NEW: Hundreds of Stanford students lined the halls yesterday to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Kyle Duncan, the judge shouted down last week.
Martinez arrived to the classroom where she teaches constitutional law to find a whiteboard covered in fliers attacking Duncan and defending those who disrupted him. The fliers parroted the argument, made by student activists, that the heckler’s veto is a form of free speech.
"We, the students in your constitutional law class, are sorry for exercising our 1st Amendment rights," some fliers read. As a private law school, Stanford is not bound by the First Amendment.
When Martinez’s class adjourned, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read "counter-speech is free speech," stared silently at Martinez as she exited the room, according to five students who witnessed the episode.
The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school. And the majority of Martinez’s class—approximately 50 students out of the 60 enrolled—participated in the protest themselves.
The few who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame.
"They gave us weird looks if we didn’t wear black" and join the crowd, said Luke Schumacher, a first-year law student in Martinez’s class.
"It didn’t feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating."
Another student in the class, who likewise declined to protest, said the spectacle was a surreal experience.
"It was eerie," the student said. "The protesters were silent, staring from behind their masks at everyone who chose not to protest, including the dean."
Ironically, the student added, "this form of protest would have been completely fine" at Duncan’s talk on Thursday.
This protest was even larger than the one that disrupted Duncan’s talk, and came on the heels of statements from at least three student groups rebuking Martinez’s apology.
The Stanford National Lawyers Guild said Saturday that Martinez had thrown "capable and compassionate administrators" under the bus. Stanford’s immigration law group issued a similar declaration Sunday, writing that Martinez’s apology to Duncan "only made this situation worse."
And Stanford Law School’s chapter of the American Constitution Society expressed outrage that Martinez and Tessier-Lavigne had framed Duncan "as a victim, when in fact he himself had made civil dialogue impossible."
The groups argued that the students who disrupted Duncan, in violation of Stanford’s free speech policies, were merely exercising their own free speech rights. That idea appears to be shared by Tirien Steinbach, the diversity dean who harangued Duncan.
In a conversation with students after the event, Steinbach claimed the hecklers hadn’t violated any law school policies, according to two people who witnessed the conversation.
She also alleged that Duncan hadn’t prepared a speech—a claim contradicted by video of the judge holding pages of pre-written remarks—and that he was a serial provocateur, belittling law students everywhere he's spoken in order to rile them up for the cameras.
Steinbach, who did not respond to a request for comment, laid the blame for the chaos entirely at Duncan’s feet, the people who witnessed the conversation said.
Martinez said at the start of her class that she had received a number of emails complaining about her apology to Duncan—which was co-signed by the president of Stanford—but told students they would not be litigating that dispute during Monday’s class.
After Martinez left the building, Schumacher said, the protesters began to cheer, cry, and hug. "We are creating a hostile environment at this law school," Schumacher said—"hostile for anyone who thinks an Article III judge should be able to speak without heckling."
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NEW: Princeton is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests.🧵
Princeton has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees.
The board is all but certain to approve the promotion, which would make Peralta eligible for deanships and other leadership roles, given that the group nearly always rubber stamps the university's appointments, professors familiar with the matter said.
NEW: The World Professional Association for Transgender Health asserted that gender surgeries and hormones were "medically necessary" so that insurance companies would pay for them, letting concerns about the treatments' affordability dictate claims about their effectiveness.🧵
WPATH's standards of care were updated in 2022 to include language about the medical necessity of hormones and surgeries because, as one WPATH official wrote in an email, the group was frustrated with America's "obtuse and unhealthy system of healthcare 'coverage.'"
Most private insurance plans and state Medicaid policies exclude procedures deemed elective or cosmetic. That is why, in 2016, WPATH issued a statement describing gender treatments as "medically necessary" and urging U.S. insurers to cover them.
NEW: Top Columbia officials conceded in private that their rules for managing student protests "don't work," according to new text messages released this week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
They also mocked one of their colleagues as a “clown.”🧵
The messages, sent during a May 31 panel on Jewish life, reference the cards that Columbia administrators, or "delegates," have been handing out to protesters since last year in an effort to break up unauthorized gatherings.
The cards instruct recipients to show their student IDs and notify them of possible sanctions, including a semester's suspension, if they don't pack up and leave.
NEW: The deans at the center of the Columbia texting scandal said Jewish students were "coming from a place of privilege" and suggested they have more institutional support than their peers because of their supposed wealth, according to new messages reviewed by the Beacon.🧵
The messages, obtained by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and released on Tuesday, show that three of the deans—Susan Chang-Kim, Matthew Patashnick, and Cristen Kromm—engaged in a more extensive pattern of disparagement than has been previously reported.
"I’m going to throw up," Chang-Kim, Columbia’s vice dean and chief administrative officer, wrote to her colleagues roughly an hour into the panel. freebeacon.com/campus/amazing…
NEW: The dean of Columbia College, Josef Sorett, mocked Columbia’s top Hillel official in a new text message obtained by the Beacon, further implicating him in the scandal that’s caused three of his colleagues to be placed on leave.
“LMAO,” Sorett said of the rabbi’s remarks.🧵
Sorett’s text came in response to a sarcastic message from his colleague, Columbia’s vice dean and chief administrative officer Susan Chang-Kim, who said of Columbia’s Hillel director, Brian Cohen, "He is our hero."
The exchange, according to the person who photographed Chang-Kim’s cell phone during the May 31 panel on anti-Semitism, came as Cohen told a concerned parent that his "soul has been broken" by the protests on Columbia’s campus, which included calls to murder Jewish students.
One reason the UCLA whistleblowers came forward is that their medical students couldn’t perform basic lab tests—the kind that that might be used to diagnosis life-threatening conditions like, well, sepsis.
"I have students on their rotation who don't know anything," a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon. "People get in and they struggle."