Heather Mac Donald: on dismantling DEI ideology
Mac Donald writes about the recent Stanford event at which law students shouted down a conservative judge’s speech, and the school’s DEI officer seemed to take the students’ side:
At 7.02am on March 9th, the morning of Duncan’s planned speech, Associate Dean for DEI, Tirien Steinbach, initiated the first of her two intercessions into the event. She sent an email to the Stanford Law School under the subject line “Today at SLS” intended, she said, to “share [her] office’s goals and roles in this situation”—the “situation” being Duncan’s appearance.
A question immediately presented itself: Why was Steinbach weighing in on Duncan’s speech in the first place? Leave aside for a moment whether or not there are matters which might actually require the involvement of a Stanford DEI administrator. A speech on how the Fifth Circuit interacts jurisprudentially with the Supreme Court would not seem to be one of them. We have grown so accustomed to the intrusion of the diversity bureaucracy into every area of academic life that this oddity may pass unnoticed. It should not so pass, however, since this oddity is, until almost yesterday, without precedent.
Good point.
And here, Mac Donald describes the situation in law schools as it still existed when yours truly attended:
In the mid-20th century, a skeletal crew of administrators dealt with the logistics of class registration and job placement; the rest of the educational enterprise was largely left to the faculty. Classes were large, the ruthlessly unsentimental Socratic method prevailed, and if you needed counseling, you went to the health services. The idea of mobilizing an administrator to psychologically prepare students for the arrival of a federal judge would have been unthinkable.
The idea of preparing us psychologically for much of anything was unthinkable. Law school was a sink or swim proposition.
Yet here was Steinbach weighing in on Duncan’s upcoming appearance without even knowing the details of what he was going to say. And the reason for that intervention is an interlocking set of fictions that currently reign on university campuses: first, that universities discriminate against and “marginalize” certain student groups; second, that such marginalization puts those groups at physical and psychological risk; and third, that their precarious physical and mental status means that ideas can injure them. A designated bureaucracy is therefore needed to protect these vulnerable groups from harm.
Martínez [Stanford’s law school dean] created one such bureaucracy in 2020, during the hysteria that swept college campuses after the George Floyd race riots. She installed Steinbach in the law school’s new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office the following year.
So the Floyd incident was the catalyst for the explosion of DEI in more and more universities.
The student-services bureaucracy had previously assured the Fed Soc board that members of Stanford’s public-safety department would be nearby and ready to step in if there were a disruption. Having campus security actually in the room would apparently put LGBTQ+ students at further psychological and physical risk. (Yale’s equally delicate law students advanced this claim last year as well.) The campus cops never showed, however. So even if someone had issued the hecklers a warning, which Martínez now says is the prerequisite for discipline, no one would have been available to remove the fractious students.
Flabbergasted by the display of aggressive irrationality, Duncan began posing rhetorical questions to the screaming audience. “Is this a law school?” “You’re supposed to be learning to be lawyers, what court are you going to go into and act like this?” The responses were puzzling. “You just said that this is a law school; there’s no jurisdiction!” “Trigger!” “This is not your court!” Most weirdly, laughter broke out when Duncan asked, “Why do you want to cancel people’s speech?”
Unbeknownst to Duncan, five student-services administrators, including Steinbach, were standing to the side of the podium. After 10 minutes of being yelled at, Duncan asked if an administrator was present. Steinbach stepped forward, introduced herself as an associate dean, and said that she wanted to address Duncan and the students. Confused as to why an administrator would address a speech to him, Duncan repeated his request…
It was [Steinbach] who represented the administration because the DEI office is at the fulcrum of every university function. And the DEI office is at the fulcrum of every university function because everything in a university today bears on identity. There is no independent sphere of thought and knowledge.
Mac Donald gives a detailed account of what Steinbach said. I suggest you go to the link and read it; it certainly wasn’t a defense of free speech. Martinez ended up having Steinbach take a leave of absence, which probably will become permanent. But as Mac Donald writes, it will do little to nothing to end the rule of DEI:
For all [Martinez’s] eloquent defense of free speech and free association, she nonetheless ends up rewarding the hecklers. Stanford will be offering even more programming and events on LGBTQ+ rights in the spring, Martínez announced. It is hard to imagine how much more thorough Stanford’s celebration of LGBTQ+ identity could be. Martínez justifies this sop to the shutdown lobby on the grounds that what motivated the protests was the “desire by students to bring greater attention to discussion [sic] of LGBTQ+ rights.”
That is fanciful. The hecklers were motivated by hatred and censoriousness, period. No one claimed that Duncan needed to be run off campus in order to “bring greater attention to discussion of LGBTQ+ rights.” But even if that had been the motivation, rewarding it now means that the protests worked.
Much much more at the link. But this needs highlighting:
The most astonishing aspect of the Steinbach affair is that it occurred at a law school. The essence of lawyerly work is to represent someone other than oneself—a defendant, a business client, a plaintiff seeking redress. One’s own identity is not at stake. A lawyer is supposed to grapple with legal ideas—the principles behind a statute or constitutional provision, the implications of a contractual clause. Here, too, his identity should be irrelevant. Much of legal work is adversarial; a lawyer confronts strongly opposing viewpoints, the outcome of which moay lead even to the loss of a client’s liberty. A lawyer rebuts those arguments not by claiming to be emotionally wounded by them, but by posing a stronger set of arguments that better accord with reason. Here, yet again, a lawyer’s own identity should not come into play.
A large portion of the Stanford law school student body seems to have no grasp of these truths.
They have no grasp of these truths because these truths have been purposely abandoned, sacrificed to the “higher truths” of leftism and activism. It’s not just the elevation of feelings above all else. The idea is that law school is indoctrination for activist lawyers who will take over the legal system and dismantle the old objectivity, which in their eyes was a fiction anyway, a fiction that served to exploit the downtrodden. In this crusade, it is perfectly okay that lawyers who represent clients the left hates should not be able to serve those clients, or that prosecutors of people on the right should withhold exculpatory evidence, or that speakers like Duncan not be allowed to spread their dangerous ideas. That activism, even more than the students’ precious hurt feelings, is really what’s behind the phenomenon.
As always with these incidents, two things are present: an inclination on the part of faculty and administration to regard institutions as their personal sandboxes and massive failure of fiduciary duty by boards. The simplest thing to do to repair the problem at Stanford is to shut the law school and discharge its employees. No university needs one and there’s terrible overproduction of JD’s in this country. The predicate for that is that the board is composed of decent and responsible human beings. Which of course it isn’t.
It will be interesting to track Steinbach’s path after this incident. Will it suffer or be ascendant?
It will be interesting to track Steinbach’s path after this incident. Will it suffer or be ascendant?
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Four people were responsible for the catastrophe at Oberlin College, which cost the institution $36 million. One was the retiring president, Marvin Krislov, who departed some months later before the court case heated up. Another was Meredith Raimondo, the student affairs prickette whose asininity had made the College liable for defaming the Gibsons. She was hired by Oglethorpe University in Georgia to a comparable position. The third was the general counsel, Donica Varner. She was hired away by Cornell. The fourth was Camille Twillie Ambar, the president who came on board about nine months into the controversy and was in charge throughout nearly all the litigation. She’s still in place. So, that tells you what the board of Oberlin (chock a block with business executives and alums) considers a firing offense.
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I’d be fascinated to see the MMPI results for all four characters, as well as the board members.
It is a lucrative, self-perpetuating racket (the DEI nomenklatura being enormous and well-compensated), and there is thus little hope of its being dismantled. The only solution might possibly be the radical de-funding of all universities (public as well as private), and punitive taxation of the endowments (Harvard’s being more than fifty billion, Yale and Stanford not far behind); the likelihood of this ever happening is tiny. Also a factor is the unbelievable amount of money from corporate America to BLM and related race-hustling initiatives, recently estimated by Claremont to be nearly one hundred billion dollars since all the Floyd-related nonsense (also stupidity and violence).
Chris Rufo on the job at hand: https://mobile.twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1640785910538051593?cxt=HHwWkoCx4fSFn8UtAAAA
Google tells me:
“Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?” is from the 2004 movie The Girl Next Door. The actor Timothy Olyphant first said it when he played the character Kelly.
Never seen it (the movie) and never heard it before. Wonder if the movie is a favorite of Steinbach.
nearly a third of the law school student body protested in Martínez’s constitutional-law classroom, having covered the whiteboard with signs attacking Duncan and commending the hecklers as free-speech heroes. Over half of Martínez’s con-law students joined the protest; those who did not were subject to silent shaming. Feelings were again dominant. When Martínez ducked out of the building after her class, reported the Washington Free Beacon, the protesters began to cry and hug each other, presumably in the belief that they had achieved an historic civil-rights victory.
If a third of the student body actually believes in this sophistry then it may be past the point of being able to be dismantled, assuming the people paying the bills are fully on board with it all too. Ultimately the only way this ends is if it becomes untenable from a financial standpoint, meaning people stop sending their kids to Standford or any other University that supports this nonsense. But I haven’t heard about any major enrollment problems in these places so far.
and there is thus little hope of its being dismantled. The only solution might possibly be the radical de-funding of all universities (public as well as private),
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Amend state corporation law to require boards be elected by a postal ballot of alumni registered to vote in the state, a ballot supervised by the state board of elections. Require also that boards have between 5 and 20 members, the number contingent on the number of alumni on the electoral roll. Institute rotation-in-office rules for trustees, debarring those who have served 14 of the last 16 years on the board or who will hit that wall during the coming term to be elected.
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Another thing you can do is debar by law the formation of a DEI staff at state schools and to eliminate certain schools by statute and ruin the demand for others. Target the teacher-training, social work, and library administration faculties as well as certain departments in the arts and sciences faculty (all victimology programs, sociology, cultural Anthropology). End any requirement that a public school employee have a BEd or MEd degree.
Lies can be sustained for periods of varying length but in the long run are not sustainable.
The question therefore is “when”, not “if”.
Related (Turley):
‘Prof Suspended After Declaring It’s “More Admirable” To Shoot Down Than Shout Down Conservative Speakers’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/prof-suspended-after-declaring-its-more-admirable-shoot-down-shout-down-conservative
And in fact, if anyone’s been reading any of the chilling responses to the poor trans “victim” who just killed six people, three of them nine-year olds—or the antics of trans protests in NZ and in Britain, there should be no surprise that violence and intimidation are tools of the trade.
Amend state corporation law to require boards be elected by a postal ballot of alumni registered to vote in the state,
Dartmouth dealt with an unwanted Board member, nominated by petition and elected by alumni, by changing the rules for nomination. The Board’s attempt at further change did not go well.
The alumni tussle at Dartmouth has its roots in the 2004 election of an alumnus, T.J. Rodgers, to the Board of Trustees. (Alumni nominate eight of the board’s 18 members.) Mr. Rodgers had petitioned to join a slate of candidates selected by Dartmouth’s Alumni Council, a body composed mostly of class and alumni group leaders.
Mr. Rodgers’s upstart campaign, in which he decried an alleged suppression of free speech by college administrators, gained the support of conservative students and alumni. He won the election in a landslide and became the first petition candidate to be elected to the board in 24 years.
Two more petition candidates, both of whom lean conservative, were elected to the board in May 2005 after a closely watched contest, which some higher-education observers said could be a new front in campus culture wars. Although all three of the “insurgent” trustees were elected on platforms that dealt with many Dartmouth-specific issues, some critics feared that the new trustees would bring partisan bickering to the governing board. Dartmouth’s president, James Wright, has said that he has had good relations with the three petition trustees.
Thurman John “T. J.” Rodgers (born March 15, 1948)[1] is an American billionaire scientist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Cypress Semiconductor and holds patents ranging from semiconductors to energy to winemaking. Rodgers is known for his public relations acumen, brash personality, and strong advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. He stepped down as Cypress CEO in April 2016 and Director in August 2016 after serving for 34 years.
Sounds like a good Board member to me.
Art Deco, all fine and good for state universities, but Stanford is a private school as are most of the Ivies. The state can’t touch them.
physicsguy, have you heard about the Prez of your former workplace stepping down? Seems to me that retiring was better than staying, even if you had been a generation younger.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/03/connecticut-college-president-resigns-over-criticisms-of-insensitivity-on-dei-issues/
Art Deco, all fine and good for state universities, but Stanford is a private school as are most of the Ivies. The state can’t touch them.
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Touch them in what way?
1. Stop providing them with grants and loan guarantees, state or federal.
2. Inform them, by state statute, that as a non-profit corporation providing educational services, they have to be governed a particular way,
3. Define, via federal consumer protection law, the range of degrees for which provider and service recipient may contract across state lines.Via state law, define those for which a provider and in-state client may contract.
Ron DeSantis’ administration is taking steps (that seem likely to be effective) to end this nonsense in the state of Florida, including at private institutions. Not sure how much is him, or people in his administration, or both, but they appear to have figured out legal and effective ways to slay the hydra in education at all levels.
This is why Federalism and free enterprise are so important. We will now see how many top tier students choose schools like New College of Florida or the University of Austin. I have heard credible rumors both schools are inundated with faculty wanting to join their staffs.
Gringo,
Yep. An example of the left eating their own. Probably the most leftist prez in school history but still not pure enough. Sad commentary on higher education today. So glad I’m gone.
Art Deco, good points. Now would a state government have cojones to do such?
When fanatics gain enough power, they dispose of the non-fanatical (the Killing Fields) then, when only fanatics remain, they start to eat each other ( Stalin/Lavrentiy Beria) and only terror remains.
Fanatics are free to write and say whatever they may but as soon as they seek to impose their fanaticism upon a society, they declare their barbarism and should be treated in the very harshest of terms.
Fanaticism is a mental disease and any society that fails to control it, seals its own fate.
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Winston Churchill
“A fanatic is a man that does what he
thinksknows the Lord would do, if He only knew the facts of the case.” Finley Peter Dunne paraphrasedA point that was made about Yale LS applies to Stanford. The law students are not preparing to be lawyers in practice but to be left wing activists. This seems to be true of a number of “High Status” law schools. The solution seems to be ending all those places for left wing lawyers in government. That may not be a practical solution but, at least, it addresses the problem.
Its a confluence of events the stanford confrontatio presaged the events yesterday so did the red wedding rant effusions from adams lightfoot et al
Mike K touched on this.
Former Civil Rights Lawyer for the Department of Justice J. Christian Adams has started a series of articles in which he examines the elite law schools. His first object is Yale Law and his article can be found here:
https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2023/03/20/do-they-teach-law-at-yale-anymore-part-one-of-a-series-n1679841
Similar to what Mike K. points out, Mr. Adams has found that the elite law schools are no longer teaching the normal practice of law, but are instead churning out leftwing activists. This can be verified by merely looking at the syllabi of the courses on offer.
Mr. Adams suggests that any person or corporation looking for a traditional lawyer, one who is skilled in traditional legal activities such as criminal defense, contract law, tort law, administrative law, any of the numerous non-glamorous aspects of practicing law, to avoid graduates of the top-tier law schools and instead hire graduates from the second tier or lower schools.
In response to physicsguy, my understanding based on Hillsdale college is that universities are subject to state and federal interference if they merely accept students whose student loans are backed by government, which is nearly all of them. Hillsdale will not accept students unless they are entirely self-funded, or if Hillsdale extends them a loan themselves. Only this level of independence makes them ‘untouchable’, not the fact that they are private.
And finally, with regards to the absurd question, “is the juice worth the squeeze?” my answer is “hell yes it is!” I grew up in California, in the County of Orange. There are no more orange orchards there but there certainly were when the county was formed and during my childhood. Both Florida and New Jersey have counties named Orange. I lived in Ventura County for 10+ years and citrus is it’s largest money-maker after strawberries.
The industrial planting of oranges for the juice industry has provided living wages for millions of families over hundreds of years. The juice is more than worth the squeeze.
Erronius
Correct on all counts. Now, the hard part: what to do about it?
Stanford is teaching that violence plays a major role in our justice system. And this is true. It doesn’t matter if your opponent has the better legal argument in court, if everyone knows that you have amassed a large mob to do violence if your side loses.
LTEC: “It doesn’t matter if your opponent has the better legal argument in court, if everyone knows that you have amassed a large mob to do violence if your side loses.”
Or as Mark Steyn put it in 2007: “The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen.”
And finally, with regards to the absurd question, “is the juice worth the squeeze?” my answer is “hell yes it is!” I grew up in California, in the County of Orange. There are no more orange orchards there but there certainly were when the county was formed and during my childhood.
I remember them well. Even the OC Register is now on the left.
T.J. Rodgers is something of a legend. I was somewhat aware of his activities associated with his alma mater, Dartmouth. But he has had many interesting things to say about many topics over the years.
The one that comes to mind first, was a long interview where he discussed the Solyndra fiasco. He was running Cypress when they purchased the solar panel company Sunpower (and later spun it off IIRC); so he knew something about the topic.
As I pointed out previously on this blog, most college students today don’t score high enough on an IQ test to be at college and are incapable of doing college level work. The incompetence is blatantly obvious. That’s why colleges have all the studies courses.
“higher truths”
You know, the ones that aren’t actually true.
They think with their genitals.
Need anything else be said?