Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Stanford was once one of the world’s great universities. It birthed Silicon Valley in its prime. And along with its nearby twin and rival, UC Berkeley, its brilliant researchers, and teachers helped fuel the mid-20th-century California miracle.
That was then. But like the descent of California, now something has gone terribly wrong with the university.
Students at Stanford Law School recently shouted down visiting Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan. He had been invited to give a lecture by the school’s Federalist Society.
The judge never even got the chance. The law school students drowned him out. They flashed obscene placards. They screamed that he was “scum.” One yelled he hoped the judge’s own daughters would be raped.
Others bellowed, “You’re not welcome here, we hate you!” “Leave and never come back!” “We hate FedSoc [Federal Society] students, f–k them, they don’t belong here either!” and “We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!”
When the judge tried to reply, they drowned him out with “liar” and “scumbag.” Then, mission accomplished, they smugly stomped out.
Note these were ostensibly not teenaged undergraduates. Instead, they were wannabe adult professionals, in law school to learn jurisprudence and to enter the elite American legal system that is supposed to have protocols separating it from the mobocracies prevailing abroad.
One of those foundational principles is to honor the Constitution’s protection of free speech and expression—not to mention the ancient idea of respecting an invited guest, or the custom to treat with deference a federal judge, to say nothing of the duty to honor the codes and laws of the institution that they have chosen to join which prohibit disruption of lectures and any effort to drive out public speakers.
When an exasperated Justice Duncan called out for a university administrator to restore calm, his podium was instead hijacked by Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach. She then gave her own preplanned, scripted lecture that sided with the disruptive protesters! Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The diversity dean then turned on the speaker. She asked the startled judge whether it was even worth supporting his free speech rights, given he and his views were deemed abhorrent to the new absolutist Stanford.
Note well: DEI Deans normally do not attend law school lectures. She showed up because she apparently knew in advance that the law students would violate their own university’s codes of conduct and disrupt a speaker.
So she had planned, again in advance, to do nothing to stop them. Instead, she would prepare a performance-art speech for such a certainty, to chastise the speaker and defend the disrupters. She assumed correctly that none of the other administrators, who also strangely attended, would admonish her or the students for violating the laws of their own university. She apparently assumed, once more rightly, that her own leftist fides on campus would be enhanced.
So far neither the diversity dean nor the students have been disciplined by the university. When the dean of the law school, Jenny Martinez, offered an apology (but did not punish the students), most of her own class walked out on her. And dozens of Stanford’s law school students lined the corridor in attempts to intimidate her as if she was some sort of toxic pariah.
In a Soviet-style finale, the Acting Associate Dean of Students Jeanne Merino advised the Federalist Society students who were targeted by fellow law students that there were “resources that you can use right now to support your safety and mental health.” Then Merino directed them, inter alia, to none other than Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Dean Tirien Steinbach herself, the very dean who had taken over the podium to lecture Judge Duncan!
The debacle revealed four disturbing characteristics about the Stanford law students: One, they acted as if they were bullies and cowards. Videos of the mess showed how they turned mob-like in their chanting, flashing creepy placards, and, like Maoists, walking out on cue. Yet, when the judge fired back at their rudeness, like wounded fawns they took offense and pouted. And later, when there was mention that the names or photos of the protestors might be published, tit-for-tat, in the manner they themselves had put up posters of the Federalist Society members, they screamed that such exposure was unfair.
Two, they seem incompetent. To the degree there were any questions and answers, few knew how or even attempted to engage the judge on matters of the law and judicial theory. In other words, any grammar-school students could have matched their performance since it required no knowledge of the law, just an ability to chant and—in groupthink style—cry, scream, and mimic the majority.
Three, they were arrogant. One protestor blurted out that Justice Duncan probably could not have gotten into Stanford, as if their own puerile performance was proof of the school’s high standards of admission. That was as obnoxious in addition to the fact that, as of recently, it may have become not so true. In July 2022, Stanford Law School announced that an uncharacteristic 14 percent of its graduates had flunked the California bar exam on their first attempt, a radical increase from past years. Four other California law schools—UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Irvine, and USC—had a higher bar pass rate.
After watching the sad performance, one wonders who taught such rude and unimpressive people.
Ethics complaints were lodged last year against Stanford Law Professor Michele Dauber for tweeting a series of gross attacks on Camille Vasquez (“some Pick Me Girl lawyer”), the widely regarded attorney of Johnny Depp. Law professor Dauber also tweeted sick fantasies about Depp’s death—and imagined the actor’s corpse would “end up in a trash can eaten by rats.” Was she the sort of model that the law students had emulated?
Then there was Professor Pamela Karla’s 2019 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the impeachment of President Trump. Off-topic and gratuitously, Karla weirdly attacked the name of the president’s youngest son, Barron Trump: “While the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.” Was that the sort of puerility that the law students sought to embrace?
In 2021, a graduating Stanford law student sent the law school student body a bogus call to violence as if it was authored by the school’s small conservative Federalist Society. The fake call to arms read in part: “The Stanford Federalist Society presents: The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection . . . Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event . . . ” Was that the sort of smear that the law students learned?
Sam Bankman-Fried, the architect of the $26 billion FTX cryptocurrency meltdown that destroyed the livelihoods of thousands, is the son of two other Stanford Law School professors. Somehow they were involved in the Bankman-Fried family’s acquisition of a $16.4 million vacation home gifted to them from FTX shortly before it imploded.
According to the New York Times, both parent professors were intimately involved in their son’s multibillion-dollar business, either directly or through gifts to one parent’s political donor network:
He [Professor Bankman] and his wife, the Stanford Law professor Barbara Fried, were more than just supportive parents backing their child’s business. Mr. Bankman was a paid FTX employee who traveled frequently to the Bahamas, where the exchange was based. Ms. Fried did not work for the company, but her son was among the donors in a political advocacy network that she orchestrated.
Were these the ethical models that had influenced the law students?
Bankman-Fried is currently out on a $250 million bond and living under bond on the Stanford campus. He is out, in part, because two Stanfordites, former law school dean Larry Kramer and Andreas Paepcke, a Stanford senior research scientist, put up a $500,000 guarantee. Former Stanford student Caroline Ellison, a partner with Sam Bankman-Fried in his various financial collapses, has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and is now working with prosecutors.
Perhaps the law school should not be singled out since it simply reflects what appears to be symptomatic of a once-great university’s freefall.
A former Stanford student Elizabeth Holmes was recently sentenced to a long prison term for defrauding investors in connection with her company Theranos. She had fraudulently claimed to have invented a “revolutionary” miniaturized blood testing device. Many of her corporation’s oversight board members were drawn from the Stanford community.
The Wall Street Journal recently ridiculed a Stanford university group’s publication of a taboo vocabulary list (“Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”). “Harmful” words supposedly unwelcome at Stanford included inflammatory expressions such as “American” and “immigrant.”
The Journal also noted that perhaps the cause of such Orwellianism was too many idle administrators chasing too few students: “For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.”
More disturbing was the revelation of a “snitch list.” The harmful language initiative apparently is tangential to another new idea of rewarding Stanford snitches who feel offended by hurtful expression. Or, as the so-called “The Protected Identity Harm (PIH) Reporting” system put it, software will monitor campus speech and even offer “financial rewards for finding/reporting” any who supposedly violate approved language usage.
Was this the sort of campus experience that the parents of Stanford students pay for at about $90,000 per year?
Stanford was also plagued by a recent admissions scandal when a former head sailing coach accepted donations to his Stanford sailing program in exchange for trying to help two students’ admission applications.
Then there were campus attacks on a pair of imminent Stanford public health experts, Drs. Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya. Both were pilloried mercilessly by some of the Stanford faculty and administration for daring to doubt the efficacy of what has proved to be disastrous government-enforced COVID quarantines and school shutdowns.
Yet the arguments of Atlas and Bhattacharya—the science does not support the mandatory use of masks to halt the pandemic, natural immunity was as efficacious as or superior to vaccine-induced immunity, the vaccinations would not offer lasting protection against either being infected or infecting someone else, and the quarantine lockdowns would cause more damage and death (familial abuse, suicides, substance abuse, mental depression, uneducated children, economic catastrophe, millions of missed surgeries, screenings, tests, and doctor’s appointments) than the virus itself—were all eventually substantiated.
Neither doctor received apologies from the administrators, faculty, or students who attacked them.
Currently Stanford’s long-serving president Marc Tessier-Lavigne—an accomplished neuroscientist—has been attacked serially by the Stanford Daily campus newspaper, which has called for his resignation. It alleges the president was culpable of scholarly misconduct concerning the publication of a joint research paper decades ago. The charges are not proven and remain under investigation. But they make it difficult for a president to weigh in on the above controversies when some faculty and the student newspaper are serially calling for him to step down for ethics violations.
In July 2020, a Stanford visiting neurology researcher, Chen Song, was arrested for not disclosing that she had apparently been an agent of China’s People’s Liberation Army. Stanford had also been investigated by the Department of Education for some $64 million in alleged Chinese-affiliated donations over a decade, all from previously unnamed, unidentified, and anonymous Chinese donors, most of them believed to be government associated.
The list of serial embarrassments reads like the suicides of Greek tragedy, where divine nemesis follows hubris. In this case, overweening intolerant ideology has sabotaged disinterested inquiry and meritocracy. Arrogance and sanctimoniousness lead Stanford to continue down this spiral—rather than pause, reflect, and redirect—and thereby only compound the public ridicule.
Stanford’s once-justified reputation for civility, transparency, tolerance, and professional ethics has been shredded before a global audience.
Given its hallowed history, and the university’s vital global role in cutting-edge research, medicine, and professional training, something has to change—before it is too late.
The university requires an array of compulsory workshops that faculty and many students must undergo. But given these recent debacles, perhaps two additional new training sessions are needed: required ethics instruction and a mandatory anger-management seminar.
“For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.” 5:1 ratio of admin to faculty. I.e. one non-value overhead employee for every student.
Taking money from China, supporting the Bankman-Frieds, abuse of Atlas and Bhattacharya, embarrassments by professors Dauber and Karla, “Snitch List” bounties,…
Stanford leading American education to the bottom.
I can tell you for certain, I will never hire a Stanford Attorney that attended that miserable Law School. I will write down class of 2021-2023. Apparently, acting like good little Marxist, rather than listening to a FEDERAL JUDGE, who knowledge might have been helpful, the go and shoot down knowledge. I suggest Stanford, demand everyone involved to be removed from the University. Those pack of monsters obviously are not for blind justice and will only harm the Judicial System, more than it is now. Shame on all of you.
You don’t just mean 2022-23 students. You mean from this day forward until policy at the University changes.
All protesters pictures should be posted at every law office and every judge clerkship they apply to.
Their parents money will be wasted since these students will be in hirable
So, will things at Stanford change for the better? No, they will get worse, and one thing we know about the Left is, they can always get worse. My bet is, this institution will deteriorate to the point at which all value it once had will disappear. It’s getting there rapidly. In cell biology, it’s known as apoptosis.
Great analogy…..”Apoptosis”!!
Betsy, I agree that Robert’s use of the word “apoptosis” was effective! Programmed cell death is a drastic measure to ensure that defective cells do not end up killing the organism of which they are a part. Can toxic, rude, arrogant and obnoxious students destroy a university to which they belong?
Those students can destroy, and are destroying their university. And that university is apparently in favor of the destruction.
Isn’t apoptosis the normal (e.g., natural, necessary) death of cells while the organism continues to grow and thrive?
I would hardly think of what is happening at Stanford Law School to be normal, natural, or necessary? (But it is highly self-destructive for juris prudence.)
Thomas, you are correct in your statement that apoptosis is a normal process in development. Apoptosis also functions to remove virally infected cells, precancerous cells and DNA damaged cells. It’s a good thing when discussion elevates knowledge! I chose the cancer removing function to describe the law students in question at Stanford.
Thank you for an excellent, very detailed essay about the problems at Stanford. It is concerning that these law school students will be our future judges and politicians. This chaos is surely not isolated to Stanford. We as a society are in trouble if this becomes more the norm rather than the exception. Interesting that these students demand an unfettered platform to speak and the safe spaces to do so, while any conservative view point is squashed or attacked. True free speech comes with a. cost, and may result in either the loss of one’s job or reputation, or threats of physical attack. The “thought police” will continue with their intimidation or worse.
One ray of hope is that they may not, in fact, be our future lawyers … if they can’t even pass the bar!
Excellent layout of the facts demonstrating Stanford University’s steep decline in many areas especially common sense. The state of California needs more common sense, too.
Stanford Law School seems to be reviving the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s 1984. What’s next?
May wish to correct 2 typos: (1) Prof. Pamela Karlan, not Karla, and (2) eminent, not imminent scholars attacked. (Then please delete this comment with tolerance for a long time tech writer who can’t help himself from proofreading.)
Everything woke turns to ____. Stanford has gone Beyone the Valley of the Ultra-Woke.
God Bless you Victor. I fear it’s too late.
I too have a connection to Stanford. Two relatives were grads, years ago. I have a son that was recruited by many colleges, you know the “elite” schools. During my sons interview at Stanford the lady dean that never really asked questions about my sons qualifications, but instead told him most are not worthy of going to Stanford. After the interview was over my son said Dad, “if accepted I don’t want to be a part of such an arrogant school, take Stanford off the list”.
He went on to graduate with distinction from another high quality business school, there was no non A’s on his transcript. Stanford loss was his gain. This was 2004. Sadly these recent actions or non actions by Stanford, confirmed my sons impression of Stanford and has permanently damaged that once glorious school
An allegory of an institution becoming Icarus.
Almost unbelievable in the fast descent into a hell of their own making.
Dear Dr. Hanson:
May I suggest an anti-money laundering class as well?
Did Alejandro Mayorkus “earn” his law degree from that place?
Excellent analysis. I see the same thing happening to medical schools as Woke administrators take over. The UMN med school asst dean administered students a Woke oath, not any version of the Hippocratic Oath. The Amer College of Surgeons has reportedly gone Woke–merit for training is out; skin color is in. A relative no longer with get on an airplane worried that the pilot’s “affirmative action” skin color may result in a meritless pilot crashing instead of landing a plane. Thank you Prof Hanson. Bob Geist MD
“How far the mighty have fallen!”
To late for Standford the awoken fox are now running the chicken coop. Perhaps they are being groomed for political positions that can be purchased?
Concerning ethics at this once prestigious day care center for spoiled cowardly brats, It was so cold in MN this weekend, I saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets!
Thank you for this detailed outline of the events. They are not covered in this way anywhere else and with such insight. I agree that something drastic needs to occur in order to save this University. I’m also afraid it’s too late.
I am not sure there is a cure for what has happened to the USA’s entire educational system, which was infiltrated years ago at the college and university level and then filtered down into the local schools by teachers graduating from the contaminated higher educational system. It would take decades to undo what is now solidly entrenched in the schools were young children go to learn.
I hate being a pessimist since I am normally the opposite, but once cancer embeds itself into the core of the body, no amount of surgery or drugs can kill it before it kills the host.
It is easy to find the problems, much harder to find the solution for fixing those problems. The only solution I have come up with is for new universities to emerge where freedom of thought and speech are invited and used to expand the minds of our young beyond the current cultism which has taken over the educational world.
Stanford and many others today have a hollow cachet.
Wearing a Polo shirt simply make you a guy in a Polo shirt.
There is a simple solution to the Stanford issue. Expel the students who participated, fire the DEI dean, and reprimand everyone above her who did nothing in response to this disgrace. Have the university chancellor and president make a strong statement defending First-Amendment principles and stating Stanford’s commitment to those principles.
But HST, it will be a cold day you-know-where before any of that ever happens. Which is why these events will continue. If there are no consequences for this event, there is no deterrent to prevent future events.
I am recently retired from a long career at one of our nation’s prominent national laboratories, and thus am no longer involved in hiring or working with technical professionals. For that I am grateful. Throughout my career I have had the honor and the pleasure of working with some of the brightest, most technically proficient scientists and engineers this nation’s colleges have ever produced. Over the last ten years I have witnessed a marked decline in the quality of new college graduates. Attitudes of indignation and victimhood are the norm, as is a fundamental lack of respect for authority, expertise, experience, customs, and traditions. Most are unable to think analytically, to separate logic from emotion, and to put their feelings aside in order to work as a member of a team. Most are unable to face any real challenge that might possibly result in failure, and thus they are unable and unwilling to learn and grow the way we of the last generation did. Many, if not most of the latest generation of professionals would never had made the grade 20 years ago. It is distressing to see that we are, as a nation, sliding quickly into a morass of unenlightened mediocrity.
The first time I knew that things were going very wrong in our institutions of higher learning was when the Howard University students whooped and jumped for joy when OJ, who had viciously murdered his white ex-wife in cold blood, was found not guilty in Los Angeles. That was back in 1995, I believe.
At that point I realized that we had turned over our colleges to radical non-thinkers who were hell-bent on destroying the country and all the decent institutions within.
It has gotten worse every year since. It’s too much and needs to stop.
A simple set of standards should be established and then enforced.
If all the perpetrators of the law school debacle were expelled and their scholarships revoked, this behavior would stop immediately. Publish the names and photos of each idiot so that future potential employers know who to avoid. Be a jerk, lose a career.
This is really not a difficult problem to solve. As Sean Connery once said, “What are you prepared to do?” The alternative is eventual anarchy, which is where we are heading.
Then there were campus attacks on a pair of imminent Stanford public health experts, Drs. Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya.
Good piece, but spelling error: imminent should be eminent!
The laws of economics will resolve this.
Venezuela is still waiting for those laws to kick in. Tyranny just may have over ruled them.
Spot on as usual.
Don’t worry too much concerned citizens. Dial back five years, and the two Stanford Law grads I know were having a ton of trouble cutting their way into the legal system. Dial it back ten years, and the recent Harvard graduates I knew said their friends were all having trouble finding employment. Even with astronomically high rejection rates, the Ivy League and Big Ten have graduated more students than any sector demands. This decade+ job scarcity breeds outlandish behavior as new minted elites fight for recognition and the fides that might give them an edge in their chosen field.
Stanford University: The go-to cutting edge of fascist techniques.
I’m rather curious about Patrisse Khan-Cullors. Why would someone retire from such a lucrative racket?
The left has been pursuing the installation of low-income housing among the suburbs and one could liken the plan to what we did in Vietnam and Afghanistan too by pushing power forward into enemy territory.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors moving into Topanga Canyon might be a variation on the theme. Who else might have moved in by now?
Pearls thrown.
The education system as we know it is dead because it has allowed Maoism and communist pedophilia grooming to overtake it making it a damaging place for a child to be. The American people let this happen to our schools who indoctrinated our generation into wiping out our future generations with mass corruption and mass hatred of several different forms of thought which is now infiltrated into everything we stand for.
I enrolled at Stanford in 1949, graduated in 1953, and received a postgraduate degree in 1957, after my tour of duty in the Marine Corps. Stanford was always a part of me, as I lived a few blocks from campus from 1938 until the war started and we were transferred out of state. I have always been proud of my association with Stanford, but no longer. The parade of liberal partisans with little familiarity with the truth has led me to believe that the Honor Code which was a defining principle has not existed for some time. The recent escapades at the law school with a bunch of mind-numbed robots led by a classless dean is the final straw. In my day this kind of behavior would have led to immediate explusion of the students and the dean. Of course, I can ‘t imagine that such a demonstration would have been permitted. I am cancelling my plans to attend my 70th reunion, and will not consider a gift of any kind other than to the Hoover.
A tour de force which I hope thousands have joined me in forwarding to Stanford board of trustees at boardoffice@stanford.edu
I have been reading VDH for going on to 3 decades. This is the best, and most needed, ever.
Why does anyone pay $90,000 per year for this? How does Stanford even support charging that much for admission? No college education is worth that amount of money, and just think of the qualified diverse students who cannot even think of applying because of such a ridiculous amount of tuition to pay?! Our son attended Stanford when it “only” cost $50,000 per year to attend. (I wanted him to attend USC instead where he could have receive a free ride – on Traveler no doubt!! Our older son graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA with an excellent education at “only” $24,000 per year, and he was even awarded a partial merit scholarship. Stanford laughed at our younger son when he inquired about a merit scholarship. That just wasn’t done! He had worked his way through school, beginning in elementary school, with that goal in mind. Through all of those years he received a straight A report card, with only one B+. Like his father, he went on to earn a MBA, but at UC Davis instead of Stanford, where he graduated #1 in his class! Why all of the emphasis on Stanford to attend? In the Menlo Park and Palo Alto area, and probably well beyond, parents dress their kids in Stanford t-shirts and sweatshirts etc. What a setup for disappointment! There are so many fine and distinguished colleges out there to attend. Give these consideration too. One might discover a better college experience at one of those hidden gems. Stanford has well outgrown its britches!!!
Shocking, shameful, and very, very sad.
Am I the only one to notice that most of the named bad actors in this piece were women? It seems to me that this, too, is becoming the new norm.
No, it’s not a coincidence. George Orwell, in his classic critique of totalitarianism, “Nineteen Eighty Four”, mentioned this specifically. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, observed that it was the women who were the most politically dogmatic, the most intolerant and unforgiving in zealously rooting out enemies of the state. I don’t know if this was a misogynistic viewpoint on Orwell’s part or observed reality which contained the kernel of truth that women are more gullible and easily manipulated by authoritarians because they tend to rely on emotions as opposed to logic and reason when making decisions or formulating opinions. Of course, the novel’s other protagonist, Julia, belied this stereotype and her outward conformity was merely a survival mechanism . You have to wonder how many “Julias” exist at an institution like Stanford. Those rational, intelligent women who choose to hide their true selves to conform to the groupthink so they may enjoy the prestige and benefits that belonging to a cabal of elites affords.
This is sort of an aside to the article, but relevant because it proves Stanford has far-reaching tentacles. My daughter is a fifth grade math teacher at a school in a small, rural town in New England. The kids are being brainwashed by the school district and school board which is filled with extreme Leftists who boast about their DEI program. The school flies the Pride flag and until recently, the BLM flag. However, there are no American flags in the classrooms and they don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance to start the day. They have a no homework policy and aren’t allowed to take their work folders home with them. Parent participation is very limited. My daughter sits in on the fifth grade teacher during history and was shocked by what she heard. The teacher was indoctrinating them with anti-American propaganda or at least a very one-sided view of American history. She said they use materials from the Stanford History Education Group. Everything she told them about the Founding Fathers was negative. They were racists owned slaves, were hypocrites, etc. another time the lesson was about Lewis and Clark expedition. Again, all negative. She only discussed their supposed abuse of the Native Americans, how they were belittled, shamed them, nothing about the expedition itself, the perils they faced or the discoveries they made. She watched the kids’ passive faces as they were exposed to this educational abuse, learning only that their country’s history is rooted in evil.
Educational abuse! Good term.
Stop financially supporting all schools and universities with these far left agendas and watch how fast things will change.
Thank you, VDH, for another glimpse of the truth about what Stanford has become. It is shameful, and I hope the whole university collapses under the weight of the fraud it has become.
Dear Dr. Hanson,
The events you describe in Part I of your “comissariate” series took place in October 1941, not in October 1942, to the best of my knowledge. I thought I would comment here, not being a subscriber.
Thank you.
In the 60s, students exhibited this kind of behavior, and administrators did nothing. Those administrators were moral cowards.
In 2023, students exhibit this kind of behavior, and administrators join in. These administrators are moral bankrupts.
Victor, one more Stanford scandal was identified by Matt Taibbi 5 days ago in his most recent Twitter Files on “The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine”. In it, Taibbi describes the Virality Project where Stanford developed a software program to monitor billions of social media posts across multiple platforms and identify “potential violations” or disinformation “Events” for government directed platform censorship. This is the biggest item yet and we’ve not heard you speak of it yet. We would love your perspective on this insidious activity.
Victor – one of your best efforts here! It certainly educates the readership to the deterioration of campus society and maybe society as a whole. You provide your readers with a great deal more than opinion. You actually provide evidence supporting your claims. How refreshing for you to resurrect this apparently archaic concept. Back in the day you could have been a gifted scientific researcher although today your inductive approach could be considered a liability.
It is 3:30 in the morning, and I again have broken sleep able to read these wonderful essays.. I am so fired up about this article. One egregious lament after another. Why should I care? The reason I should care is in the introduction of your essay. But like ‘True Romance’ , I will take control of my own destiny and be glad I live in the Free State of Florida.
Great article! So, since 1930, Stanford’s logo and mascot was the “Indians” until 1972 when it changed to an awkward “Cardinal” with an incongruous tree as its mascot. And of note, there is a bizarre tree costume that one of its special students actually wears at events! Given the progressive left’s call for African American slavery reparations and the associated dismantling of any related historical links, might Stanford also be ripe for reparations for their wrongs toward Native Americans!? Or, will hypocrisy prevail and exempt this privileged institution?
Why all the anger? Are they attempting to socially shakedown previous generations of students making their claims on American minds? What a farce. My highly qualified grandsons decided not to go to Stanford because of the serious decline in its reputation. Sad.
“The diversity dean then … asked the startled judge whether it was even worth supporting his free speech rights, given he and his views were deemed abhorrent to the new absolutist Stanford.”
I take it this was uttered in the form of a rhetorical question, but an answer to the hostile crowd by the invited speaker ought to be ‘Absolutely. How else do you develop an informed opinion unless you hear what exactly you are supposedly against?’ And there might well be people — or as Rush Limbaugh used to say, young skulls full of mush — who might not have formed a mature opinion on their own and might yet become convinced by what a speaker has to say. The danger to leftists is their ideas lack integrity and those ideas can’t defend themselves against the truth. This is why conservative speakers have to have vile behavior projected on them and made to be abhorrent so they won’t even be heard. This obnoxiousness serves two purposes: one of preventing the speaker present from being heard, the other to discourage or prevent other speakers from wanting to come and be chastised in similar fashion.
Stanford has become purely and simply Maoist! They are a Maoist institution and could have fit just as well in Mao’s China as they do in Woke American society.
Great point, thanks! Back in late 60s @TheFarm (PoliSci ’70) we had the Chicano-Maoist Venceremos. Sick Stanford Virality Project detailed here (Michael Shellenberger): “Why Renee DiResta (CIA Fellow turned Stanford Internet Observatory research manager) Leads The Censorship Industry, the US government efforts to stamp out disfavored speech on the Internet”
https://public.substack.com/p/why-renee-diresta-leads-the-censorship
Twenty years ago my daughter was valedictorian at her large and competitive Catholic high school for girls, which was (and still is) one of the top high schools in one of the largest cities in the country. Confirming her intellectual abilities, she scored 35/36 on the ACT test (top .01%). She was also starting outside hitter on the girls’ volleyball team that won the State championship for large high schools, public or private. She also helped put together and was the driver of the robot for the Robotics team that won the regional competition, beating out myriad teams of boys and moving on to Nationals. She also played cello in the community college orchestra (because her high school didn’t have an orchestra). She’s a quality kid if I say so myself. But my daughter’s application to Stanford was rejected. She was apparently not the kind of prospective student Stanford wanted. But another student from her high school, a girl whom my daughter had never met nor heard of (as this girl did not attend any great books classes or advanced placement classes offered at the high school), was awarded a full scholarship to Stanford. A girl with, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, an Hispanic last name.
So what, you say? Make of it what you will. It’s anecdotal to be sure, but quite possibly, symptomatic. Dodged a bullet avoiding Stanford, we now all agree.
I’ve been looking for a lawyer since I moved. I will go out of my way to avoid one from Stanford.