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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Mar 23
One day after Stanford Law School reiterated that the behavior of its DEI dean, Tirien Steinbach, was unacceptable, Steinbach writes in the Wall Street Journal that she was merely trying to “defuse the situation” so that Judge Duncan could speak.

wsj.com/articles/diver…
“I pointed out that while free speech isn’t easy or comfortable, it’s necessary for democracy, and I was glad it was happening at our law school.” In fact, she said she was glad that the /protest that disrupted Duncan and violated Stanford’s free speech policies/ was happening.
“I asked Judge Duncan, ‘Is the juice worth the squeeze?’ I was referring to the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech: to consider not only the benefit of our words but also the consequences.”

Consequences? He was there to talk about cryptocurrency regulation!
Read 4 tweets
Mar 22
Key points from the memo:

-Steinbach on leave.
-No punishment for students—in part because administrators sent "conflicting signals about whether what was happening was acceptable.”
-Mandatory training not just on free speech, but “professional conduct.”🧵freebeacon.com/campus/stanfor…
Jenny Martinez, the law school's dean, sent the memo to all Stanford Law students on Wednesday morning. It takes several swipes at Steinbach, saying that administrators "should not insert themselves into debate with their own criticism of the speaker's views."
At future talks, the role of administrators will be to "ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed," Martinez said.

She gave no additional details on the terms of Steinbach's leave, stating that Stanford doesn’t comment on “pending personnel matters."
Read 13 tweets
Mar 22
BREAKING: in non-Stanford news, a Pennsylvania lawmaker on Tuesday issued a veiled threat to withhold funding from the University of Pittsburgh over the school's decision to allow several conservative speakers on campus.🧵

freebeacon.com/democrats/penn…
During an appropriations hearing on university funding, Pennsylvania state representative La'Tasha Mayes (D.) demanded that Pitt disinvite Cabot Phillips, Riley Gaines, and Michael Knowles from upcoming campus events.
All three speakers have a history of "targeting transgender students," Mayes claimed—especially Knowles, whom she accused of saying that "transgender people should be eradicated."
Read 18 tweets
Mar 20
NEW: Is the juice worth the squeeze? Stanford Law School sure seems to think so: the DEI dean who berated judge Duncan makes as much as $201,200–more than twice the salary of most Stanford postdocs, and considerably more than many tenure-track positions.🧵freebeacon.com/campus/is-the-…
Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean of DEI, makes between 100k and 200k a year, according to Stanford’s internal salary structure. For context, an assistant professor at Stanford’s school of sustainability has a max base salary of just $145,000.
Even Steinbach’s minimum salary, $95,800, would put her in the top fifth of U.S. earners: In 2021, the median American family only made $70,784.

The dean has become an overnight avatar for what the Wall Street Journal called the "tyranny of the DEI bureaucracy."
Read 21 tweets
Mar 17
Wokeness is a political and social movement characterized by the following:

-A strong and in practice unrebuttable presumption that certain salient group disparities are due entirely to oppression.
-A willingness to jettison longstanding legal, political, and social norms in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
This isn’t a set of necessary and sufficient conditions or an exhaustive list of the traits. But it is clearly a good approximation of what most people mean.
Other distinguishing characteristics, via a friend:

-A belief that oppression, while pervasive, is also concealed.
- A sense that unmasking oppression requires the special insight of those with “lived experience,” which can be partially imparted through trainings and experts.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 17
NEW: The same students who plastered the names and faces of the Stanford Federalist Society all over the school are now demanding anonymity from the Free Beacon.

They say we've violated their right to privacy by identifying them.

You can't make it up.🧵 freebeacon.com/campus/at-stan…
On Sunday, I identified board members of the Stanford National Lawyers Guild--one of the groups responsible for the posters--who in a public statement described the protest as "Stanford Law School at its best."

A few hours later, the board demanded I redact their names.
One of the board members, Lily Bou, demanding that we remove her name and those of her classmates. "Listing our names serves no purpose other than to invite abuse and harassment," she wrote in an email.

I wonder what purpose the posters of the fedsoc board served.
Read 10 tweets

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