Writes William A. Jacobson in "The Stanford Law School Culture, Not The Diversity Dean, Is The Problem (but I repeat myself)/Something is wrong with the culture at Stanford Law School, and many (most) law schools. Let’s address that issue" (Legal Insurrection).
[I]n a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck.... It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy—purposeful, and malicious at times, other times just for straight self-survival—on the part of the designated target. The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible....
One of the criteria in picking your target is the target’s vulnerability—where do you have the power to start? Furthermore, any target can always say, “Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?” When you “freeze the target,” you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all the others to blame. Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the “others” come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target....
What if they don't support the target? The law school dean has apologized for Steinbach. Steinbach's attackers doubled down and demanded that she be fired. This non-firing is a bit of support, somewhat visible. Students are protesting the apology — as well they should! — and perhaps it will be taken back. So the tactic of going after Steinbach could be effective in getting at the larger DEI culture.
Anyway, I've been saying all along — click my "Tirien Steinbach" tag — that Steinbach, as the DEI dean, was doing what the law school hired her to do. She should not be targeted by the people who are using her as the face of their DEI culture. They should explain and defend their culture... or refine and improve it. The enemies of that culture have clamped their jaws around one part of it, and you're delusional if you think it's only about an isolatable associate dean.
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I would say the problem is this is a target rich environment and only one target has been identified so far.
From afar, it’s not clear to me that the DEI Dean did what she was hired to do, which was participate in dressing down an invited guest speaker. I don’t see this as good PR for Stanford Law. Maybe they do.
However, it’s pretty obvious this is a cultural issue across many higher Ed schools. I don’t think there’s any delusion about this. DEI has become a cancer eating away at our ability to think critically and act with humility. It’s a bullying mindset.
It's a self-solving problem. No DEI dean means no support for DEI.
@Althouse: She should not be targeted by the people who are using her as the face of their DEI culture. They should explain and defend their culture... or refine and improve it. The enemies of that culture have clamped their jaws around one part of it, and you're delusional if you think it's only about an isolatable associate dean.
First, per the 'tall poppies' social mechanism, anyone who stands up or stands out will be targeted by those who disagree. This is not limited to DEI. However, within the DEI community after the Trump election, those opposed to Trump turned a blind eye toward anything that would support Trump and glossed over anything that made his opponents look bad. The anti-Trumpists literally sold their sous because of humiliation after miscalculating his popularity/win, and for personal political gains.
The distortions and corruptions of DEI accelerated with the departure of lefty Senator Al Franken after the coordinated attack on Trump's actions toward women. (Plus, lefties Weinstein, Epstein, Gates, Conyers went down during the "Believe All Women" era.) Pots calling kettles black --> DEI incoherence, projection, and de facto insanity.
Second, I don't think ANYONE OR ANY RESPONSE to your earlier posts hangs this on the actions of single or isolated person. She was indeed the leader of a pompous and self-righteous DEI-themed protest, but leaders require agreeable and complicit followers. Those who grew up with 2nd or 3rd generation DEI training surely believe it's Good, Right, and Moral to do all these bullying and superficial virtue signaling things. But social media makes us all stupid, and young or naïve people often latch on to simplistic moral framings that fail to capture tough choices and the inevitable blowback of imperfect human decisions.
The current DEI culture arose in response to their amoral "sex and drugs and rock and roll" parents and grandparents left a void in their understanding of the world. Religion is recreated across all cultures and all times. The DEI young people created a new morality and religion from nothing, and are now falling flat on their faces as every start-up fundamentalist religion does.
She should not be targeted by the people who are using her as the face of their DEI culture.
By this ‘reasoning’ if Stanford discovers they’ve made a mistake in accepting and promoting leftie cancel culture what are they going to do with the cancel culture dean? Move her to the physics department? So fucking stupid…
…I’d add there’s no better way to demonstrate Stanford is stopping the rot than removing it from power.
-Was not the class of protest fixating and freezing and silencing an invited speaker?
-Wasn’t that the good ‘old rule used against a guest?
-Wouldn’t the time of protest been less personal, but more acceptable- before the speaker was scheduled?
When I was in HS so much more was expected from us, as students &future citizens of production &power. We were the future-listening, learning &taking notes. College was different only in the fact that we didn’t have to raise our hands to ask questions.
I’ve watched this behavior in Evergreen, Middlebury &the everLiberal learning colleges throughout the US: target it, freeze it, personalize it- run it the hell out of the building &extra points if you twist an arm.
Freedom looks a lot different to the Left than it does to the Right.
No elephant involved. It’s a herd mentality of the old school: when mobs used to run down people they targeted- pull them apart w/their bare hands and fight over the teeth and hair as souvenirs.
In my mind- it is uncivilized and signals the breakdown of societal norms at the core.
But, hey- who the hell am I? I work w/cows. And I’m always grateful that at the end of the day? The shit that sticks to me washes off in the shower.
Yay for that.
"Just doing her job" has been soundly rejected as a defense since at least the Nuremburg trials. Her job wouldn't be possible if there weren't people like her willing to do it. One hardly need reference Saul Alinksy to "target" the head of the DEI program if you don't think there should be a DEI program.
"Conservatives pounce!"
There are two issues here. One is "DEI," which most conservatives believe is a bane upon society. It is, however, what Stamford Law School seems to want to promote.
The more important initial issue is what Dean Steinbach did. Had she been agitating on behalf of the importance of protecting the Fifth Amendment, or maintaining subsidies for education, what she did would still be an outrageous breach of the basic principles of debate and the open exchange of ideas which is fundamental to higher education and to a free society, not to mention common decency.
She should be fired for not doing her job--promoting DEI--properly. How does shouting down and mau-mauing invited speakers promote diversity, equity and inclusion? It doesn't--she very badly damaged the brand. She exposed for all to see the institutional rot that has engulfed Stanford Law School, in the name of DEI.
Which is great as far as I am concerned, because the brand needs to be exposed, critiqued, and ultimately relegated to the dustbin of history.
But she is hardly a victim.
She needs to be fired. Stamford needs to make clear to its students--and to the legal world--that such conduct and tactics will not be tolerated, and that in future those engaging in them will be disciplined. But firing the dean is step one.
This much "sturm und drang" over a lecture at a law school!
Just imagine the fireworks soon to come, when the Supremes effectively outlaw all this DEI nonsense, sometime in the next few months. I expect it will be epic.
Will they burn the cities down, as they did with the St. George of Floyd riots? It wouldn't surprise me. There's a lot of moral capital invested in this scam.
""I think the focus on the [Stanford DEI dean Tirien] Steinbach is a mistake, for reasons I articulated...""
Of course you do.
Because every HR Administrator sees this as an attack on them.
And you are just part of the HR Administrator movement.
Steinbach is part of the machine that the wealthy elite have built to grind down the common citizen in the United States. They have taken largely average women and put them in positions where they have power over mostly men and given them authority to attack them just like Steinbach attacked this judge.
HR, bureaucracy, and education professions are all largely staffed by women, have no real measurable standards of productivity, and are designed to give these people who largely could not meet real standards power over the people who actually produce stuff.
The HR Administrator movement is just another cog in the machine the .0001% wealthiest people have instituted to control the people and they have recruited a fairly small group of Mandarins like Steinbach to administer this system of control.
It gives mediocre people like Steinbach power over more productive people and keeps them in line.
Ann had a similar position in this machine and sees attacks on Steinbach as an attack on her life's accomplishments.
So Ann is going to defend this Maoist bullshit vigorously no matter how obviously repulsive it is to any freedom supporting citizen.
I have personal experience with the law school deans at both Creighton and Nebraska.
At about the time of the Floyd riots in Omaha, there was a police killing of a black guy. A Creighton law student, Riley Wilson, tried to start a race riot on Twitter. The black guy (convicted felon) was armed and was had his hand on his loaded gun when the cop shot him dead in self-defense. It was all on tape.
The Creighton Dean defended this student and said he was proud of him. I wasn’t happy and engaged him on Twitter. He told me, inter alia, to “be better.”
Rachel Tomlinson Dick is a recent Nebraska grad who now teaches at Nebraska. She just published a long article in the Nebraska Law Review in which she claimed that the SCOTUS Bostock case could be extended so that trans people should be allowed to compete in sporting events against members of their new genders. Think Lia Thomas breaking women’s swimming records by large margins. In her footnotes, RTD claimed that former males had NO advantage over females. That’s absurd and I said so on LinkedIn.
I also wrote the editor of the law review and the Dean and said RTD’s law review article was NOT a well-written or edited law review article. The Dean wrote back (“I normally don’t respond to such emails…) and he claimed RTD was one of the best law students he’s ever had at UNL. He also played the civility bullshit card on me and he lectured me. Members of the Bar and faculty should all get along. I was too harsh in my legal criticism.
So, yes, there is a real problem at law schools with both the faculty and students. Modern liberals just can’t even comprehend that there is another side of the story.
I second Enigmma's comment. I am sorry, but I do not think many of the comments on this here (certainly not mine) have been focused only on this one DEI bureaucrat. I am truly astounded by how convoluted the exchanges here have been about this outrageous assault (yes by ALL of Stanford) on basic free speech principles.
Perhaps if Ann is concerned about the "freezing the target" issue, she could spend four or five postings on, say, the neutering by Harvard of Roland Fryer, or any of a thousand other frozen out, isolated targets on campuses, corporations, public schools, etc., etc. I for one am pretty tired of getting this lecture. I (and I believe the vast majority here) have been clear that the true evil is the entire DEI ideology and its bureaucratic enforcement force. I want it ALL extirpated from colleges, and now increasingly public-school systems. "Take no prisoners" is my motto, not "freeze the target."
Anyway, I've been saying all along — click my "Tirien Steinbach" tag — that Steinbach, as the DEI dean, was doing what the law school hired her to do. She should not be targeted by the people who are using her as the face of their DEI culture. They should explain and defend their culture... or refine and improve it. The enemies of that culture have clamped their jaws around one part of it, and you're delusional if you think it's only about an isolatable associate dean.
Yeah. She is just a good little Maoist.
She was hired to be a Maoist and was just doing her job.
There is some truth to the idea that we need to focus on the system that gave her a job and the oligarchs who use people like Steinbach to grind down the average citizen.
But in the end we need to defeat the HR Administrators too. We need to address the positions of status and power they are being granted within our society.
I don't understand your point Professor; the right shouldn't use Alinsky's rules for radicals? She's the visible face of the DEI rot at Stanford for this incident.
According to Rules for Radicals, we should single-out Steinbach. One can argue about fairness here, though Alinsky didn't seem to care about that.
The bottom line, is that the establishment has installed DEI everywhere they can, we conservatives are the radicals now and we need to make DEI leadership positions toxic.
The Free Beacon has more on the student protest against the Stanford Law Dean. The Dean also teaches constitutional law.
The Dean walked into her class and the White board was nearly covered with signs.
“Where’s his apology?”
“Counter-speech is Free Speech.”
“We, the students of your constitutional law class, are sorry for exercising our constitutional rights.”
If the Dean was smart, the final exam would have one First Amendment essay question. These kids would obviously fail it as they don’t know the law. They all get F’s.
If it’s not ok to “focus” on the DEI Dean (who after all was just “doing her job”, would it be ok, in your view Ms. Althouse, to do away completely with the DEI organization, including the DEI Dean? Or would Stanford be obligated to finding her a sinecure for “doing her job”?
No conformity tokenism and patronage is nothing of the kind its another tool to destroy this country same as with critical race theory
Judge duncan would not bend the knee to a child predator the process is the punishment the target is irrelevant
Didn't the dean realize that maybe what she was doing (or about to do) was not exactly the right thing to do? If she was indeed acting at the behest of senior management, she could have packed her bags and said, "I'm not doing this, it's not right." So, she made a choice for whatever reason, even though there was a way out for a principled person.
Ms Althouse, I agree with you in principle---that focusing on the DEI Dean is somewhat problematic. She was hired to advance certain goals. However, IMO it's not defensible to claim that part of the Dean's role was to dress down an invited speaker, especially because Stanford's explicit policy is to bar a Heckler's Veto.
The Dean could have dealt with the student's concerns in many other ways, such as inviting them all to have a discussion about their concerns before or after the Judge's talk. Insulting an invited speaker while he stands there as a featured Dancing Bear is beyond any reasonable definition of a DEI administrator's duties.
Here's how Saul Alinsky explained his "Pick the target" approach in "Rules for Radicals"
The tell of course is how these stunts focus our minds on Alinsky or Powell’s Cookbook instead of Robert’s Rules or Oxford debate or just plain human fucking decency…
"The enemies of that culture have clamped their jaws around one part of it, and you're delusional if you think it's only about an isolatable associate dean."
No one thinks that.
Now do Judge Duncan--use the same analysis. Look at the signs carried by the protesters. They seem to be psychotic. It appears from David Lat's reporting that most of them are first year students. The admissions office has achieved something. Maybe the students will burn the place down!
This wasn't really that different from the scenes at Evergreen State. Remember that? It was in 2017, before the death of St. George Floyd. These Stanford students really wanted Judge Duncan to play the role of the hapless George Bridges, the soft college president who was humiliated at a struggle session right out of the Great Cultural Revolution.
I don't disagree with Althouse's analysis, but I think she is sugar-coating it. Steinbach isn't the target. Judge Duncan is. There will be others in the future.
Any word on who leaked the draft of the Dobbs opinion? No? I think it was a woke law clerk who, as Billy Ayres put it about himself, is "Guilty as hell, free as a bird."
As they used to say in the '60s when they were setting something on fire, peace and love, baby.
"you're delusional if you think it's only about an isolatable associate dean."
Absolutely true. DEI administrators are part of a cultural trend that includes diversity training in corporations and government agencies. It also is part of the same mind-set that gives us cancel culture. Singling out Steinbach lets the college weasel out of admitting that she was the wrong person to address this particular incident. If they fire her, they'll replace her with someone whose job description is exactly the same as Steinbach's.
Looks like going to school prepares people to become reality show stars/influencers.
The trick is to make Steinbach’s life so miserable that no one ever takes the position again except explicitly to dismantle DEI at Stanford.
About 100 protesters at the University of California, Davis, surrounded a venue T
he protesters, who were mostly wearing black, clashed with law enforcement officers and other students, including attendees of the event, as they smashed windows, hurled eggs, used pepper spray and blocked people from entering
According to the left; protests (up to and including Murder) against the right, are GOOD!
and, according to Our Professor.. What they did was just fine.. Right Professor?
I mean, his views "explain" their hostility
Exactly weinstein was that evergreen college kristakis(sic) at yale, any one who stands up to the mob is the target.
Of course she, alone, is not the problem. That seems obvious. Maybe it wasn't. But in that room, she was the face of DEI/Woke, Inc. It is her entire reason for being employed. She oversees it, feeds it, promotes it, and defends it.
Of course, the state of our law schools is in peril. They're a part of the overall universities, whose direction and status is in peril. And, Jacobson is correct that the DEI Dean is not, by herself the issue. As you can see here, Stanford's been working on 'crazy' for some time.
“Critical Race Theory teaches us always to suspect that these efforts are a con.”
Suspect? OK. But what is the decision process by which one is to finally determine whether or not “it” is a con? Is there one? To what key elements or factors is one to look reliably to decide if one is merry bring conned? Or under CRT are we supposed to live forever in our suspicions, ever worried we’re being conned in perpetuity by everyone. That seems to me to be a recipe for depression and loneliness.
Saying that Steinbach should not be “targeted” since she was “doing her job” is a bit like saying that the ones operating the showers at concentration camps or guards at the camps in China today should not be targeted because they are just “part of the system and doing the job they were hired for”. Going after DEI would require Steinbach and everyone who was responsible for hiring her and establishing the Dept to be fired. Maybe that’s more for the trustees or State Legislature to handle by cutting off the funding - that’s the way you “fix” it.
But back to Steinbach. She emailed the mob before the event. She had a prepared “speech” to whip up her trained seal chorus and she directly insulted the judge. If intent means anything - her juice needs to be squeezed out for good.
DEI may be the cancer - but the necrotic tissue needs to go too.
Totally agree. The Camp Commandants and SS guards running Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other extermination mega factories so efficiently were not the problem. It was the Jews that made European people hate them. We can’t blame people hired to be evil.
Hmmm? Maybe we should shoot them on sight.
Fire the DIE/IED dean and Stanford's president for hiring her, or is it a "him" because I'm sure she wants to identify as a man so she can raise the trans-flag. It's a start.
I would bet that all of these neobarbarian students were raised in homes that did not punish them for acting out or sassing their parents. "Enlightened" parents would never paddle their little darlings nor wash their mouths out with soap for misbehaving.
The little darlings would learn that they can do anything they want without consequences. Their outrage over someone with a different opinion is just a manifest of their upbringing. The best response to their poor little hurt feelings is a paddling to their fundaments and a night in jail. Pain is the best teacher.
Decades ago in my college ethics seminar we explored the differences in how crisis is managed between the Americans and Soviets. The Yanks tend to blame systemic reasons - that it was good, well intentioned people who made bad choices due to poor information or misaligned incentives. The Commies tended to fix blame on a person(s) - the system is good, the player(s) are bad people.
When you watch HBO's Chernobyl this tension comes thru.
""Just doing her job" has been soundly rejected as a defense since at least the Nuremburg trials."
What a bad analogy. The Nuremburg trials took place after the Nazi leadership was defeated. If the leadership were still in power, would you isolate the lower-downs in the system and let the leadership get away by issuing an apology for what the lower-downs did?
You are missing THE point. At least show that you understand what I'm saying.
"She should be fired for not doing her job--promoting DEI--properly. How does shouting down and mau-mauing invited speakers promote diversity, equity and inclusion?"
Come on. Get the facts right or your opinion is irrelevant. Steinbach did not shout anyone down. She talked to everyone in the room and cleared the space for the judge to give his speech. She talked about ideas and invited debate on how to balance the competing free-speech interests at stake. If you want someone fired, you'd better demonstrate that you know what she did and explain why that was wrong in the context of an institution that hired her to stand in the crossroads of competing interests.
"Suspect? OK. But what is the decision process by which one is to finally determine whether or not “it” is a con? Is there one? To what key elements or factors is one to look reliably to decide if one is merry bring conned? Or under CRT are we supposed to live forever in our suspicions, ever worried we’re being conned in perpetuity by everyone. That seems to me to be a recipe for depression and loneliness."
2 posts up: "As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, in conversation “there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought.” What matters, he continued, is the “flow of speculation.”..."
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/03/paula-marantz-cohen-is-self-professed.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oakeshott
Rubbish. The DEI stooge wasn't doing her job "properly." And this is war. Were the positions reversed, the target would've been fired. The DEI stooge clearly can't do ANY job properly. Fire her and let's move on to the next battle in this war.
CRT as taught in schools says Blacks are always victims and can never succeed. Last time I checked, Ibrahim Kendri is still Black and he is making big bucks on his CRT books and lectures. His very existence overturns his racist teachings. Or maybe, he now identifies as White so can continue to make grift on his thesis.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
A journey begins with the first step.
Put a shoeshine on it, and call it the elimination of the position, and have the DEI group report to another Dean who has a broader perspective (unless you just want to go straight to eliminating the entire group).
But methinks some law or ABA accreditation might slow or prevent at least some of that.
Critical Racists' Theory (CRT) presumes diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry). The students created an opportunity, Steinbach led the protest with a speech to a captive audience. Yes, she represents the tip of systemic diversity (e.g. racism, sexism, ageism), but this is how class-disordered ideologies (e.g. wicked solution, political congruence, witch hunts, warlock trials, cancel culture) was birthed and progressed.
Dave Begley said...
"Modern liberals just can’t even comprehend that there is another side of the story."
Worse than that - they don't believe another side of the story should be allowed to exist. The students should be (but are not) frustrated that they haven't been given the intellectual tools to make a counter-argument to these ideas that shouldn't exist. All they know is to shout and scream and stamp their feet - they haven't been taught that anything else is necessary. It doesn't seem that the law professors or the HR department see this as a problem.
So the HR Dean got the kiddies to quiet down by lecturing the invited guest on how wrong he is, and the law professor celebrates this as an achievement of some sort.
You and Jacobson both have a strong premise. Correct even in a big picture way. However we dissenters have another POV. DEI is so horrible a bait and switch on the American goal of 100% equality of opportunity and equal treatment before the law. Quite reluctantly, and continually demagogued for opposing it, we allowed a push for diversity, some affirmative action if you recall. We have diversity. There is no lack of diversity at all in jobs or schooling in America.
But like rust the Left never sleeps. They want to replace diversity with DEI which is the opposite of treating people equally and fairly. And like people who would agitate for the return of chattel slavery those DEI advocates should be shunned like nazis and pushed out of any organization. Just like communists and nazis are two fingers on the same left hand DEI is a third finger raised to white males and bizarrely any minority who acts “too white” according to DEI orthodoxy. The dean is pushing nazism so the dean needs to go. We don’t accept “I was just following orders” in such cases.
I find the claim that Steinbach should not be criticized because she was just doing the job for which she was hired very strange. DEI is an ideology alien to American democracy as enunciated in the Constitution. Someone who takes on this job is a willing accomplice in the suppression of free speech. I thought we had moved beyond absolving people of crimes just because they were following orders (or in this case, carrying out their job description).
I find the claim that Steinbach should not be criticized because she was just doing the job for which she was hired very strange. DEI is an ideology alien to American democracy as enunciated in the Constitution. Someone who takes on this job is a willing accomplice in the suppression of free speech. I thought we had moved beyond absolving people of crimes just because they were following orders (or in this case, carrying out their job description).
""Just doing her job" has been soundly rejected as a defense since at least the Nuremburg trials."
What a bad analogy. The Nuremburg trials took place after the Nazi leadership was defeated. If the leadership were still in power, would you isolate the lower-downs in the system and let the leadership get away by issuing an apology for what the lower-downs did?
When Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland we didn't send him back to Germany so he could continue his work. When German soldiers were captured on the battlefield they were imprisoned, not set free. Punishing the lower-downs did not prevent us from eventually punishing the NAZI leadership.
You're acting like Joseph Kennedy.
She certainly did do what she was hired to do. Give explicit approval to the struggle session. The professor's dodge is pathetic. The content of the "discussion" once Dean Steinbach did such a commendable job of protecting Judge Duncan's right to speak was vulgat sexual insults and general struggle sessioning from the students. One can only imagine how the professor would have responded to being treated like that, after requesting those in positions of authority end her being verbally abused and shouted down. No doubt her defense of Dean Steinbach would be not one iota less robust.
Come on. Get the facts right or your opinion is irrelevant. Steinbach did not shout anyone down. She talked to everyone in the room and cleared the space for the judge to give his speech.
Steinbeck organized and encouraged the students to shout down the speaker (she certainly never told them not to, despite repeated opportunities to do so) and then hi jacked the speech to give her own (at least semi) prepared remarks attacking the speaker and endorsing the bad behavior of the students.
I suppose Charles Manson was innocent because he never actually stabbed anybody.
She should not be targeted by the people who are using her as the face of their DEI culture. They should explain and defend their culture... or refine and improve it.
BUT. Isn't that the larger issue???
Exactly how is the Judge supposed to address DEI, when the mob only seeks to silence, a single countering voice? The students initiated the 'target and isolate' tactic. The Dean validated the students actions.
The left is in the impossible position of justifying minimizing some race/'s in order to privilege a preferred race. But we are not allowed to debate the nuts and bolts of DIE. Any attempt gets you labeled a racist. Any written opinion is censored. Individuals are fired, or their services dropped. Opposing view points are thus given notice, that indeed, "the juice, is not worth the squeeze"
DEI has no intention of "defending" their culture. You can't defend the indefeasible.
DEI was not created by debate and open discussion. It is the invention of a very small percentage of academia elite. Which stems from the past decades of indoctrinating students rather than educating them. Those indoctrinated ONLY know what they have been told.
Dei is malware it serves no useful purpose
No one thinks it's "only" about an "isolatable" dean.
Althouse still digging.
Should we go after Steinbach? Or after the DEI cult which she serves and represents?
False choice there. Embrace the healing power of “and.”
My impression that Stanford Law needs a complete do-over —from the Board of Trustees on down to the janitorial staff— has only been strengthened by the seriously good Stasi imitation of the student body at and after Dean Martinez’s Con Law class on Monday. These children have entirely too much free time and entirely too little self-control. They didn’t get that way yesterday, and they didn’t do it without a lot of help, much of it embedded in the very fabric of the school. Best to send them all away and start over after a decent interval: maybe a quarter-century of quiescence.
By the way, Alinsky depended on the good manners and desire for peace of the middle class to achieve his ends. He thought he could shock the middle class into compliance with his goals.
I believe our host is imploring us to deny the Stanford culture the cheap solution of satisfying the pack of conservative prolespeak by throwing Steinbach to the wolves and then continuing as if nothing at all happened. Like Mongo, she's just a pawn in this. It's the whole damn culture of Stanford Law that made this happen. One victim won't make an ounce of difference, plus she'll get a raise and more power in her next position, because she'll be a martyr/hero to the cause of justice by then.
Think. Through. This.
The solution won't be found in a quick dismissal that makes us feel good for five minutes.
Besides, we should remember that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
But what is the decision process by which one is to finally determine whether or not “it” is a con? Is there one? To what key elements or factors is one to look reliably to decide if one is [merely being] conned? Or under CRT are we supposed to live forever in our suspicions, ever worried we’re being conned in perpetuity by everyone[?]
It's unfalsifiable. That seems to be a primary feature of Critical Theory in all its incarnations, and that's what I was talking about in the last Stanford post - the biggest issue for me is whether truth matters. Free speech is still taking place, if pretty beleaguered on the right, but do we implicitly accept the premise that the victim/harm/vulnerability message of DEI is true? To say nothing of beneficial?
I agree with our host to this extent: firing this DEI functionary would allow Stanford to "move on" with its commitment to the untruths of DEI unchallenged. If we say, "Fire her, she wasn't doing her job right," are we just giving legitimacy to what her job is supposed to be?
But what's the alternative?
My first thought was to treat her as if she had been sent there strictly to uphold compliance with Stanford's policies. But that also legitimizes the very idea of having a DEI dean.
I'll say this about this topic, exhausting as it's getting: it's made me think.
that Steinbach, as the DEI dean, was doing what the law school hired her to do. She should not be targeted by the people who are using her as the face of their DEI culture.
"what the law school hired her to do"
Isn't the true reason for the position? Take the flak, so the Top Administrator, never gets dirty hands?
Isn't that the real cause of the explosion of college administrators?
As several up thread have mentioned. CEO's and COO's, have hid behind HR depts. Taking all the heat off them, and giving them functionaries, to blame. HR staff are not stupid, so they have created dozens of metrics to prove their worth, all the while the work force as a whole declines...no one has any responsibility. Or there are so many, none can be held responsible.
Steinbach did not shout anyone down. She talked to everyone in the room and cleared the space for the judge to give his speech. She talked about ideas and invited debate on how to balance the competing free-speech interests at stake.
If she had unequivocally reprimanded the students for violating the university code of conduct and if she had simply invited debate on the tension between free speech and their opposing views, then I would agree with your support of her. You seem completely blinded to the fact that she never did the first part and while doing the “inviting debate” part she actually initiated the debate (at an inappropriate time and place) AND participated in the side of the debate that is in opposition to freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity.
And previous commenters have beat me to it, but you are making a strawman argument about our desire to isolate Steinbach. I’d venture to say that virtually no one here thinks she is an isolated problem or that firing her would be a solution (other than possibly as a first step.) Much of the discussion here has focused on her only because of your framing, by defending her.
Steinbach's culpability is predicated on whether the arranged the incident. If she set up Judge Duncan, then she want too far in her role and should take the blame. If she was simply responding to the student's and used that event as a teachable moment, then maybe she simply overstepped and should be made aware that she gave her boss a black eye. If you believe that dressing down a guest (even if briefly) and validating the students' concerns without sufficient reprimand was within her defined role, then she should be backed up strongly by the administrators. The administrators appear to settle on the middle road here while we are debating whether 1 or 3 are more likely. If you land in camp 1, you think Steinbach should be removed, camp 3, she should be retained. Granted there are those who want her gone regardless, but many here land strongly in camp 1, so they are not missing the point, per se.
Sorry for all the mixed metaphors. Sneaking a little blog time while at work prevents me from making my point more coherently.
Ann Althouse said:
"Come on. Get the facts right or your opinion is irrelevant. Steinbach did not shout anyone down. She talked to everyone in the room and cleared the space for the judge to give his speech. She talked about ideas and invited debate on how to balance the competing free-speech interests at stake. If you want someone fired, you'd better demonstrate that you know what she did and explain why that was wrong in the context of an institution that hired her to stand in the crossroads of competing interests."
Come on yourself. I could respect your position if you would admit Steinbach did not need to "talk about ideas and invite debate" in this setting as a condition precedent to Duncan continuing his speech. Erroneously or with intent, she infringed on the time that was allocated to the judge for his *invited* talk. Her ONLY task in response to the students' disruption was remove the disruption caused by them. The fact is that Steinbech could have had her "talk about ideas and invite debate" with the malcontents before or after the judge's speech, but in another venue that would have avoided the disruption that was generated by them. It goes without saying that doing so also would have avoided her condescending remarks to Duncan *before* she deemed it the appropriate time to "clear the way" for Duncan to speak (as if he needed her permission in the first place).
Pretzel logic is not a good look. Neither is selective recitation of the facts.
What a bad analogy. The Nuremburg trials took place after the Nazi leadership was defeated. If the leadership were still in power, would you isolate the lower-downs in the system and let the leadership get away by issuing an apology for what the lower-downs did?
But why do you insist that anyone here thinks the leadership at Stanford should be let off the hook by throwing Steinbach under the bus? Unless I missed it, no one has argued that.
I think it's fair to say that most commenters here are not attacking Steinbach, but rather are attacking her position. I think that's fair game, and different from the Alinsky principles, which are to 'personalize it', i.e. attack the individual's ego.
Further, I disagree that she 'cleared the space' for the lecture. I think she poisoned the atmosphere, salted the ground. That is different, certainly a different motivation and goals.
Ultimately the community of judges will decide the fate of the law school by refusing to hire their graduates for clerking, because they are Unqualified, in addition to having evidenced behavioral problems as a group. Too bad for the conscientious students that are in the bunch. Maybe they ought to pipe up once in a while.
What is truly astonishing is the lack of perception on the part of the faculty, to let this eventuality happen. The students have clearly violated the student Code of Behavior and should be publicly named and shamed, if only for the future record and to facilitate identification during the employment process.
Should we go after Steinbach? Or after the DEI cult which she serves and represents?
False choice there. Embrace the healing power of “and.”
What’s hilarious is that this is apparently Steinbach’s motto- in the email she sent out before this event she talked about the collection of ampersands in her office and that they represent this idea of embracing “and” instead of “or”.
As a retired lawyer, I find the level of disrespect for a federal circuit judge that was displayed at Stanford to be truly appalling. What are they teaching these kids? To refuse to rise when the judge enters the courtroom if they don't like the judge? To tell a judge to f-off if he or she says something they disagree with? If these attitudes about our judicial system prevail, the system will break down. As a dean at Stanford, Steinbach should know something about the need for judicial respect. Obviously she does not. She had a teaching moment and blew it. She gets an f.
What if they don't support the target? The law school dean has apologized for Steinbach. Steinbach's attackers doubled down and demanded that she be fired. This non-firing is a bit of support, somewhat visible. Students are protesting the apology — as well they should! — and perhaps it will be taken back. So the tactic of going after Steinbach could be effective in getting at the larger DEI culture.
Anyway, I've been saying all along — click my "Tirien Steinbach" tag — that Steinbach, as the DEI dean, was doing what the law school hired her to do.
1: Concentration camp guards only did what the Nazis hired them to do. We still punish them
2: See bolded part. You keep on saying you're not defending the students, and then you denied their defenders. Sorry, that is defending the students, and defending their actions
No, the students should NOT be objecting to the apology. They should recognize that DEI is destroying their ability to be functional lawyers.
Only a power obsessed thug whose goal in life is to bully and harass, not to actually be a lawyer, should defend DEI
3: If they fire Steinbach, then the next action is to demand that the next DEI hire publicly commit to freedom of speech, freedom of academic inquiry, and to publicly condemn the assault on Judge Duncan and the people who wanted to listen to him.
The pit bull has salvaged your child. Do you say "gee, that's just what pit bulls do!" and leave it around your child so it can bite again?
Because that's what you are arguing for
Dean Steinbach has demonstrated she is an evil monster. Fire her
You, and Jacobson, are wrong
Isn't the true reason for the position? Take the flak, so the Top Administrator, never gets dirty hands?
Isn't that the real cause of the explosion of college administrators?
As several up thread have mentioned. CEO's and COO's, have hid behind HR depts. Taking all the heat off them, and giving them functionaries, to blame. HR staff are not stupid, so they have created dozens of metrics to prove their worth, all the while the work force as a whole declines...no one has any responsibility. Or there are so many, none can be held responsible.
I *think* this is Althouse’s main point. I don’t disagree but also don’t see any coherent alternative strategy. It’s also not at all clear that Althouse thinks that DEI theory itself is the problem, as it seems more like she’s arguing that they just aren’t doing it right.
Nuanced support…
Burn the witch!
I think Ann is still missing the point. The School's "apology" amounts to empty words unless Stanford takes steps to prevent such a thing from happening again, and if they have I haven't heard about it. Steinbach may have diffused the immediate situation, but what of the medium-term, indirect, and not immediately visible consequences of her approach? See Henry Hazlitt: Economics in One Lesson.
From a few accounts of the event, the DEI Dean possibly fomented and then actively participated in the lengthy disruption of the guest speaker lecture. That is a clear violation of the Stanford Code of Conduct. That is why she should be fired.
If she had reminded the students of the Code of Conduct and expressed that there would be repercussions for violations, she would have done her job. She could have offered discussion time outside the time of the Judge’s speech. Those are the actions that would have been expected of a law school Dean.
Ann Althouse said:
"Come on. Get the facts right or your opinion is irrelevant. Steinbach did not shout anyone down.
She didn't have to shout anyone down, she arranged for her Bronwshirts to do it for her.
The prepared notes show that she conspired with the students about this assault on free speech
If you engage in a conspiracy where person A rapes a woman and steals her clothes, so that person B can just happen to come along with extra clothes in order to "befriend" the woman, person B is an accessory before the fact to that rape, and just as guilty, if not more, than person A
She talked to everyone in the room and cleared the space for the judge to give his speech.
No she didn't. That is a flat out lie. Please stop lying about this
https://davidlat.substack.com/p/yale-law-is-no-longer-1for-free-speech
I quote: As you can see from the video, about half of the protestors eventually left at the direction of a student protest leader, with one of them charmingly calling the judge “scum” as she walked out. Yet the heckling continued, and still the administrators did nothing to intervene.
She talked about ideas and invited debate on how to balance the competing free-speech interests at stake.
No, she didn't
There is NO "free speech interest" in or her brownshirt thugs silencing other people's speech
None
Any more than you have a "bodily integrity interest" in being able to swing your fingers to the point where you poke my eyes out
"If you want someone fired, you'd better demonstrate that you know what she did and explain why that was wrong in the context of an institution that hired her to stand in the crossroads of competing interests."
Only one of the "competing interests" is valid
"Free speech" is a valid interest
"I don't want anyone I disagree with to be able to speak to people who want to listen to him" is not a valid interest.
What you're fundamentally saying is that we shouldn't punish a rapist, because he claims that he's just protecting the fundamental interest of "free sex". We should just have a talk about whether or not rape is really wrong, and the fact that there are many people who enjoy raping women means it's a legitimate position to take.
Stanford has rules, rules that Steinbach and her Brownshirts violated.
Steinbach should be fired
Any new hire for her position must o forced to publicly condemn that assault on the free speech of Judge Duncan and the FedSco students
Every student who took part in the heckling should be punished, and Stanford should announce that, going forward, they will immeditately expel anyone who does that heckling of an invited speaker, ever again
And then Stanford should enforce that
And you should read David Lat's summary of the situation, because
1: You clearly have no clue what actually happened
2: He shows a far more principled left wing position than what you are taking
Of course, being an actually principled position, he condemns the hecklers
There wasn't much "picking" involved. Steinbach made herself a target all on her own. She, or another administrator might have tried to handle the situation differently so that she wouldn't be.
Yes, the problem is the broader culture. As I said, Stanford ought to apologize for being what it's become. Her head rolling would be part of that. Law schools are responsible for much of today's "lawfare" and cancel culture. Why should they be exempt from taking the consequences for their own actions?
But no worries.
Tirien is a lifetime East Bay Area resident who loves cooking, crafting and hanging out with her family, and she will always cherish the memory of the night she got to dance on stage with Prince.
More time to hang out with her family.
And she'll always have that special night with Prince.
"The School's "apology" amounts to empty words..."
Restorative Justice. Or, in other words: No punishment, you get away with it.
So much hate toward DEI/Woke culture, which is misrepresented/demonized terribly by the right. Didn’t Althouse say to explain and defend your culture? How is the regressive culture better? Do you think that half of the US will embrace the regressive culture? More regressive laws that go back to 1849 are better? The more the right freaks out over DEI the more the left will reject the culture the right is pushing.
“They should explain and defend their culture... or refine and improve it.”
Aggie @ 9:27: “…Too bad for the conscientious students that are in the bunch. Maybe they ought to pipe up once in a while.”
Exactly. If I had been there, carrying that burden of work and debt to gain vital training in my chosen profession, I would be *furious* at these spoiled brats for making my life much harder and that credential much less useful. Their tantrums are taking money out of my pocket, credibility out of my degree, honor out of my school. And for what? A “cause” they can’t even define in plain English, nor defend with plain logic. No: their best (and only) course of action is pure hysterical smash-mouth tactics: “Shut up, they explained.”
The blowback ought to be huge. *Ought* to be. But will it be?
Meanwhile, the students who act like 2 year olds having tantrums will see that they can do whatever they want with NO consequences. Rude, selfish and Progressively REGRESSIVE. You get what you put up with.
It's very difficult to believe the professor thinks that it was appropriate at that moment, to lecture the speaker on his views. At that moment, it was appropriate only to lecture the protestors on freedom of speech, and ask their civility in allowing the speaker to express himself freely.
As someone else posted, "Time and place..."
What's happening at Stanford is best understood as a dialectical struggle, with free speech as the original thesis and DEI as its antithesis. The law school, and the university as a whole, have been forced into this dialectic by the appalling behavior of a bunch of semi-educated (they're 1L's, after all) brats who insist on arrogating to themselves all moral and ethical judgments at SLS.
Either Assistant Dean Steinbach is able to adapt her behavior and outlook to the eventual synthesis, or she must be sacked. Her firing would not be an end in itself, but an inevitable part of the forces of history.
The rights of a minority of students were trampled upon by the majority. The Fed Soc students invited a speaker, and he was shouted down. The DEI Dean insulted the speaker and then talked about balancing the emotional reaction of the majority to the right of the speaker to express a minority opinion. If this were any other minority, we would agree that the infringement was outrageous and see the DEI Dean's open siding with the majority and conditioning of minority rights as outrageous as well.
Imagine such a scene if it involved high-caste Indian students shouting down a Dalit activist at Stanford, for example, only to have a Brahmin Dean come in to ask the Dalit speaker if the "juice was worth the squeeze."
This wouldn't happen, of course, and most high-caste students would be mortified if it did.
Not so with liberal Stanford lawyerlings.
I don't care, in a propaganda sense, whether the DEI Dean is fired or not. I am concerned that the traditions that underlie our liberties are being traduced. There were always reasons that we have said "It can't happen here," but those reasons are being compromised rather systematically.
It's not an "either or" situation. She should be fired and the law school should be vilified.
Hoping for reform of our lefty law schools is futile.
mezzrow says “ The solution won't be found in a quick dismissal that makes us feel good for five minutes.”
A quick dismissal would send a message to all the other administrators: see what she did. Don’t do that.
A quick dismissal would start the process of changing the culture. But let’s be serious - it’s impossible to dismiss anyone who works for the government. And all the administrators know that.
You grab one straw over and over. As many have noted, we support punishment for everyone involved in this Maoist DEI cabal.
I also think that anyone like you, who received the special privilege ( not right, privilege -- of free speech selectively reserved for your class, has no understanding of the suffering caused to everyone under you by these fascists, as you were specially protected from it, so long as you didn't actually use it).
That's not defending free speech: that's denying it to others who must rely on a social contract of civility instead, unless they get out of line, and then they are destroyed.
And what did you do during the revolution? At least be intellectually honest enough to admit that we in fact are recommending an overall investigation. You are welcome to your opinion but not to so unintellectually misrepresent what we are saying.
Show me one place I didn't say the entire DEI food chain -- up to the presidents of the law school and university, should not face consequences too. You've beaten this little point to death five times already.
The resident dullard speaks out:
Blogger Inga said...
So much hate toward DEI/Woke culture, which is misrepresented/demonized terribly by the right.
As long as I don't have my money invested or on deposit in one of these crazy "Woke" companies. SVB donated $74 million to Black Lives Matter, then went bankrupt. But it's OK because they were all big Democrat donors so they will be bailed out with our money.It would be OK if you crazies paid for all this damage but you won't.
"'She should be fired for not doing her job--promoting DEI--properly. How does shouting down and mau-mauing invited speakers promote diversity, equity and inclusion?'
Come on. Get the facts right or your opinion is irrelevant. Steinbach did not shout anyone down. She talked to everyone in the room and cleared the space for the judge to give his speech. She talked about ideas and invited debate on how to balance the competing free-speech interests at stake. If you want someone fired, you'd better demonstrate that you know what she did and explain why that was wrong in the context of an institution that hired her to stand in the crossroads of competing interests."
You really, really want me to accept your own willingly obtuse interpretation of what happened here. I don't.
The shouting down and mau-mauing are what Steinbach explicitly praised and encouraged in her invitation to "debate". At the clear expense of the invited speaker and those who invited him to speak. She deliberately poisoned the forum, delayed and essentially "ran out the clock" for the presentation, and allowed and encouraged the boorish behavior of a childish mob. She substituted her own lecture for the judge's presentation. The "competing interest" which you are apparently championing is the interest of mob rule.
You seem to have completely lost all perspective on this.
I find more than coincidental the congruence of thought regarding the supposed "targeting" of the DEI dean as expressed by both Jacobsen, an ostensible conservative, and Ms. Althouse, an avowed cruel neutralist. Perhaps the common rationale for such similarity is that both are long-time academics, whose view of such events are at such a divergence from those in the non-academic world (including the professional legal world). The phrase, "Ivory Tower" is more than a stereotype.
Ann, would you care to comment on the Alinskyite attack on the Law School president subjected to defacement of her classroom and dozens of DEI students -- if they even were students -- in ANTIFA gear invading her classroom and rendering it an actually not safe space for educating, because she merely apologized to the guest speaker?
As a woman, what do you think she feels if she must be late at night in the parking deck trying to get to her car? Do you think she isn't using security guards at this point? Why aren't you even curious about this? Why don't you ask any questions about the behavior of those perpetrating the continued action? Do you literally believe that shouting personal and career-threatening racial slurs and making false accusation of the speaker's "danger" to them is debate?
Answer some other question.
I'm going to proffer a bet: the DEI fascists will resort to even more vandalism and move on to violence while you're still myopically busy misrepresenting our words on this site to press your only strawman response to our arguments.
Why?
I give the professor credit for tolerating vehement and frequently insulting, dissents of view on her post. But, would that she would allow that she has been out argued on the key point, i.e., the behavior of the DEI dean during the speakers address. Has this ever happened on her blog. Ever?
Althouse say to explain and defend your culture?
Check out Inga white-knighting like little Chuckie does! Impressive.
My comments above DO defend "our culture," which is the uniquely American brand of "equal under the law" and I explicitly reject the nazi* ideology inherent in DEI/Woke bullshit. It's your side that wants to 100% discriminate on the basis of race/sex/age/skin color now. Doesn't that give you any pause, Inga?
*Feel free to reread Animal Farm if you don't understand "two legs bad, four legs good," since that is what you are advocating for.
When you're standing all alone and your former supporters have deserted you and you are certain that you are correct and everyone else is wrong and uninformed and refusing to see the goodness and righteousness in you and your position and you're beginning to question the sanity and integrity of the others then there may be only one thing left to do - Road Trip!
"It's so much easier to target one person."
One person at a time, you mean.
The Flak Catchers are doing all of the mao-maoing these days. Funny how times change.
Everybody involved in that needs their asses kicked. It is literally the only thing that will get their attention. Cause it does. Every time.
As I understand the matter, about a third of the students at Stanford Law School dropped whatever they were doing to participate in an organized public hate ritual directed at Dean Martinez. I am open to suggestions about how this situation might be addressed. There is historical precedent for "Let not one stone stand upon another. Plow the earth it stands upon with salt". And there's a moral argument for "Wall them in and give them weapons. But no food". I personally favor "Blast off and nuke it from orbit". It is, after all, the only way to be sure.
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/03/15/auto-draft-100-n537130
Some of the kids headed over to UC Davis and you’ll never believe what happened next!
"Ironically, Critical Theory teaches us always to suspect that these efforts are a con."
The whole point of Critical Theory is that any non-violent human interaction is necessarily a con. "The human is the only predator that is able to remain upon good terms with its prey until it is ready to feed upon it".
Blogger Not Sure said...
What's happening at Stanford is best understood as a dialectical struggle, with free speech as the original thesis and DEI as its antithesis.
This is well said.
Althouse describes Steinbach’s words as “inviting debate.” In a different setting that’s fine, although I can’t conceive of any arguments that would convince me that DEI ideology and the freedom of speech are compatible. Her approach, from what she said during this event, reminds me of Solomon suggesting that the baby should be split.
From Dean Steinbach’s Stanford bio:
“Tirien is a lifetime East Bay Area resident who loves cooking, crafting and hanging out with her family, and she will always cherish the memory of the night she got to dance on stage with Prince.“
You can’t take that away from her. Can’t you see that she won? She owned Judge Duncan pretty bad, worse than any lib has ever been owned by any conservative. Even if you get her fired, she will still be the winner. And by demanding that she be fired, you and the Circuit Judge have ceded the high ground to Tirien Steinbach.
What kind of a first name is Tirien? It’s so Game-of-Thronesy badass.
Steinbach was just following orders, it seems. A tried and true Nazi excuse.
How times have changed. A Dean condemning a man whose decisions have caused them "harm" is now fully supported by Ms Althouse. When the protesters in Madison were protesting the harm you did by photographing them and accurately reporting what you witnessed, you complained when one of the people you "harmed" stole your camera. According to your new principles, you had no right to be there because of the "harm" you were doing to the lefty crowd.
Will you now apologize for your past reprehensible actions that case aspersions upon the righteous, highly moral, protesters you caused harm to?
I believe your support for the Dean is a knew jerk reaction to seeing a fellow feminist getting her butt dragged through the fire. Just my opinion.
More regressive laws that go back to 1849 are better? The more the right freaks out over DEI the more the left will reject the culture the right is pushing.
What are you talking about? "Laws that go back to 1849" - I'm assuming you mean anti-sodomy, anti-miscegenation, anti-woman suffrage, pro-slavery, like that? Rather than, for instance, some copyright law from 1849 or something? So that's a ridiculous strawman, for starters.
This statement appears to make DEI, the DEI we actually have and experience rather than the pearly vision of DEI you'd apparently like us to believe in based on the beginning of your comment, based on critical theory and steeped in victimhood rhetoric while operating from a position of power, a foregone conclusion. It makes that DEI the default condition. And it makes the reaction from those who don't embrace that DEI the problem.
It's like a fundamentalist using the King James book of Genesis as a evidentiary argument against an evolutionist. When your interlocutor doesn't accept your terms or starting point, you're not debating, you're just putting your hands over your ears and going "lalala."
Sure, we all do that sometimes, but - even though you're welcome to believe what you believe even if everyone in sight thinks it's foolish - it's not going to change any minds, if that's what you're after. If, instead, you're just trying to make everyone feel bad about themselves because they have misjudged the real mission of DEI and now find themselves on the 1849 side of history - well, you're not going to succeed by arguing from premises you can't defend.
Demonstrate how DEI improves society in any way and you'll have a decent starting point.
“They should explain and defend their culture... or refine and improve it.”
Among other things, my culture is against shouting down people who have opinions I disagree with. My culture opposes Moaist struggle sessions and attempts to destroy the past in order to bring about a year zero. My culture is for letting kids grow up without mutilating them using steroids and surgery. My culture is for not burning down cities and against allowing violent criminals to run free, terrorizing the citizenry.
The Left wants me to say, "2 + 2 = 5" and "Men can have babies."
Ann quoting "2 posts up: "As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, in conversation “there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought.” What matters, he continued, is the “flow of speculation.”..."
Ann, that strikes me as lofty nonsense. What matters is the not the flow of speculation. What matters is the motive of the speakers - why they are saying what they are saying. Why they are opening their mouths at all, and saying the words that they say.
In a narrower context: surely when a witness is in the stand, we're not looking for endless speculation. There is a truth to be discovered, otherwise why call the witness and put her in the stand. You wouldn't put a witness in the stand and ask her to say nothing. They are there, and have the capability, to say what they have experienced.
I may not be able to judge the motive of a person speaking to me, but I have found that I can judge enmity when it comes at me, and I can judge coercion - coercive words - too.
Our problem in society today has nothing to do with an excess of certitude. I would hope that we can all be more certain about truth. Our problem is that we start the day - we start the conversation - by choice, with enmity for the person to whom we are speaking. We start - a priori - with opposition and hatred - a chosen opposition and hatred. Everything thereafter becomes a struggle between persons for dominance. There can be no agreement or unity or changing of minds, because to do so suggests that one was wrong before, and our endless struggle causes us to refuse to admit that we were EVER wrong.
Our choice of enmity and hatred causes damnation in the true sense - all progress is stopped because no one will admit that they were wrong or have anything to learn from the other person.
Pride, not certitude, is the root of ALL evil. Jesus said that life eternal is to KNOW certain specified things. Endless speculation as a good, is an illusion.
"The Nuremburg trials took place after the Nazi leadership was defeated. If the leadership were still in power, would you isolate the lower-downs in the system and let the leadership get away by issuing an apology for what the lower-downs did?"
Isn't that pretty much what happened in Abu Ghraib? Lower ranked soldiers spent time in prison. Their higher ranked leaders? Not so much.
"I think Ann is still missing the point. The School's "apology" amounts to empty words unless Stanford takes steps to prevent such a thing from happening again..."
Or in other words, Stanford's apology is the con, or is a con also.
It's just so odd, because DEI does most certainly not support diversity or inclusion. What happened at Stanford had nothing to do with either of those two principles.
"Steinbeck organized and encouraged the students to shout down the speaker (she certainly never told them not to, despite repeated opportunities to do so) and then hi jacked the speech to give her own (at least semi) prepared remarks attacking the speaker and endorsing the bad behavior of the students."
This seems like a fair description to me.
Our hostess says she was just doing what she was hired to do.
That seems to mean that Stanford DEI positions are, at least in part to help organize the heckler's veto. To use students as props (they hushed when she spoke and left when she told them). And to belittle an invited speaker and accuse him of hate before the audience.
Or, can we even imagine she went far beyond what the administration envisioned in a DEI administrator?
The fact that Stanford issued a statement that the actions were not in accordance with Stanford policy would seem to indicate she went beyond her authority.
I should add that the Stanford statement, without follow up for the administrator or students is weak sauce. Especially true in light of the follow up student actions.
“Anyway, I've been saying all along — click my "Tirien Steinbach" tag — that Steinbach, as the DEI dean, was doing what the law school hired her to do.
The basic problem is that this wasn’t a job for a DEI Dean. This was a job for campus security.
What makes Dean Steinbach’s achievement so heady is that DEI is about to get body-slammed by the U.S. Supreme Court on the subject of admissions. Why Judge Duncan would put himself in a position to get shamed so badly by a DEI Dean with that victory so imminent is something his supporters ought to consider. Of course, it won’t be a total victory, it will take at least 3 or 4 cases to make eliminating DEI deanships a necessity to avoid losing lawsuits, and there is the prospect the victory will be Pyrrhic.
The Little Eichmanns in the administration were only doing what they were supposed to do. It was their job.
Meanwhile the Stanford Students [hereinafter referred to as the S.S.] have decided to bypass the brown shirt phase and go directly to the all-black of that other SS. Bold. Brave.
This is why they are the chosen ones who spend their days in sunny Palo Alto instead of freezing in some snowbound midwestern cow college. Class will out.
But I think they need more flair. Maybe stylize that SS and add a rune or two. Maybe an ancient Hindu symbol to add some degree of orientalism.
By the way, this is the transexual community at Stanford that is behind this.
Am I saying they are engaging in Nazi-like behavior? Damn right I am.
Those who support them to any degree should be ashamed.
As others have said:
1. She should be fired.
2. She should be fired because the whole DIE apparatus is dismantled.
3. The rest of Stanford's law school leadership should be fired because they created the DIE apparatus.
4. Students should be allowed to stay at the school under the conditions they behave civilly. One of the problems is that people seem to have dropped "responsibility" as the other side of the coin of "liberty". This should be reinforced to the students that they have the liberty to express their opinions but the responsibility to do it civilly. This civility BS, either, as it's expected of everyone at all times when participating in school and school functions.
“By the way, Alinsky depended on the good manners and desire for peace of the middle class to achieve his ends. He thought he could shock the middle class into compliance with his goals.”
The ultimate problem for the left here is that the movement politically, here in the US, has been that the upper middle class, that most respect good manners and the like, have moved in their direction, and the lower middle/working class has moved to the right. Which is why, Alinsky is being used more and more, and more effectively, by the right in this country.
Thinking back to when I lived in Austin. I would go out to dinner with a family member, their spies, and my GF. Their favorite inside joke involved the word “Shrub” (used by them to identify then Gov GW Bush). All I could think of was how stupid and juvenile. 8 college degrees among the 3 of them, and that passed for humor. I see a huge amount of humor on the right these days, much of it counter authoritarian. In the end, being the humorless scolds, trying to censor anyone questioning their authority, is not going to endear the center in their direction. Much better to laugh at a good joke, at the expense of those at the top, than being on the side of those too humor impaired to get the humor.
@Inga: So much hate toward DEI/Woke culture, which is misrepresented/demonized terribly by the right. Didn’t Althouse say to explain and defend your culture? How is the regressive culture better? Do you think that half of the US will embrace the regressive culture? More regressive laws that go back to 1849 are better? The more the right freaks out over DEI the more the left will reject the culture the right is pushing.
DIE is post-modernist Marxism, with class warfare replaced by race essentialism. Woke culture presumes a special awareness about social injustices and their causes to which they alone are privy. The unwoke are by definition racists, and prove their racism by denying the charge. IOW, a Kafka trap.
What do you mean by "regressive culture"? Is it what DIE/Woke means, that race blindness is, by definition, racist?
Every element of DIE is antithetical to American values. Dean Steinbach shouldn't be fired merely because she brought shame upon the SLS's reputation, although she surely did. Rather, all institutionalized DIE needs to die, and her worthless job with it.
Tell us. What positive contributions has DIE brought to *anything*?
The more the right freaks out over DEI the more the left will reject the culture the right is pushing.
Stop being a bunch of fucking thugs is the culture we're pushing?
OK. Fine. Reject it. See what it gets you.
By the way, one of the reasons the DIEists were excoriating Judge Duncan was because of his transphobic opinion in a case denying a male defendant's demand to be addressed by female pronouns.
Here it is: United States of America vs. Norman Varner
Where is the failure in legal reasoning? The "transphobia"?
Certainly there was something more to the Maoist shouting than mere pronunciamentos.
Remember the Scottish rapist recently housed in a women's prison because she insisted he is a trans woman?
That is where all this biology defying pronoun nonsense must eventually lead. It is a real mystery why these Maoists can't take that on board.
"The rest of Stanford's law school leadership should be fired because they created the DIE apparatus."
They didn't.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/frontpage/pro-students/issues/roi-issue07.html
Ann Althouse said…
Come on. Get the facts right or your opinion is irrelevant. Steinbach did not shout anyone down. She talked to everyone in the room and cleared the space for the judge to give his speech.
Absolutely pathetic and dishonest.
This is ad faith on your part.
Why Judge Duncan would put himself in a position to get shamed so badly by a DEI Dean with that victory so imminent is something his supporters ought to consider.
Yeah. How dare he accept an invitation to speak to a group of law students. Why, the nerve of some people.
The Alinsky 'pick a vulnerable target, isolate it from safety, attack it, skitter away, another attack from another direction by someone else' is a technique demonstrated well by Antifa. In their filmed assaults one sees masked assailants scurry from a crowd, hit someone, then run away not to be seen again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Freedom looks a lot different to the Left than it does to the Right
Farmgirl nailed it and encapsulated the problem in 14 words. Freedom to the lefties means freedom ONLY to the lefties. Everyone else can just STFU.
- Krumhorn
I can't get past the notion that students, adults, in classrooms and lecture halls situated in one of the wealthiest universities in one of the wealthiest cities in the world feel themselves 'unsafe' because of other adults' words. The effete sophistry on display is disgusting.
Farmgirl is concise and wise. Good work describing the culture we are preserving Ron. Again, concise and true. I wish the Left would actually demonstrate tolerance for a change instead of endlessly lecturing us about it.
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