"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.

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.

"The Full Audio Recording Of Judge Kyle Duncan At Stanford Law."

Presented by David Lat at Substack.

I've listened to the first 22 minutes (and intend to finish later). That is, I've relistened to the Tirien Steinbach intervention, and I've heard, for the first time, everything that went before, that is, what students did that required the intervention.

As I heard it — and much of it was difficult to hear — there was one student who did most of the speaking, and she seemed to be trying to control the event by addressing the judge, inviting him into a dialogue instead of delivering his prepared remarks. The rest of the crowd seems to be supporting her effort, adding to the pressure on the judge, as if he might decide that the best path through the evening was to throw the written speech aside and take on all comers.

I can imagine a character in a movie doing something like that, really looking the questioning student in the eye and saying words that truly connected.

The movie in my head looks something like this:

"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.

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.