Dismantle DEI IdeologyThe disgraceful scenes at Stanford are a flawless embodiment of how diversity doctrine distorts academic life and constrains decision-making.
Heather Mac Donald
26 Mar 2023
For now, the adults at the Stanford Law School appear to be in charge. In a March 22nd letter addressed to the “SLS Community,” Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martínez unequivocally repudiated the shoutdown of federal judge Kyle Duncan by Stanford law students earlier this month. The law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, who had lectured Duncan about his allegedly injurious presence on campus, has been placed on leave. That is the good news.
Martínez’s letter is one of the most thorough defenses of academic free speech to come from a college administrator in recent years. However, she has declined to discipline the students involved in the heckling. Distinguishing those students who had engaged in punishable conduct from those who had not would be too difficult, she claims. Moreover, the hecklers had not been warned that they risked sanctions. Punishing the hecklers would also leave unpunished those who did not literally disrupt the event but whose vulgar signs or insulting personal questions were outside the norms of civil discourse.
Instead of discipline, Martínez will require all law students to attend a half-day session on free speech later in the semester. (One can’t help but observe that Judge Duncan’s student hosts, who engaged in no speech disruption, do not seem to be in need of such training.) The reasons for Martínez’s amnesty are not persuasive. Nevertheless, that amnesty could serve as an acceptable compromise if other measures to prevent a reoccurrence were in place. They are not, and Martínez’s letter shows why they likely never will be.
First, however, it is worth recalling the details of the Steinbach affair, since it is a flawless embodiment of how diversity ideology distorts academic life and constrains decision-making. The Stanford Law School chapter of the Federalist Society had invited Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan to deliver a speech titled, “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: COVID, Guns, and Twitter.” Judge Duncan was a 2018 Trump appointee to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Headquartered in New Orleans, the circuit is the most conservative federal appellate court in the country.
Duncan’s remarks, had he been permitted to deliver them, were going to address how appellate courts reach their decisions in areas of doctrinal flux before the Supreme Court has fully established an emerging legal rule. The speech would have provided Stanford’s future lawyers with practical insights into the evolution of federal case law. It would also have given them the opportunity to interact with a judge who has been centrally involved in his circuit’s important recent cases.
Such considerations mattered nothing to Stanford’s left-wing students, however, because Duncan does not subscribe to contemporary academic orthodoxies. Before becoming a judge, he had written a law-review article as a private lawyer, arguing that the definition of marriage should be left to the states. He had represented a Virginia school board that opposed allowing high-school boys to use girls’ bathrooms. And once on the bench, Duncan had declined to use “she” to refer to a male prisoner federally convicted of possessing child pornography.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/03/26/dismantle-dei-ideology/
