A normal reaction to failure is to do something about it. Either you work to actively to rectify your past mistakes or take new steps to avoid making those same mistakes in future.
Yale Law School administrators, however, seem not to have learned this lesson. As the consequences of the school’s embrace of cancel culture come home to roost, the administration is meeting a demand for action by doubling down on the kinds of policies that got them into trouble in the first place.
Last month, federal Judge James Ho announced he would no longer accept law clerks from Yale Law School as a result of the school’s anti-free speech policies. Thirteen additional federal judges followed suit shortly after.
One can agree or disagree with these judges’ decision, but all of this was avoidable. Yale had been warned repeatedly that its campus culture and administrative policies had become unacceptably hostile toward differing views. Earlier this year, for example, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, notified Yale that it had fallen to the very bottom of its free speech rankings, coming in 198th place out of the 203 schools ranked. And in February, FIRE gave Yale a Lifetime Censorship award.
Yale chose to do nothing.
Likewise, Yale Law School’s response to the judges’ boycott has been disappointing and even alarming. In a recent message, Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken tried, and failed, to make the case that she and her administration really do support free speech on campus.
Laughably, Gerken highlights an incident from March of this year, during which more than 100 Yale Law students shouted down a panel on free speech, as a demonstration of Yale standing up for free speech.
Gerken claims a letter she sent almost three weeks after the event laying out Yale’s policies on the disruption of campus speech constitutes a “concrete [step] to reaffirm our enduring commitment to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas.”
Yet no students were punished for disrupting the panel. All Yale did was reiterate policies that it isn’t enforcing. What message does that send other than that there will be no consequences for those who disrespect and trample on the free speech rights of others?
Among Yale’s more concerning “concrete steps” is a new policy prohibiting “surreptitious recordings” on campus — a move that seems more designed to protect the school from bad publicity than to support free speech.
In September 2021, for example, Yale Law School administrators pressured a Native American Yale Law student to apologize for an email party invite sent to the Native American student email list that referred to a “trap house.” Because the student was a member of the campus’s Federalist Society group, his peers reacted to the invite by reporting him to the administration, claiming the email was “triggering.”
When the student refused to apologize, an associate dean indicated the student could face professional consequences. The law school’s diversity director even drafted an apology for the student to sign.
We wouldn’t have known about any of this had the student not recorded the meeting with the administrators in the first place — which is exactly what the school’s new policy against “surreptitious recordings” aims to prevent.
Again, Yale Law School’s new policy is not about fostering free speech. It’s about protecting Yale Law School’s woke bureaucrats from accountability. The administration’s continued failure to apologize for inappropriately pressuring the law student indicates that Yale is more concerned about getting caught than about the suppression of student speech.
One of the other “concrete steps” highlighted by Gerken is the hiring of a “new Dean of Students who is focused on ensuring students learn to resolve disagreements among themselves.” Considering Yale Law School administrators’ past history of putting their thumb on the scale against free speech, there is little reason to believe this will solve the problem, even if the intentions are good.
Yale Law School’s response to the toxic environment growing on its campus has largely been talk. And where there’s been action, it’s been in the wrong direction. To reverse the impression that Yale Law School is hostile to free speech, and to restore the standing of its law students, Yale needs to prove that attempts to shout down or intimidate speakers will result in consequences. Its bureaucrats need to demonstrate true commitment to free speech principles instead of protecting themselves from repercussions when they abandon those ideals.
Yale Law School has done little to assuage the concerns of cancel culture on campus. They need to correct course, and fast.
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Lauren Noble is the founder and executive director of the Buckley Program.
