Said Judge Kyle Duncan, interviewed by Rod Dreher (at Substack).
Instead of explaining to the students that they should respect an invited guest at the law school (yes, a federal judge, but really this applies to any guest), even one they might disagree with passionately, she launched into a bizarre (and already printed out) monologue where she accused me of causing “hurt” and “division” in the law school community by my mere presence on campus. So, this had the effect of validating the mob. Then, at the same time, she pretended to “welcome” me to campus so that I could express my views. All of this was delivered, as anyone can see from the video, in the voice and idiom of a therapist.
He's criticizing her voice. He's tone policing!
I found it profoundly creepy.
He doesn't need protection from creepiness. If the tables were turned, and he were the lefty, wouldn't conservatives call him a "snowflake"?
It was the language of “compassion” and “feelings,” but it came across as deeply controlling and aggressive.
It "came across as".... You're calling for a person to lose her job. You, with your life tenure guarantee. Your subjective experience is worth hearing about, but it doesn't establish that she did something terribly wrong. She had a hard task to carry out, and you ought to try to understand how it felt, subjectively, to her.
Many people are talking about the weird metaphor she used: “Was the juice worth the squeeze?” I had no idea what she was talking about, but at some point I realized that she meant, “Yes, you were invited to campus, and we ‘welcome’ you. But your presence here is causing such hurt and division. So, was what you were going to talk about really worth all this pain you’re causing by coming here?” In other words, it’s just a folksy way of giving these students a heckler’s veto.
But it's not a heckler's veto, because she was clearing the way for you to speak. She was caring for the students' concerns and simultaneously helping you. She was engaging in an intellectual consideration of the issues of protest and the right to hear a speaker. Notice the question mark: "Was the juice worth the squeeze?" It's an important question, and she answered it in your favor while also supporting the students.
If they hate you enough, then surely it wasn’t worth your coming to campus. Apply that twisted idea to the civil rights movement, and see where you end up. It isn’t on the side of the people marching across the Selma bridge.
You reject their analogies, and I'm pretty sure they'll reject that one of yours.
In other words, what the dean was preaching is the exact opposite of the law of free speech. We protect the speaker from the mob, not the mob from the speaker.
Was there a threat of physical violence? No. Do we protect the speaker from the words of the "mob"? Duncan must know it's not "the exact opposite of the law of free speech." This wasn't a case of the speaker being punished for riling up the crowd. It was only a case of the crowd drowning out the speaker's speech with more speech.
And here was a dean of one of the best law schools in the world using the exact opposite of that basic principle to silence a sitting federal judge....
How was she silencing you? She was clearing the way for you, she just took longer to do it than you would have liked and she acknowledged the feelings and opinions of the protesters as she did it.
Duncan returns to the idea of a law school as the manufacturer of lawyers:
[T]he whole point of law school is to train bright-yet-unformed young minds to “think like a lawyer.” You’ve seen The Paper Chase, of course. The brilliant professor Kingsfield humbles the first year law students with his withering Socratic interrogation. Now we’ve evidently turned that model upside down.
Has he seen the movie "The Paper Chase"?! Kingsfield isn't the hero. The law student is, and the film audience is on the side of the student. The film turns that model upside down!
Ah, but Duncan's idea is that he — in the classroom — not as a professor, but an outside speaker — ought to have been respected and revered like the old-fashioned law prof. In that light, he spoofs:
The first year law students ridicule and silence Kingsfield for his cis-hetero-normativity, and then Kingsfield is publicly disciplined by the assistant DEI dean for harming the community’s sense of “belonging” by expecting them to recite a case.
Duncan was not "publicly disciplined." He was interrupted by rude noise from students, and the DEI dean restored order using an overlong speech he didn't enjoy. The dean invited the students to leave the room and they did. He was never pushed to help them feel that they belonged.
What did Duncan actually say after order was restored? He says he declined to give his prepared remarks. So what did he do instead? Did he rise to the occasion? Is there video of what went on after Steinbach spoke? I'd like to see it.
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214 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 214 of 214lonejustice said “ he needs to understand that when he is outside of his personal reign as a king in his courtroom, people are not going to treat him as a king. The robe is off.”
I’m not a judge and no one treats me like royalty and let me tell ya if anyone said to me (surrounded by people who were also hostile to me) “I have gay sex, I can find a prostate, why can’t you find a woman’s clit?” I would feel uncomfortable, worried that events were spinning out of control and worried about my personal safety. No one - judge or janitor - should be exposed to that kind of hostility, to that kind of language. The homeless guys on the street I pass by as I go to work don’t use that kind language. These are supposedly college students at a university funded by an awful lot of taxpayer dollars.
Question for all the lawyers here…isn’t there a contractual obligation that could be litigated?
I would assume that the SLS, the Federalist Society, and Duncan signed a contract for this speaking engagement.
Althouse has raised the right to assemble and demonstrate, mentioning specifically the Boston Tea Party.
I would note that event was:
..a protest by persons aggrieved of economic oppression by a sovereign Government over which they had little control; and
..was followed by an actual shooting war of some years duration.
As regards this event:
..the actors were, i suspect in most cases, not personally oppressed in any way, but rather virtue strutting - stroking their egos by building fantasies in their heads in which they are the heroes;
..there is today a growing number of people economically oppressed and suffering loss of other liberties at the hand of a sovereign Government which is beyond their control;
..and as for George III...may he profit by their example.
She simply should not have been put in the position to have to maintain order in this instance. Some other official should have been given that task.
But she was the Chosen One. That fact implies either that Stanford wanted exactly this to happen - if we're going with the "she was doing her job of helping 'vulnerable' people feel 'safe'" - or she grossly overstepped - if, as I just commented, she used the opening to express her own opinions rather than just enforcing university policy. Which is it?
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It occurs to me, that Stanford could fire all the "administrators" who were in that room and did nothing, as well as the one who led the struggle session, and expel every single one of the students who participated. And they could replace them all very easily, with serious people. But Stanford will not do that, because Stanford Law School is not a serious institution.
Here is an interesting update from David Lat on Substack:
https://davidlat.substack.com/p/7-updates-on-judge-kyle-duncan-and-stanford-law
Ken White, not exactly a fan of conservatives, the Federalist Society or Judge Duncan (White appears to detest each in varying degree), but that doesn't prevent him recognizing, quite at variance with Althouse, the threat to 1A values: https://popehat.substack.com/p/hating-everyone-everywhere-all-at. Worth highlighting:
"Stanford students attempted to shout Judge Duncan down and prevent him from speaking and his willing audience from listening. ... (¶) Stanford, institutionally, made it much worse, sending an associate dean to do a grown-up’s job. Tirien Steinbach, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, indulged in a colloquy that more or less challenged the entire concept of universities tolerating speech that some people don't like. Steinbach, though ultimately and reluctantly asking students to let Judge Duncan speak, articulated the modern view that if some people assert your words and actions have been harmful, then maybe you shouldn’t speak on any topic[.]"
"Associate Dean Steinbach and her ilk are campaigning to undermine free speech legal and social norms, striving to make someone’s subjective reaction to speech an unquestionable justification for suppressing it. Academic freedom is under state assault and she’s busily undermining it and telling students they have a right to shut people up."
"And students. Students think that they should be able to dictate which speakers their peers invite, who can speak, what they can say, and who can listen. They’re not satisfied with the most free-speech-exceptionalist system in the world that lets them respond to speech by assembling, protesting, and reviling people of authority like Judge Duncan. They demand the right not just to speak, but to control the speech of others. That’s straight-up thuggish, an aspiration born of a fascist soul. These are law students. They are training to express themselves for a living. If their view is “we can’t respond to awful speech, we can only stop it from happening,” then they’re going to be terrible lawyers."
"California has Leonard’s Law, a statute requiring private universities to extend the same level of free speech to their students. So you can say that Stanford must obey the First Amendment in disciplining students. And, when they let students put up angry and vituperative fliers, and assemble to protest, and carry signs, and be disrespectful, that’s what they’re doing. However, shouting down is not protected by the First Amendment. Neither is pulling the fire alarm, setting off an airhorn, or making bomb threats to stop the speech from happening. You couldn’t pass a law that said “no shouting down conservative speakers” or “no shouting down political speakers,” because those wouldn’t be content-neutral, but you can absolutely prohibit disrupting someone else’s exercise of free speech so long as you do so in a content-neutral way."
This is all very entertaining. On purpose, it would seem. Prof. Althouse is way too intelligent and has way too much common sense to really believe what she has written. A masterful troll and at 208 comments I would say she was wildly successful.
A "staged public shaming" is not necessarily just a "planned protest". It's completely plausible that the invitation was extended or agreed to by some parties with the intention of shouting him down, and/or that the administrator's prepared remarks (which by itself is odd) were planned well in advance as part of a public humiliation or ritualized component of the protest.
William T: Thanks for pointing me To Stanford College grad Popehat, brilliant and funny as usual. Folks should follow your cite to the original, which has links to back up statements like no free speech protection for shouting down speakers, where I belive Popehat parts company with AA.
Once you ask yourself why leftists have become intolerant of divergent viewpoints, and begin the historical unpacking of leftist thought and action, you realize it is because the left has largely lost the argument. The left agitated (appropriately) for free speech in the 60's and 70's, and largely succeeded. However, the ability to spread widely leftist ideas and policies carried with it the seeds of destruction, because this freedom extended to analysis of the results of leftist ideas and policies. And when, eventually, it became clear (at least for a majority of the country) that these ideas and policies led to bad outcomes, including for the people they were supposed to help, the left realized that they could not win a fair fight, that is to say, the left is unable to mount an intellectually coherent and persuasive case for it loony ideas. Having lost the argument, what remains is the accumulation and preservation of power and the shutting down of your political opponents, which includes any and all weapons that come to hand, such as the hecklers veto. You can't (or at least shouldn't) expect any kind of civil discourse and argument/debate, precisely because the left has already realized that is a losing strategy.
Regardless of all that, the University is simply producing graduates that are far less prepared to contribute positively to their community after attending, and are in fact destructive and much less valuable to those who would pay them to support themselves and their community. It's just fundamental institutional failure, and it's now the norm. Paying for that is stupid. Even if it was free it would not be worth the price.
I have never re-posted one of my comments in my 20 years as a reader of Althouse blog, but I will this one time. I've been a lawyer for most of my adult life. My view is that the protesting students should be disciplined, along with the dean. But there is another side to the story that most of you will never ever see or know unless you were a trial lawyer.
Something changes when a lawyer becomes a Judge. I've seen it happen many times. Judge Duncan was not a presiding judge in a court of law. He was a guest lecturer willingly going into the lion's den at a left-wing law school. As a Judge, he is used to being treated almost like royalty. Judges in the U.S. are as close as we get to having medieval kings and queens, and they expect to be treated as such. They wear black robes, they sit on a quasi throne (the bench) and look down on everyone else in the courtroom. You must always rise whenever they enter or leave the courtroom. Everyone is forced to address them as Your Honor, and May it please the Court. You dare not raise your voice to them or contradict them, even when they are clearly wrong. If you misbehave in their courtroom, they have the power to have you immediately arrested, charged with contempt, and then sentence you up to 180 days in jail for such contempt. All at the same time. (At least in my district they do.) I have been berated by a Judge for showing up in his chambers (not the courtroom) for not wearing a tie. I have been yelled at by a Judge for not immediately coming to his chambers when summoned, because I was on the phone with another lawyer about a hearing that was scheduled that very morning in front of the same judge. He berated me in the presence of other lawyers I practiced with. Most judges are not like this, but I can see how a judge like Judge Duncan could get used to being treated like a king, and the protesting students were not what he was used to in his court of law. I am not saying I agree with Althouse putting this in the category of civility b.s., but I am saying that judges are used to being treated like royalty. They expect and demand it.
My favorite law professor was an older guy who loved to hunt and raise bird dogs. He told us one day that when he was in private practice he always named his worst bird dog "Judge." Then, when the dog screwed up during a hunt, he would yell as loud as he could, "Judge, you god-damn stupid son of a bitch! How could you be such a fucking idiot!" He said it was a great way to relieve stress.
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