Stanford law dean faces student revolt after apologizing to Trump-appointed judge
Jeremiah Poff
Students at Stanford Law School staged a protest against Dean Jenny Martinez on Monday after she apologized for the disruption of an event featuring federal appellate court Judge Kyle Duncan last week.
Duncan, who serves on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was supposed to deliver a lecture at the law school on Thursday, but he was disrupted by a group of protesters composed primarily of students but also included Tirien Steinbach, the school’s dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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STANFORD APOLOGIZES TO TRUMP-APPOINTED JUDGE PROTESTERS SHOUTED DOWN AS ‘SCUMBAG’
The disruption drew outrage from free speech advocates and conservative commentators, who especially noted Steinbach’s participation in the protest. Martinez, the dean of the law school, later apologized to Duncan in a written note that said the school was “taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again.”
Meanwhile, in the days since the disruption, calls have grown for the law school to dismiss Steinbach, including from conservative students at the school, who said it was “unclear what Stanford plans to do to prevent such disruption in the future.”
“If Stanford cares about free speech, it must fire any administrator who actively encourages these unruly actions against it,” the students wrote in the Stanford Review. “Someone who is so eager, at the behest of an unruly mob, to shut down free speech, which Stanford itself considers ‘a bedrock principle for the law school, the university, and a democratic society,’ has no place as a Stanford dean.”
The apology did not sit well with Martinez’s own students, who staged a protest Monday in the dean’s constitutional law class by blanketing the whiteboard with flyers that read, “Counter speech is free speech,” and standing silently as she left the classroom, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Photos of the whiteboard also showed flyers that read, “We have free speech rights too.”
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After Martinez’s class was over, the student protesters reportedly lined the hallway while dressed in black and stood silently as the law school dean walked by them and exited the classroom and the building, the outlet reported.
“We are creating a hostile environment at this law school,” law student Luke Schumacher told the Washington Free Beacon, “hostile for anyone who thinks an Article III judge should be able to speak without heckling.”