Jeff Zymeri reports for National Review Online a praiseworthy development at a major west coast university.
Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez released a detailed letter Wednesday criticizing the students who heckled federal judge Kyle Duncan and announcing that DEI administrator Tirien Steinbach, who interrupted his lecture, is now on leave. Martinez declined to submit to calls that she retract her letter of apology to Duncan and emphasized that Stanford’s speaker disruption policy was violated by both students and administrators.
At an event hosted by Stanford’s Federalist Society earlier this month, Duncan, who sits on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, was expecting to give a wide-ranging lecture on recent decisions that Court had handed down. However, audio and video of the event revealed that the judge was immediately heckled upon beginning his talk, with students shouting obscenities at him. When Duncan asked an administrator to intervene, he was subject to Steinbach explaining to him that he was tearing the fabric of the Stanford community. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?,” asked Steinbach.
Public outcry followed shortly thereafter. Some called for the students who heckled Duncan to be expelled and for Steinbach to be fired. Others, including many Stanford Law students, criticized and sought to shame Martinez for her public apology to Duncan, demanding she retract it.
In a ten-page letter to the Stanford Law community, Martinez announced that no students would be punished individually, instead preferring “mandatory educational programming for our student body” on freedom of speech and academic freedom.
She also announced that Steinbach was on leave and that moving forward “the role of any administrators present will be to ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed, and all staff will receive additional training in that regard.”
For Martinez, the commitment to diversity and inclusion does not mean speech should be limited, but precisely the opposite.
