What mob rule says about our future

From The Blind Leading the Blind, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, completed in 1568.

With the sad mob rule on display this month in Australia and New Zealand in preventing a speaker on a hot public topic from having her say, and in depriving the right to hear of hundreds (or more) of others, more attention needs to be given to the growth of intolerance among the young.

A very apposite essay, therefore, is one delivered in Persuasion online magazine considering the implications of the disruption by law students at the elite Stanford University that prevented a federal judge speaking to a private group of law students at the university. Their action was condemned by the law school's dean who imposed special training for all students on “freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession”.

The essay, by Alex Morey, provides disheartening statistics on an increasingly apparent incomprehension as to the norms of dissent and the value of freedom of speech:

In 1969, Belgian economist—and self-described “revolutionary Marxist”—Ernest Mandel was denied a visa for a planned speaking tour to American universities on the grounds that deviations from his itinerary on a previous trip constituted “a flagrant abuse of the opportunities afforded him to express his views in this country.”

A group of American professors—determined to “engage him in a free and open academic exchange”—took Mandel’s case all the way to the Supreme Court. Though Mandel lost on a point related to immigration law, the case is now best remembered for Justice Thurgood Marshall’s impassioned, stirring dissent. “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin,” Marshall wrote. “The activity of speakers becoming listeners and listeners becoming speakers in the vital interchange of thought is ‘the means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.’”

Marshall’s “freedom to hear” is an arresting idea and a useful guide in making sense of the fracas at Stanford Law School earlier this month.

On March 9, a group of Stanford law students shouted down Kyle Duncan, a Trump-appointed federal appeals court judge, as he tried to deliver remarks at a campus event hosted by the Federalist Society. Duncan’s rulings restricting access to abortion and implicating trans-rights have elicited harsh criticism, including from many at Stanford. In the lead-up to the Federalist Society event, signs were posted around campus accusing Duncan of delivering transphobic, homophobic, and racist rulings, and at the event itself, a crowd of several dozen protestors heckled Duncan relentlessly, forcing him eventually to give up on his prepared remarks. And in a uniquely troubling twist, Stanford Law’s Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, took over Duncan’s podium after he had asked for an administrator to help restore order and, in her remarks, openly questioned whether Stanford ought to rethink its existing free expression policies. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Steinbach asked of the Federalist Society’s event. “Is this worth it?”

At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where I direct our Campus Rights Advocacy work, we’ve spent more than 20 years pushing back against all manner of censorship from administrators. But the Stanford incident stood out as something new and different. For FIRE, it was a frightening coalescence of several trends within a particular strain of illiberalism that we’ve seen creep onto campuses and spread over the last decade. These appear rooted not in administrative overreach but in a desire by the students themselves for ideological and emotional safety. New in the last few years, and caught on video in all its brazenness at Stanford, is a growing penchant for using authoritarian tactics to obtain it.

Ten years ago, we saw the occasional “civility” initiative. Students who felt “unsafe” encountering ideas they disagreed with were asking faculty for in-class “trigger warnings” or demanding that speakers with unpopular views be disinvited. A few years later, we saw disinvitations dip and were briefly hopeful that students might be getting more tolerant. Not so. Potentially controversial speakers had simply stopped being invited at all. Now, with the widespread popularity of campus “equity” initiatives, calls for tolerance by means of intolerance have reached a fever pitch—of which the shoutdown at Stanford is a perfect illustration.

The essay goes on to examine the trend toward intolerance on campus and is worth reading in order to get a full picture of the likely nature of Western societies of the near future, if elites continue on their present track of blocking open discourse over important issues such as the welfare of women and children.

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