"The reaction from the student body points to a larger issue: many people my age don’t want to take the easiest path but..."

"... if it’s being offered to hundreds of your peers, giving them the chance to earn higher grades or better job opportunities, that’s what you do. Otherwise, you feel like a sucker.... "

Writes Elsa Johnson, in "I exposed Stanford’s disability racket. I was stunned by the reaction on campus After my revelation that elite students are claiming to be disabled to get cushy perks, I expected blowback — but what happened next surprised me" (London Times).

"Many of my peers and I wouldn’t mind — and might even prefer — our teachers and administrators being tougher on us. After all, the accommodations we’re gaming today won’t help us in the real world. In the workplace you won’t have sympathetic OAE advisers giving you extra time to perform a surgery if you’re a doctor. No one is going to excuse you from a tricky business presentation because you claim 'anxiety.'..."

Here's my post from a few days ago about Johnson's original essay.

"I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point...."

"The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal. When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.... So of course you have to go overseas to get qualified PhD candidates, most of the native born kids who could have been in that pipeline were cut out of it.... I was born in 1971 in Iowa and grew up in Wisconsin. My cohort of citizens was told that we just had to put up with this as a cost of prior American bigotry even though the discrimination was now aimed at us. And for the most part we did. But the insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020 totally shredded that complacency. And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore. The universities are at ground zero of the counterattack since they are BOTH actively discriminating against us AND primary origin points and propagation vectors.... They declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price...."

Wrote Marc Andreessen in a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders.

Quoted in "Tech billionaire Trump adviser Marc Andreesen says universities will ‘pay the price’ for DEI/The investor in a private group chat also criticized Stanford and said colleges are biased against Trump voters: 'My people are furious'" (WaPo).

My prompts to Grok were "What does Marc Andreessen mean by 'my people'?" And then: "That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people. Why wasn't he smart enough to use different words? One answer would be that he meant to signal to white people that they need to come together and fight for their own interests." Answers: here.

"An instructor at Stanford University.... asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves... told [them to] stand in a corner, and said, 'This is what Israel does to the Palestinians'..."

"The instructor then asked, 'How many people died in the Holocaust?' When a student answered, 'Six million,' the lecturer said, 'Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.'... The teacher 'didn’t say anything that happened to the Israelis.... He ignored that. He said, "Hamas is a legitimate representation of the Palestinian people. They are not a terrorist group. They are freedom fighters. Their actions are legitimate."... He’s saying Israel is worse than the Nazis and Hamas is innocent. This is what Jewish students face at Stanford and other places. They’re feeling isolated, under attack and threatened.'"

From "Stanford instructor removed for targeting Jewish students as ‘colonizers’ after Hamas attack on Israel/Stanford officials were also criticized for neutral language in initially failing to unambiguously condemn Hamas" (Forward)(quoting Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, who was relaying what he heard from 3 students).

"It was a very valuable experience to me, and a lesson that ideas, no matter how vile, should be argued, defended, and defeated in public."

Writes Vesuviano in the most-liked comment at the NYT on the article "At Stanford Law School, the Dean Takes a Stand for Free Speech. Will It Work?" 

The article is the subject of my first post of the day, but I wanted to give this fantastic comment its own post:

"Are 10 minutes of shouting out of an hour-and-a-half-long event too much? That is a matter of judgment and degree."

Said Nadine Strossen, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, quoted in "At Stanford Law School, the Dean Takes a Stand for Free Speech. Will It Work? After a student protest, Jenny S. Martinez wrote a much-praised memo defending academic freedom. But that protest shows how complicated protecting free speech can be" (NYT).

If you get the balance wrong, Ms. Strossen said, then you risk chilling speech on the other side....

Ms. Strossen said she was struck that [a week later, when she appeared on a panel at Yale], there were no protesters of any kind. “I worry that maybe the reason that there weren’t even nondisruptive protests,” she said, “is students were too afraid that they would be subject to discipline or doxxing.” 

Strossen spoke at Stanford in January, a guest of the Federalist Society. That was 2 months before the famously disrupted visit by Judge Kyle Duncan. Strossen says that Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion — widely criticized for her handling of the Duncan event — moderated her event. According to Strossen, "That took some courage." It was "extraordinary."

Pause a moment to absorb that.

"Only now — as a student about to graduate — do I realize how few classmates agree with the loudest ones."

"Most of us fall somewhere between or are still forming our opinions. A friend recently told me that 'coming out as a moderate was more difficult than coming out as gay at Stanford Law School.' He eventually moved to San Francisco so he could 'just ignore the madness.' These dynamics are hardly unique to Stanford. My friends in law school at Yale and Harvard, among others, have shared similar experiences...."

Writes Tess Winston, in "With some of my fellow Stanford Law students, there’s no room for argument" (WaPo).

The quietness of people in the middle makes extremism work. They're so busy being invisible that they don't notice — or acknowledge — the role they play.

How easily they internalize bullying:

The Stanford DEI dean, Tieren Steinbach, explains that expression she used, "Is the juice worth the squeeze?"

I'm reading "Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford" (in the Wall Street Journal), in which Dean Steinbach defends herself, saying things that feel familiar and reasonable to me: 

My role was to observe and, if needed, de-escalate....  I stepped up to the podium to deploy the de-escalation techniques in which I have been trained, which include getting the parties to look past conflict and see each other as people.... To defuse the situation I acknowledged the protesters' concerns; I addressed the Federalist Society's purpose for inviting Judge Duncan and the law school's desire to uphold its right to do so; I reminded students that there would a Q&A session at which they could answer Judge Duncan's speech with their own speech, as long as they were following university rules; and I pointed out that while free speech isn't easy or comfortable, it's necessary for democracy, and I was glad it was happening at our law school....

Okay. I've said much the same thing myself, defending Steinbach, as you can see in my earlier posts tagged with her name. But I'm stunned to read her explanation of the metaphor she used:

"Stanford Law School is requiring all students to attend educational programming on free speech after protesters interrupted a speech..."

"... by a conservative federal judge earlier this month. The law school will hold 'a mandatory half-day session in spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession,' Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez said in a public letter to students Wednesday. Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach, who spoke at the March 9 event with US Judge Kyle Duncan, 'is currently on leave,' Martinez said."

Bloomberg reports.

Judge Duncan's Wall Street Journal column: "My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School."

Link.

Stanford Law School’s website touts its “collegial culture” in which “collaboration and the open exchange of ideas are essential to life and learning.” Then there’s the culture I experienced when I visited Stanford last week.... 

When I arrived, the walls were festooned with posters denouncing me for crimes against women, gays, blacks and “trans people.” Plastered everywhere were photos of the students who had invited me and fliers declaring “You should be ASHAMED,” with the last word in large red capital letters and a horror-movie font. This didn’t seem “collegial.” Walking to the building where I would deliver my talk, I could hear loud chanting a good 50 yards away, reminiscent of a tent revival in its intensity. Some 100 students were massed outside the classroom as I entered, faces painted every color of the rainbow, waving signs and banners, jeering and stamping and howling.  As I entered the classroom, one protester screamed: “We hope your daughters get raped!”

It was a big protest, generated by the real human beings the law school had assembled as its student body, not propaganda on the institution's website. It's real life, like the life experienced beyond the courthouse and beyond the law school, and it's not that polite. You know, it's also not polite to put "trans people" in quotation marks. It's a more polished form of incivility, but law students have long protested about the way law dresses up and glosses over injustice.

"I think the focus on the [Stanford DEI dean Tirien] Steinbach is a mistake, for reasons I articulated..."

"... in my post 'Firing Diversity Dean Over Judge Shout-Down May Help Stanford Law School Escape Consequences Of Its Toxic DEI Culture.' My point was that Steinbach was just doing what was expected of her as a DEI officer. She is the symptom, not the underlying problem, which is the DEI culture of intolerance.That toxic culture evidenced itself after the shout-down. The Stanford Law School Chapter of the Federalist Society, which invited Judge Duncan to speak, got almost no faculty support (only two reached out privately), even though not just Judge Duncan but also Federalist students were targeted. Through its silence, the faculty sent a strong message that what happened was acceptable (had it been a liberal judge shouted down, you can be sure there would have been a faculty uproar.)"

 
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). 

It's so much easier to target one person. It's the old rules-for-radicals idea: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The law school dean, by apologizing for Steinbach, has helped isolate the target, as if the larger DEI Culture is not under attack. How weak is that culture? The students ought to suspect the entire thing is a con. Ironically, Critical Theory teaches us always to suspect that these efforts are a con.

Jacobson says it's a mistake for conservatives to begin with the attack on the isolated target. He recommends skipping that step. Here's how Saul Alinsky explained his "Pick the target" approach in "Rules for Radicals":

"You might read comments somewhere that I was, at some point, given 'permission' to deliver my remarks by the DEI Assistant Dean, Steinbach. Nonsense."

"For a good 20-30 minutes (I’m estimating), I was ruthlessly mocked and shouted down by a mob after every third word. And then Steinbach launched into her bizarre prepared speech where she simultaneously 'welcomed' me to campus and told me how horrible and hurtful I was to the community. Then she said I should be free to deliver my remarks. Try delivering a lecture under those circumstances. Basically, they wanted me to make a hostage video. No thanks. The whole thing was a staged public shaming, and after I realized that I refused to play along."

Said Judge Kyle Duncan, interviewed by Rod Dreher (at Substack).

So, the judge declined to deliver his speech after Steinbach quieted the crowd for him. He's also now calling for her to be fired. He says it was a "staged public shaming," but that's the same thing as saying that the protest was planned. He and his supporters are engaging in staged public shaming too, and they want a person not just disrupted on one evening but deprived of her job. That's tit for tat and a refusal to stand down.

As long as we're talking about the president of Stanford University (see previous post)...

 ... let's read "This 18-Year-Old College Journalist Could Bring Down Stanford University’s President/Theo Baker recently became the youngest-ever recipient of the prestigious Polk Award" (BuzzFeed).

Baker and the Stanford Daily merited a “special award” for their series looking into allegations that scientific papers coauthored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a noted neuroscientist, contained manipulated imagery. 

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?

That's what Ed Whelan asserts over at National Review. He says:

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.

A harrowing scene at Stanford Law School. ADDED: What the associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion did was just fine.

Stanford Law students shouted down Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan while he was trying to speak.

When he asked for an administrator to control the situation, Stanford’s “associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion” got up and lectured him for nearly 10 minutes pic.twitter.com/tjlUPOIMmQ

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) March 11, 2023

ADDED: I embedded this tweet without listening to much of the "nearly 10 minutes" of "lectur[ing]," because I had to run out to catch the sunrise, but I listened to the audio track very closely while I was out, and now I need to say that I disagree with the text of the tweet.

I think the dean handled the situation well. The dean — whom Fox News identifies as Tirien Steinbach — says that she has come forward because the judge asked for an administrator to do something to restore order.

Responding to him and needing to manage a noisy group of students, she spoke in a "thinking out loud" way that openly considered various factors: the protesting students' passion and outrage, the judge's position of power, the interests of the students who wanted to hear the judge and welcome him, the schools' interest in making students feel valued and supported, and the traditional free-speech preference for active debate and more speech. She made her points quickly and clearly, and she successfully invited the students who didn't want to hear the judge to leave the room, and she seems to have convinced the remaining students to hear out the judge to save time for the Q&A after his speech.

The Fox News article disparages Steinbach as "emotional" and "frustrated," but that she struck me as professional and appropriate. If you're going to call other people "emotional" and "frustrated," you'd better be sure you're not emotional and frustrated. I know it's absurd to ask mainstream news media to play it straight and keep it factual, but it's my absurdity, willingly embraced.

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.

"Mocking an ideologically-based group can’t be made a basis for denying academic privileges in any open society worthy of respect. If accurate, this report shows Stanford Law School to be unworthy of treatment as an academic institution."

Tweeted Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, quoted in "A Stanford student bashed the Federalist Society with a satirical flier. He nearly missed getting his diploma" (WaPo). 

Stanford reversed its position after getting excoriated on the web yesterday. Below, you can see how the flier looked. It is subject to being mistaken as the real notice for the event, but that's how satire is done, and it's not as though there was a risk of anyone doing anything harmful if they were foolish enough to believe the "fake news." 

And why should Stanford Law strain to protect its community? It can't be that it thinks they're dumb. Maybe it decided to respond to the complaint of the Federalist Society — a conservative group — so it could bank credit for political neutrality as it bumbles boldly forward in the culture wars.

Here is the flyer that led Stanford to place a hold on Wallace's diploma following a complaint by a Stanford Federalist Society leader. pic.twitter.com/sUg3Jvta3I

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 2, 2021

"When she arrived at Stanford in 1979, she had wanted to teach gender and the law, but the dean refused, telling her to pick a 'real subject.'"

"She agreed to teach contracts instead, but changed her mind two years later when the dean retired, and several alumni threw him a party — and invited a stripper. 'I said to hell with contracts,' she later wrote." 

From a NYT obituary by Clay Rosen, "Deborah Rhode, Who Transformed the Field of Legal Ethics, Dies at 68/A Stanford professor, she pushed the legal profession to confront the ways it failed clients and to be more inclusive of women." 

Who was dean of Stanford Law School in 1979? 

Here's a chronology of Stanford Law School deans. 

Imagine a law school retirement party with a stripper — in 1981.

I can imagine a law school dean telling a new professor that she's got to cover a basic required course — like contracts. But it would have been very awkward, even then, to say that "gender and the law" was not a "real subject." As I remember it — and I started teaching law school in 1984 — the standard course name was "Women and the Law," and it would have been considered an upper-level elective. I don't know what it was like at Stanford in the 80s, but at Wisconsin, you could invent your own seminar. We had to teach 4 courses a year, but one of them could always be anything you were interested in. There were many seminars called "Law and ______" — fill in the blank. It was considered funny to refer to these courses as "Law and My Ego." 

Maybe over at Stanford, the joke was "not a real subject." But that was a bad joke to aim at a new hiree, when she was only the second woman on the faculty and the course she wanted to teach was women and the law.

By the way, when I began my search for a law school teaching job, I was advised by one of my law school professors — a female professor — to resist getting slotted into one of the "women's" courses. I was warned. Watch out for these deans who want you to teach, say, Family Law.

ADDED: I do see that the the party for the dean does not seem to have been an official retirement party. It says "a party." Set up by "several alumni." Who knows how long ago these alumni graduated or, more importantly, how important these alumni were to the current faculty? You might wonder why would you say "to hell with contracts" because there was a stripper a law school party — or a stripper invited to a law-school-adjacent party? What's the connection between a particular law school course and that party? 

But I understand. And it fits with the advice I was given to stay out of "women's" courses. Contracts is the classic law school course. A woman, like the woman who advised me, might think the idea is to transcend gender. But if you got a wake-up call and decided, no, things are really retrograde here and I'm not going to pretend there's not a gender problem, you might say "to hell with contracts."

Now, just stop saying "christened" and you'll finally be free from pressure to change the words you are using.

"Not all landmarks that echo [Junipero] Serra’s name will be re-christened," The Stanford Daily reports in "University to rename Serra House, Serra Mall following two years of controversy."

Serra Street, which stretches from the end of Serra Mall to El Camino Real, will retain its name. The dorm Junipero — named for the juniper tree rather than Serra, despite popular misconceptions — will remain unchanged.

The disparagement of very real feelings as "misconceptions" is microaggression. Why should the viewpoint of those who did the naming take precedence over the effect the name has on the students whose day to day lives go on under the burden of that name? If there were a dorm called Hitler that happened to be named after an obscure donor, would you shrug it off?

“We hope that renaming the two Serra houses and Serra Mall will remove a significant hurt to Native Americans, other members of the Stanford community and the larger diverse world that Stanford seeks to embrace,” [says the report of the Advisory Committee on Renaming Junipero Serra Features]. “We also acknowledge that respect for historic continuity with Stanford’s founding reflected in our recommendation to maintain the names of other features named for Spanish missionaries and settlers may continue to cause concern for some.”

Why should the committee's "hope" inspire Native Americans to stand down after this victory? How has their hope fared in the scheme of "respect for historic continuity"?

“For many of the participants, Serra’s name evokes the entire history of oppression of Native Americans,” the committee wrote....

But other interest groups on campus sought to curb efforts at renaming. The issue is of special relevance to the Roman Catholic community, since Serra was canonized as a saint in 2015.... Catholic stakeholders also said the committee should not attribute all problematic components of the mission system to Serra, as some factors were beyond his individual knowledge and power.

That argument is reminding me of the current image problem of Pope Francis, so I'm wondering how it feels to students at Stanford. It seems tone deaf, but I'm also concerned that this entire campaign against Serra is being experienced as anti-Catholic.

The committee summarized the Catholic community’s viewpoint with the statement of one individual, who said they would be “disappointed but not angry,” if features honoring Serra were renamed. As a result, the committee determined that “the harms avoided by renaming outweigh the harms of renaming,” and thus, renaming is “not disrespectful,” according to the report.

So the offense to Catholics was considered but minimized and rejected as outbalanced.

“Whenever you are trying to accommodate or balance competing interests, the chances are that you are going to reach an accommodation that is not completely on one side or another of what people would like,” [Committee chair and former Stanford Law Dean Paul] Brest said. “That’s the nature of accommodating different interests. The hope is that this is a balance that both significantly reduces the negative experience of members of the community and preserves the history at the same time.”

There's that "hope" again! God help them, I do believe they are trying, but from what wellspring does this hope arise?

Some of the critics of Trump's Warsaw speech reject the idea of the greatness of Western Civilization.

"[A]mazingly enough, they find the West itself an offensive and exclusionary concept. Th[is] critique speaks to how the mantra 'Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go' is no longer just the creed of fringe activists, but is seeping into the mainstream. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post worries that Trump’s speech invites civilizational conflict. Really? Trump just had a successful trip to Saudi Arabia, where presumably it isn’t news that the West is vested in Western values. Peter Beinart of the Atlantic objects that 'the West' is allegedly 'a racial and religious term.' This is bizarre, given that countries everywhere can 'Westernize,' or adopt the norms and practices that were first adopted in the West and are uniquely suited to human flourishing. Trump warned in his speech of fighting for centuries to maintain our freedom, only to lose it to 'a lack of pride and confidence in our values.' The unhinged reaction to his address... shows how this, alas, is not an idle worry."

Writes Rich Lowry at The National Review.

Do you remember the original "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go"? It happened at Stanford:

By the mid-1980s, increasing dissatisfaction with the introductory humanities program known as “Western Culture” that had begun in 1980 came to the fore. The program was criticized for its lack of diversity and its predominantly Eurocentric readings. Students advocated for a curriculum that included ethnic minority and women authors. On January 15, 1987, as many as 500 students, along with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, rallied down Palm Drive chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go." The curriculum debate drew national attention, and in 1989 Western Culture was formally replaced with the Cultures, Ideas, & Values (CIV) program that included more inclusive works on race, class, and gender.

And here's an article from last year in The Daily Beast, "Stanford Students Want Western Civilization Studies Back as the PC Backlash Begins":

At Stanford, a backlash against this censorious student culture is taking shape in the form of a petition to reinstate the university’s Western Civilization curriculum. In the next two days, students will vote on a referendum proposed by the Stanford Review, an undergraduate political magazine, urging the Stanford’s Faculty Senate to require a two-quarter course for freshman “covering the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.”...

The referendum failed, though, by a vote of 1992 to 342.

"I served for 8 years on a university sexual misconduct board and at the end of that distressing tour of duty concluded the following..."

"(1) the combination of alcohol abuse by both parties (which is the case in the vast majority of charges), absence of witnesses, and absence of any forensic investigation in the student led process makes the charges almost impossible to prove by any standard of evidence; (2) a very small number of sexual predators can create a lot of misery on a campus (3) peer pressure and buddy systems by both male and female students are probably the best form of prevention; and (4) cases of sexual assault should go straight to the police and courts. Universities aren't equipped to handle these cases and need to stop trying to serve as a parallel justice system. This is not a place for amateur hour."

That's the second-highest-ranked comment on the NYT article: "A Majority Agreed She Was Raped by a Stanford Football Player. That Wasn’t Enough."

"A Majority Agreed" means that 3 members of a panel of 5 found that the male student committed a sexual assault. It "Wasn't Enough" because Stanford required at least 4 out of 5 on the panel to find a preponderance of the evidence against the accused. Preponderance is the lowest standard of evidence, and the panel can include students (as well as faculty and administrators), but the NYT still called this "an uncommonly high bar."

Stanford has changed the procedure to a panel of 3, and now the panel must be unanimous:

“In deciding we wanted well-trained, long-term panelists, it made sense to go to a three-person panel,” said Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford Law professor who is now chairwoman of a sexual assault advisory committee, “and having three people decide something by a preponderance of the evidence seemed to us the appropriate way of deciding whether a life-altering sanction should be imposed on somebody for his or her behavior.”...

Michele Dauber, a Stanford law professor... said she doubted that the university’s proceedings complied with Title IX.... “You have to look at the process holistically, and when you see a series of hurdles and roadblocks, this becomes a very unfriendly place, if not one of the most unfriendly in the nation,” said Ms. Dauber, one of five Stanford professors (including Mr. Palumbo-Liu) who wrote an open letter in December 2015 to the provost complaining about the new policy. “The victim should not need to garner three votes to win while the respondent needs to garner only one. That is basic inequality.”

Those last 2 sentences of Dauber's are — as her use the word "garner" suggests — disingenuous. The accused and the accuser are not in the same position, and the panel isn't voting to pick one of 2 individuals who are vying for the same thing. It's not a question of equality. It's a question fairness — giving enough process to the one who faces a very serious deprivation. 

ADDED: I don't like Dauber's reference to the "victim" and the "respondent." The absence of parallelism shows the strain. Before the outcome is determined, it is emotive and biased to call one person the "victim." Dauber is decorous enough to avoid saying the word that goes with "victim":  "perpetrator." She says "respondent." The word that goes with "respondent" is "complainant."

"We had a real hard time with Inky."

Said Kelly Sheffield, the coach of University of Wisconsin volleyball team, which lost to Stanford in the NCAA tournament regional final last night.

Redshirt senior Inky Ajanaku, who led the Cardinal (25-7) with 20 kills and 11 blocks and was named the tournament’s MVP, said her team was a “little flabbergasted” after the first two sets. But after she gave her youthful but talented teammates a pep talk at intermission, she could sense they were not about to give up.

“I looked in everybody’s eyes and I saw they were ready,” Ajanaku said. “They were ready to be there all night and they were ready to fight.”

AND: Isn't it strange that volleyball is the sport with the most violent lingo? Kills. Where's my trigger warning?