At a time when the free and civil exchange of ideas is vitally important to our democracy, we’ve seen too many instances of students and faculty on college campuses badgering guest speakers on stage.
An incident last week at Stanford University provides the latest example: An administrator at the prestigious California school hounded a conservative judge from the New Orleans-based U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal.
Kyle Duncan was invited to Stanford to speak at a Federalist Society event. The topic: “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.”
But he was greeted by boisterous protesters and forced to listen to a lengthy lecture from Tirien Steinbach, Stanford’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, who at one point asked whether whatever Duncan came to Stanford to say is “worth the pain that this causes.”
Appropriately, Stanford’s president and law school dean apologized. They wrote that “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”
Duncan’s views would have come as no shock to anyone attending. Nominated to the appeals court by former President Donald Trump, he’s long been a favorite of social conservatives and was a widely known courtroom opponent of LGTBQ rights. That’s bound to make him unpopular on many campuses, not just Stanford’s; indeed, this newspaper is not endorsing his individual views here, but his right to freely express them.
If students, faculty members and administrators didn’t want to hear what Dunan had to say, they could have stayed away rather than disrupt. Instead, a video shows Steinbach explaining that her job is to “create a space of belonging for all people at this institution.”
All people except those who disagree with her.
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