield made it at least suspect that this was a setup and her conflict of interest is part of the problem for which she bears some responsibility.
3. Suggested that there is room for debate between DIE principles and First Amendment principles. Even if so she was advocating for this in a completely inappropriate way and at an inappropriate time. In doing so she provided proof of why it would be so harmful to yield any ground whatsoever on free speech principles to accommodate DIE.
My take is slightly different from the others.
1. This speaking engagement was not a planned debate. Any unilateral effort to make this even a debate, including explaining to the invited speaker why the protesters may feel justified in their protest, is inappropriate for this time and place. Steinbach invited herself to speak on the subject matter, as an uninvited and unsolicited guest. Whether or not her comments or views or intentions were correct or justified, they were entirely inappropriate.
2. The only valid reason for any member of the SLS administration to take the podium was to address the protesters' violation of the school's expressed interest in protecting free speech on campus. Whether or not the DEI Dean was the correct official to engage in this role of restoring order, Steinbach's intervention lacked credible focus on restoring order. Enforcing the school's speech policy is not the responsibility of a DEI Dean, and Steinbach did not fulfill that responsibility professionally or competently.
If Steinbach in any way orchestrated or colluded with the protesters, that should be grounds for severe sanctions (up to and including dismissal) for Steinbach, having planned or facilitated a serious violation of school policy. That's a big "if".
At best, Steinbach is responsible for a serious lapse in judgment and decorum. At worst, Steinbach has lost all credibility and confidence in her ability to execute her professional responsibilities as a SLS dean.
My take, since you asked: Steinbach delivered a Master Class in angry, female, college-educated, passive-aggressive, Puritanical midwittery. It was truly remarkable in its obnoxiousness. She reminded me of those girls/women in that iconic photo of the Cultural Revolution in China: angry faces, fists raised, a crowd in the stadium behind them.
I didn't read your defense of her, Professor. I can't believe anyone could defend this woman.
Gosh, there is so much going on here.
I am a big fan of this blog. I am a surgeon, but I was a history major in college, and I like constitutional history especially.
First, thanks to Althouse for starting the thread and allowing it to go on as long as it has. This is her blog, and she has shown great forbearance. I thoroughly enjoy her thoughts about what she posts. It makes me think.
Unfortunately, the vituperation on this thread is off the map, and y’all need to scale it back. My mom once said, “Son, never say the very first thing that comes into your head.”
Althouse does not get paid enough for this. If you naysayers want to start your own blog, go ahead. I am grateful that people can still post what they think on blogs like this and not lose their family, like in North Korea.
Second, Althouse is absolutely correct. This is the Stanford administration’s problem, and they created it. The Dean was only doing what she was hired to do. To fire her would be self-serving to the administration.
And it would not solve the Woke problem at Stanford.
I disagree that the Dean was not scolding. Her stance, body language, and verbiage remind me of times I have seen my family watch (honestly, I don’t watch these...) “The Real Housewives of Manhattan” or what-have-you. She clearly was disrespectful to the judge.
And, someone has to explain to me how the judge “harmed” the law students...at least more than how I harmed my children by telling them they could not put mud in the basement to grow earthworms.
Unfortunately, and this is the big picture to me, this Dean was teaching these law students that it is acceptable behavior to be publicly disrespectful to a judge... and even in front of the judge. And, it is clear from the evidence that I have seen that this protest/disruption was planned, and that the Dean was reading from pre-prepared remarks. Believe me, no one was "harmed" here.
But this is why this despicable law school administration hired this Dean from the get-go. They bear the responsibility.
I am not an attorney, but I have needed an attorney many times. I can only think this: This will leave me at a loss as a client if my attorney is thinking more about saying horrific things to the judge because of the judge's previous rulings, rather than thinking about my case and what is best for me, on my side of a legal proceeding before that judge.
Uffda.
Post a Comment