Early in my career I was a counselor on an adolescent psych unit. What I learned quickly was in order to successfully manage the unit, action had consequences. And the more swiftly and firmly the consequences were delivered the more peaceful and productive the program was for all involved. The students involved in these disruptions should be suspend for the remainder and the Dean should be suspended for 90 days. The message sent by the administration should be that we are indifferent about your point of view but it is unacceptable to disrupt a sanctioned event.
The fact that this behavior currently has no consequences is why it will continue to re-occur
I do not take comments from Rod Dreher on free speech as useful given the facts that: (1) he has become a cheerleader for Viktor Orban and his brand of authoritarianism, and (2) his entire intellectual presence was built on “marriage is forever, no matter how bad it gets, and therefore must be restricted from Same-sex couples” and then he divorced his wife. He is no more credible than Jimmy Swaggert.
Again, the continuing controversy here points to what I commented on with your prior post on this debacle: viewpoints that differ from one's own are outright dismissed and ignored rather then debated. Now, I will say that the judge here I do not think is helping himself except with a small subset of people with his strong pushback on the entire incident. However, I think that all of the commentators are not helping themselves either with their limited and narrow view of the event. I do not outright favor one side or the other here; rather I think that there needs to be more tolerance for a broader array of views, even those one finds (perhaps even rightly so) offensive. A democratic society benefits from diversity of many things, not just one thing or another.
It bears noting that the National Lawyers Guild was a Communist affiliated outfit during the Cold War. There views and tactics have not changed. Why is an organization that supports disruption of those that oppose them and has roots in Communism supported by so much of the Law School consortium while the Federalist Society which leaves other group's speakers alone, attacked? These people will be law professors, lawyers and worst of all, judges. Who besides like minded totalitarians will get a fair hearing before them?
I view your comments on the Stanford controversy with both amusement and alarm. I am amused becasue I find disputes in elite academic institutions strange and funny. I am constantly reminded of the old say that battles in academia are always deadly because they involve so little.
As for alarm, I understand your role is not to cover all free speech disputes, but only those that arise in elite law schools. You focus on the legal elite, so I that is how I see your role. And, given your limited role, your extensive reporting is fine.
But you contribute to a larger problem. The threat to free speech (which is guaranteed only against government restrictions, not against private universities, if you want to be technical) is threatened most from the right, not the left. The right has entire state governments under its control and uses that control to launch masssive attacks against free speech. See, for example, the "don't say gay law" in Florida, the legislation against drag queens in Tennessee, the legislation in Idaho against anyone commenting on abortion, and similar efforts in Texas. Many of these laws carry criminal penalties. Standford law school, which may punish the protesters, cannot sentence them to prison.
My point is there is no equivalence. Judge Duncan may have been inconvenienced, but he was not threatened with prison. Gay teachers in Florida, or drag queens in Tenneseee face far worse consequences.
What you do is amplify the complaints of the right on free speech issues. They do not need amplification. But by doing so, you allow right wing politicians and commentators to argue that free speech faces greater threats from the left than the right, when the opposite is true.
Free speech need not worry about petty incidents at Stanford Law School. But it should worry every time the legislatures of Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho convene. Keep that in mind.
One problem in universities now is that it is extremely difficult to hold in check or discipline "woke" DEI administrators--no matter how they act. Doing so risks terrible plublicity, and rebellion from a faction of studetns the DEI administartors have themselves urged towards radical actions. Thus at many schoools, the DEI administrators are now more powerful than any Provost or President: invulnerable. The behavior of the DEI administrator at Oberlin cost the college $33 million in a successful slander suit over a false charge of "racism"--but she didn't lose her job. The behavior of the DEI administrator at Stanford Law School has broken new ground now by personally leading a student disruption of an invited speaker--a conservative judge--seizing the podium from him and verbally attacking him. When the Law School Dean publicly apologized for this outrageous act by a university official, she faced a large public protest from law students in response to her daring to apologize. Maybe the Dean will resign; but the DEI administrator is in absolutely no danger of being suspended.
I note that an eyewitness said that most of the protestors against the Dean's apology were 1L's. These are the very latest cohort graduating from hot-house Humanities and Social Science undergraduate education. Just think about what's coming next.
I'm going to turn into a troll on this issue for one comment, but I still want to know why free speech in the academy is more worthy of defense than free speech for the public, where following the model of content moderation as defined by Daphne Keller and Evelyn Douek of Stanford, the Knight First Amendment Center, and Jack Balkin apparently, I can be banned for doing the "harm" of misgendering someone on twitter. Why does a judge have the right to say things the rest of us don't? And Quoting David Lat, "yes, I’m well aware that the First Amendment applies to governmental actors", but I'm interested in restoring "a culture of free speech" to public life.
I find it a little obscene to read defenses of monopolies that control and limit information because the main concern of legal academics is preserving the ability to regulate the speech of the majority. Douek: "tech platforms are perhaps the most important speech regulators in the world." Kate Klonick calls them "our New Governors." Following Keller—former Associate General Counsel for Google—we're closer to the day when in he were alive the anti-Zionist Karl Popper would be barred from social media, if not academia, as an anti-Semite.
There was a time years ago when guest speakers at the University of Chicago were terrified of having their arguments being ripped apart by students who showed them no deference. Duncan and the students deserve each other.
links:
Facebook blocked Kurdish pages at Erdoğan's request; Musk blocks BBC doc in India at Modi's request; Facebook's algorithms and the mass murder of Rohingya
Early in my career I was a counselor on an adolescent psych unit. What I learned quickly was in order to successfully manage the unit, action had consequences. And the more swiftly and firmly the consequences were delivered the more peaceful and productive the program was for all involved. The students involved in these disruptions should be suspend for the remainder and the Dean should be suspended for 90 days. The message sent by the administration should be that we are indifferent about your point of view but it is unacceptable to disrupt a sanctioned event.
The fact that this behavior currently has no consequences is why it will continue to re-occur
Thank you for this encyclopedic update.
I do not take comments from Rod Dreher on free speech as useful given the facts that: (1) he has become a cheerleader for Viktor Orban and his brand of authoritarianism, and (2) his entire intellectual presence was built on “marriage is forever, no matter how bad it gets, and therefore must be restricted from Same-sex couples” and then he divorced his wife. He is no more credible than Jimmy Swaggert.
Again, the continuing controversy here points to what I commented on with your prior post on this debacle: viewpoints that differ from one's own are outright dismissed and ignored rather then debated. Now, I will say that the judge here I do not think is helping himself except with a small subset of people with his strong pushback on the entire incident. However, I think that all of the commentators are not helping themselves either with their limited and narrow view of the event. I do not outright favor one side or the other here; rather I think that there needs to be more tolerance for a broader array of views, even those one finds (perhaps even rightly so) offensive. A democratic society benefits from diversity of many things, not just one thing or another.
Hi David,
Ringside has also been covering this, and it's possible you and/or your readers might find our take at least slightly illuminating. From the most recent backwards, https://ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com/p/the-stanford-mob-isnt-going-away https://ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com/p/stanfords-comically-idiotic-response https://ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com/p/mob-rule-at-stanford-law-school-part https://ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com/p/stanford-law-school-replaces-yale
Thanks for your comprehensive and invaluable coverage.
It bears noting that the National Lawyers Guild was a Communist affiliated outfit during the Cold War. There views and tactics have not changed. Why is an organization that supports disruption of those that oppose them and has roots in Communism supported by so much of the Law School consortium while the Federalist Society which leaves other group's speakers alone, attacked? These people will be law professors, lawyers and worst of all, judges. Who besides like minded totalitarians will get a fair hearing before them?
Ken White (Popehat) has written the perfect takedown of this matter.
https://popehat.substack.com/p/hating-everyone-everywhere-all-at
David,
I view your comments on the Stanford controversy with both amusement and alarm. I am amused becasue I find disputes in elite academic institutions strange and funny. I am constantly reminded of the old say that battles in academia are always deadly because they involve so little.
As for alarm, I understand your role is not to cover all free speech disputes, but only those that arise in elite law schools. You focus on the legal elite, so I that is how I see your role. And, given your limited role, your extensive reporting is fine.
But you contribute to a larger problem. The threat to free speech (which is guaranteed only against government restrictions, not against private universities, if you want to be technical) is threatened most from the right, not the left. The right has entire state governments under its control and uses that control to launch masssive attacks against free speech. See, for example, the "don't say gay law" in Florida, the legislation against drag queens in Tennessee, the legislation in Idaho against anyone commenting on abortion, and similar efforts in Texas. Many of these laws carry criminal penalties. Standford law school, which may punish the protesters, cannot sentence them to prison.
My point is there is no equivalence. Judge Duncan may have been inconvenienced, but he was not threatened with prison. Gay teachers in Florida, or drag queens in Tenneseee face far worse consequences.
What you do is amplify the complaints of the right on free speech issues. They do not need amplification. But by doing so, you allow right wing politicians and commentators to argue that free speech faces greater threats from the left than the right, when the opposite is true.
Free speech need not worry about petty incidents at Stanford Law School. But it should worry every time the legislatures of Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho convene. Keep that in mind.
Richard Antognini
One problem in universities now is that it is extremely difficult to hold in check or discipline "woke" DEI administrators--no matter how they act. Doing so risks terrible plublicity, and rebellion from a faction of studetns the DEI administartors have themselves urged towards radical actions. Thus at many schoools, the DEI administrators are now more powerful than any Provost or President: invulnerable. The behavior of the DEI administrator at Oberlin cost the college $33 million in a successful slander suit over a false charge of "racism"--but she didn't lose her job. The behavior of the DEI administrator at Stanford Law School has broken new ground now by personally leading a student disruption of an invited speaker--a conservative judge--seizing the podium from him and verbally attacking him. When the Law School Dean publicly apologized for this outrageous act by a university official, she faced a large public protest from law students in response to her daring to apologize. Maybe the Dean will resign; but the DEI administrator is in absolutely no danger of being suspended.
I note that an eyewitness said that most of the protestors against the Dean's apology were 1L's. These are the very latest cohort graduating from hot-house Humanities and Social Science undergraduate education. Just think about what's coming next.
I'm going to turn into a troll on this issue for one comment, but I still want to know why free speech in the academy is more worthy of defense than free speech for the public, where following the model of content moderation as defined by Daphne Keller and Evelyn Douek of Stanford, the Knight First Amendment Center, and Jack Balkin apparently, I can be banned for doing the "harm" of misgendering someone on twitter. Why does a judge have the right to say things the rest of us don't? And Quoting David Lat, "yes, I’m well aware that the First Amendment applies to governmental actors", but I'm interested in restoring "a culture of free speech" to public life.
I find it a little obscene to read defenses of monopolies that control and limit information because the main concern of legal academics is preserving the ability to regulate the speech of the majority. Douek: "tech platforms are perhaps the most important speech regulators in the world." Kate Klonick calls them "our New Governors." Following Keller—former Associate General Counsel for Google—we're closer to the day when in he were alive the anti-Zionist Karl Popper would be barred from social media, if not academia, as an anti-Semite.
There was a time years ago when guest speakers at the University of Chicago were terrified of having their arguments being ripped apart by students who showed them no deference. Duncan and the students deserve each other.
links:
Facebook blocked Kurdish pages at Erdoğan's request; Musk blocks BBC doc in India at Modi's request; Facebook's algorithms and the mass murder of Rohingya
https://www.propublica.org/article/sheryl-sandberg-and-top-facebook-execs-silenced-an-enemy-of-turkey-to-prevent-a-hit-to-their-business
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/24/twitter-elon-musk-modi-india-bbc/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/