If
Stanford
and other universities ever start punishing faculty members for abetting totalitarian behavior, they should crack down just as hard on those directly guilty of it â in particular, the totalitarian tots pretending to be “students” who shout down guest speakers to silence them.
Indeed, colleges and especially law schools should implement systems that show no mercy to speech deniers. Punishment should be swift, sure, and significant.
STANFORD SHOULD FIRE ITS DEI DEAN AND REST OF ITS DEI BUREAUCRACY
The subject arises because of the outrageous treatment by Stanford law students and administrators alike of U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan, a speaker duly invited by the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society. The school administrationâs subsequent pretenses of making amends for the abuses were embarrassingly perfunctory and insubstantial.
At the March 9 event, protesting students, some of them yelling astonishing vile things,
heckled Duncan into silence
before he could even begin his speech. As several other administrators sat there without even trying to admonish the students, the schoolâs chief âdiversity, equity, and inclusionâ commissar took the podium herself for a six-minute, prewritten harangue in which she several times mouthed the words âfree speech,â but spent the rest of the time insulting Duncan and encouraging students to walk out. Afterward, students again shouted down the speaker until he was escorted from the premises by federal marshals, for his safety, without ever being able to utter a word of his prepared text.
Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne eventually wrote a mealy-mouthed
âapologyâ
letter to Duncan but announced no punishment for anyone involved. Later, an associate dean emailed student leaders of the Federalist Society chapter advising them that if they needed âresourcesâ to cope with how badly they and their guest speaker were treated, they should âreach outâ to
the very DEI administrator
who gave the harangue.
Conservative media are rightly full of calls for the DEI administrator to be fired. But not enough ire has been directed at the adolescent delinquents who disrupted the speech and who now are
shunning the dean
who dared offer even such a halfhearted apology.
This sort of student loutishness has
become endemic at campuses across the country
in recent years. It must stop. The entire point of college is to open minds and encourage the free flow of ideas. Students and faculty who do the opposite are denying educational opportunities for everyone else on campus. Furthermore, these Leninist legions in law schools trample all respect for the spirit of the very legal system that their jobs will be to uphold.
All colleges run by even half-decent people should fight back. Every college in the nation should adopt an unyielding, prophylactic policy. As part of the requirements for admission to any college, every student should sign a no-exceptions contract guaranteeing respect for free expression. The contract should say that any student, at any time, who takes physical or verbal action resulting in a denial of formal speech privileges will submit to suspension for at least a semester without the right to return of tuition and fees. A second offense should result in a mandatory expulsion.
If a prospective student will not sign such a contract, his letter of admission should be revoked. These rules should be nonnegotiable.
No college should be a space safe from ideas and free expression. College should be safe for unfettered intellectual inquiry and exchange. Those who wonât respect this basic assumption donât belong in college or law school, much less in the court of law â not even as bailiffs. Here in the United States, the land of ordered liberty, the mob must never rule.
