The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium covers the plight of free speech in higher education. He contacted Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan after he was made the object of the Two Minutes Hate at Stanford Law School with the support of one Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
As Steve Hayward noted in “Stanford University disgraces itself,” Judge Duncan was beyond inclusion. His inclusion at an event sponsored by the Federalist Society was an inclusion too far. Sibarium picks up the story with comments from Judge Duncan:
[Judge] Duncan, who was shouted down by Stanford Law School students as administrators looked on in silence, says the protesters behaved like “dogshit.”
Now, in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, Duncan is calling on the school to discipline the students who disrupted his talk and to fire the school’s associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion, who stepped in during the event to chastise him and deliver what the judge described as a “bizarre therapy session from hell.”
Duncan’s remarks come after nearly a hundred students at Stanford Law School disrupted his remarks in brazen violation of Stanford University’s free speech policies.
One source of the students’ ire was Duncan’s refusal, in a 2020 opinion, to use a transgender sex offender’s preferred pronouns. The Stanford event, which was sponsored by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, got so out of hand that federal marshals eventually escorted Duncan from the building.
Tirien Steinbach, the school’s diversity dean, arrived on the scene when Duncan himself asked for an administrator to restore order. She then took to the podium and, in a video that has now circulated widely online, accused the judge of causing “harm.”
“Your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement” of the students’ rights, Steinbach said, accusing him of “tearing the fabric of this community.”
“Do you have something so incredibly important to say,” she asked him, that it is worth the “division of these people?”
Duncan warned that what happens at Stanford, long the second-ranked law school in the country, behind Yale, is unlikely to stay there. “If enough of these kids get into the legal profession,” he said, “the rule of law will descend into barbarism.”
Sibarium includes the usual nonresponse from those responsible: “Neither Steinbach nor Jenny Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law School, responded to a request for comment.”
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