Aaron Sibarium Profile picture
Mar 14, 2023 17 tweets 3 min read Read on X
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.

The students effectively subjected Martinez to an intimidating walk of shame.🧵freebeacon.com/campus/student…
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. ImageImage
"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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More from @aaronsibarium

Dec 18
NEW: Amy Wax told UPenn last week that she will sue the university for race discrimination if it does not drop the sanctions against her.

She's arguing that by punishing speech that offends racial minorities—but not speech that offends Jews—Penn violated civil rights law.🧵 Image
Penn has until December 19 to "conclusively disavow" the penalties. "Should you fail to do so," her attorney wrote in a letter to Penn, "Professor Wax will file suit against the University."
Because Penn promises its professors academic freedom, the letter argues that the school breached its contract with Wax by punishing her for protected speech. It notes that Penn took no action against professors who spewed anti-Semitic bile after the October 7 attacks.
Read 8 tweets
Dec 9
NEW: The top neuropsychology organizations in North America may soon adopt training guidlines that call on clinicians to use "social justice frameworks," fight "systemic oppression," and pursue "equitable and just scientific knowledge."

Board certification is on the line.🧵 Image
The guidelines are the product of two years of meetings between the field’s main professional groups and could reshape the entire discipline.

Neuropsych is the branch of medicine that diagnoses brain injuries, including concussions, by administering tests of cognitive function.
In 2022, delegates from the field’s membership and credentialing organizations met in Minneapolis to draft a new set of guidelines, or "competencies," meant to guide neuropsychology education.

It was clear from the start that those guidelines would have an ideological bent.
Read 28 tweets
Nov 26
NEW: ~40 departments at the University of Illinois Chicago have pledged, in writing, to hire faculty based on race.

One department justified its quotas by claiming that minorities "have a greater sense" of the "nature of teaching."

Here's how UIC is openly flouting the law:🧵 Image
In September 2022, the Department of Industrial Engineering made a bold promise to UIC's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Engagement: From then on, the department said, 50 percent of all faculty hires would be either women or minorities. Image
Citing the need for "culturally relevant pedagogy," the department explained that "minoritized" professors "tend to have a greater sense" of "the human, social, and communal nature of teaching and learning." Image
Read 29 tweets
Nov 18
NEW: In a required class for first-year medical students, UCSF praised an anti-Israel protest that shut down the Bay Bridge, delayed the delivery of donated organs, and put UCSF's own patients at risk.

If you find that hard to believe, wait till you see the other lessons.🧵 Image
UCSF has a mandatory unit on "justice and advocacy in medicine," which covers "issues like racism, ableism, and patriarchy" and spans six weeks—more than the amount of time spent on basic anatomy or cardiovascular health.

Those six weeks contain some shocking material.
One lesson describes "objectivity" and "urgency" as characteristics of "white supremacy culture"—and says students should "consider reporting" those traits, each of which is depicted as a bottle of poison. Image
Image
Read 34 tweets
Oct 22
EXCLUSIVE: In 2007, Kamala Harris plagiarized pages of Congressional testimony from a Republican colleague.

And in 2012, she plagiarized a fictionalized story about sex trafficking—but presented it as a real case.

It's not just one book; it's a career-long pattern.🧵 Image
On April 24, 2007, Harris testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of a student loan repayment program. Virtually her entire testimony about the program was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois. Image
Harris devoted approximately 1,500 words to the program. Nearly 1,200 of them—or 80 percent—were copied verbatim from the statement Logli submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 27, 2007, two months before Harris delivered her testimony. Image
Read 42 tweets
Oct 17
NEW: Harvard punished a Taiwanese student, Cosette Wu, who disrupted a talk by China's ambassador.

But it declined to punish a Chinese student who forcibly dragged Wu from the event.

After video of the assault went viral, Harvard even gave that student a letter of apology .🧵 Image
Wu got in all of 20 seconds of heckling before a student from China grabbed Wu and, in an incident that the university's police department logged as an assault, ejected her from the event.
The student was Hongji Zou, a master's candidate in Harvard's Graduate School of Education and an officer in Harvard's chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association—a group overseen by the Chinese Communist Party.
Read 52 tweets

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