Academia, Free Speech

Survey: A Majority of Stanford Students Support Cancelling Conservative Speakers a Year After Duncan Controversy

A year ago, Stanford University was embroiled in controversy after federal appellate Judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down by law students. Now a survey by FIRE has found that a majority of students believe that Duncan should have been cancelled.  Seventy-five percent believe that it is appropriate to shout down speakers.  A year ago, I wrote a critical column on the ridiculous response of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Law School Dean Jenny Martinez who declined to punish any students. Instead all students were required to watch a widely mocked video on free speech.

The Stanford Federalist Society invited Judge Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to speak on campus. However, liberal students, including members from the National Lawyer’s Guild, decided that allowing a conservative judge to speak on campus is intolerable and set about to “deplatform” him by shouting him down. In this event, Duncan was planning to speak on the topic:  “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.”

A video showed that the students prevented Duncan from speaking from the very beginning. Many called him a racist while others hurled insults like one yelling “We hope your daughters get raped.” Duncan was unable to continue and asked for an administrator to assist him. Dean Steinbach then took the stage and criticized the judge for seeking to be heard despite such objections. Steinbach, who was put on leave, later doubled down in defending her widely criticized actions.

Given the tepid response of the university, it is hardly surprising that students believe that stopping others from speaking is a form of free speech.

Academics later supported the students in shutting down the judge.

FIRE released “The Judge Duncan Shoutdown: What Stanford Students Think,” including 54% of Stanford students said that Judge Duncan’s visit should have been canceled by the administration.

Another 36% stated that using physical violence to shutdown a campus speaker is “always,” “sometimes,” or “rarely” acceptable.

75% said the same about shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking.

Not surprising, only six percent of conservative students now feel comfortable disagreeing with professors.

The survey is consistent with other surveys and polling in higher education.

These students have been taught for years that “speech is violence” and harmful. They have also been told by figures such as Pines that silencing others is an act of free speech. Academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. In one instance, former CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek insisted that disrupting a speech on free speech is itself free speech.

Even schools that purportedly forbid such interruptions rarely punish students who engage in them. For example, students disrupted a Northwestern class due to a guest speaker from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (after the class had heard from an undocumented immigrant). The university let the protesters into the room after they promised not to disrupt the class. They proceeded to stop the class and then gave interviews to the media proudly disclosing their names and celebrating the cancellation. Northwestern did nothing beyond express “disappointment.”

At Stanford, law students received a mixed message in the law school denouncing the silencing of opposing views but refusing to hold any students or groups accountable.

These schools are enablers of the anti-free speech movement and the rising of a generation of speech phobics. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, academics and administrators continue to foster an environment of orthodoxy and viewpoint intolerance in higher education. This survey vividly demonstrates how schools like Stanford mouth commitments to free speech while sending a completely different message in the actual actions that it takes in the face of anti-free speech campaigns.

182 thoughts on “Survey: A Majority of Stanford Students Support Cancelling Conservative Speakers a Year After Duncan Controversy”

  2. “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

    – Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx
    _________________________________

    “Death to America!”

    – Ilhan Omar, Isra Hirsi Omar, “The Squad,” Minnesota Congressional District 5 et al.

    1. “[We gave you] a [restricted-vote] republic, if you can keep it.”

      – Ben Franklin
      _________________

      You bleeding heart milquetoast poltroons couldn’t.

  5. Stanford is an $8.9 billion enterprise. Most people think that Stanford is doing research for companies when really … the vast majority of our research funding every year comes from the government,” said G. Russell Brewer, associate vice president of research administration. In 2022, only 7% of external funds came from private industry. It would be interesting to see if the State Action Doctrine fits a university who gets this much funding from the government, specifically the DOD and others and that Stanford provides a public function. Someone should sue Stanford on free speech grounds and hopefully the SC would act and stop this nonsense.

  6. Look at the official seal for Stanford with motto in German; replace that tree with a Swastika and it’ll be up to date…

  7. More than 20 years ago, the average IQ of a Stanford student was 128. Today’s Stanford average student has an IQ of 97. This is the inevitable result of the transformation of Stanford from an educational institution of highere learning to a Leftist Indoctrination Entity mill, which now stamps out mindless drones from its production line.

  8. Beginning to ponder how much further into the abyss our constitutional republic can go before reaching the point of no return.

  9. “Viewpoint intolerance”. The understatement of the year and Stanford’s new motto…..

  10. Give them credit. Not an easy thing to take a survey when you’re busy trying to chase Jews around.

  11. RARELY is the correct answer to the survey question asking whether physical force may be warranted to remove speech.

    Some speech is illegal, such as wishing death upon the President or anyone in the line of succession to the presidency.

    If you support the police’s right to enforce the law, then you must support their right to intervene, physically when necessary, to apprehend someone who is wishing death upon the Speaker of the House.

    NEVER is a strong word and is usually not appropriate in the real world.

    1. Wishing death on someone is not illegal, doing things to make it happen are. You’ve been brainwashed.

      1. Incorrect. See above. I would not advise making threats against the President. That may result in visits from the Secret Service.

    2. Selective enforcement is one of the essentials steps on the path to totalitarianism. The DOJ became infected with it during Clinton though the seeds were sown all the way back to LBJ (look up the Bobby Baker case which you probably don’t know about). Recall Kathy Griffin posed with Trump’s bloody head and there were no consequences, long before this the venom-spewing “rapper” Paris danced with an Uzi gun while singing “Bush Killa”.

      Burning the US flag is protected “free expression” by the same SCOTUS that refused review of the Morgan Hill flag t-shirt case where students were suspended for wearing US flag shirts. (After THEY were threatened with violence they were ordered to remove them). A man who burned a rainbow flag in Iowa got 15 years.

      Underneath all this is a ghastly legal “theory” called “protected classes” (everybody but the now-minority non-GBT white male) where some people get special protection–and others don’t, yet this is considered “equal treatment”. DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Kristin Clark believes whites have calcified pineal glands and are thus less spiritual than others.

      Support of criminal behavior by the “news media” is another stepping stone. Recent attacks of Jewish students at UC Berkeley (speaking event shut down, attendees terrorized) received little or no coverage.

    3. Wishing is a poor choice of words. The desire for someone else’s death is repugnant but not illegal.
      A small subset of death THREATS are actually illegal.

      But MOST death threats justify investigation as well as the use of force to protect the threatened person – regardless of whether the speech is illegal.

      1. Incorrect. See above. How does no one on a free speech blog know about 18 USC 871?

  12. It’s as if we’re living in an ‘age of rage’.
    Which is also seen in the comment section here today.
    With the anonymous name-calling in place of healthy dialog.
    -Cat

    1. You can not have “healthy dialogue” with the Democrats. Because they are not honest people, and they only care about winning. Nothing that you can say will ever penetrate through to their brains, because their brains are damaged. So many of them have been living in their own delusional bubbles, for so long, that most of them are not fixable in the short term. They vote for Democrats because their families voted for Democrats. Some, like Bill Maher, recognize that their party is nutz, but they will vote for them anyway. Because reasons.

      That is why I seldom engage with the DNC shills here. They are not amenable to reasoned discourse. I mean look, the Party endorses the castration of young boys and the cutting off of the breasts of young girls. Don’t you think that any normal, sane, mentally-well functioning person would recoil from that in abject horror???

      But they don’t recoil. They embrace it, so you are left with a situation similar to trying to tell someone that they are an alcoholic, when they do not want to hear that. Maybe one day Reality/Clarity will sink in, but there is probably very little that one can do to make that day come around sooner. About all you can do is pray that enough bad things happen to them that they will wake up, before their delusions end up killing them.

        1. Thanks! I mean, the Democrat Party embraces and supports the sexual mutilation of kids – what more should it take for decent people to say goodbye to the Party? If I was a Democrat, I would be ashamed to tell anyone, and I would leave the Party. There is plenty more the Party does that is stupid, bad and wrong, but is any of that relevant when the Party goes the Dr. Joseph Mengele route???

      2. What you say is correct.
        It is also one of many reasons why free speech is critical.

        But ultimately it is critical that we are able to reach/persuade some of these people.

        Further we do have a valuable – if costly tool – reality.

        Ideas that do not work – DO NOT WORK.

        One of the disturbing things about our disasterous mishandling of covid is that the learning did not last very long.
        We STILL have people worshiping the publib policy experts who egregiously harmed all of us.

        Regardless, Covid was a lesson – bad ideas do not work.

        You can learn through education, or you can learn through failure.

        1. Over my 70 years, it has been my observation that more people learn from failure. And, there are many for whom even abject failure is not enough.

          For education to work, I have seen it most often from people learning in their childhood what is right and wrong. Once they become adults, it is hard for them to learn new tricks. Which is why I despair of the young people in the country ever growing up. They were taught crap during their formative years, and the weight of the failure they would have to face to overcome that training, is immense. Like disaster-level immense.

          1. To learn from failure one must experience the results of that failure. That’s why you see the repeat offenders, they are shielded from the results. Lack of accountability. An ass whoopin speaks volumes.

        2. I believe that people who are not ‘ready’ to see what’s going on, the evil and lies put forth by our own government, will not ‘see’ what’s going on BECAUSE they are not ready to ‘handle’ it. Much like Nazi Germany. People “knew,” but they were not “able” nor ‘ready’ to see what was actually happening. So they did not ‘see’ it.
          If during covid you were ‘ready’ to ‘handle it,’ then you were able to see it. You were able to punch through the lies and deception and recognize what was happening.

      3. @Floyd

        Sadly, and I’m a lifelong independent who has seen enough to know better, I believe this is true. It should be printed on t-shirts and shouted from the skies. The modern left have certainly made a mess of this world, across continents, in record time, even *if* you take the Obama years into consideration. It is flabbergasting. The only thing more maddening is the supposedly ‘smart’ people that go along with it.

        1. Forgive me Floyd, that was actually in response to JohnSay, though I appreciate your words as well. 👍🏼

      4. Floyd, once in awhile, there are those who ‘see the light’ and do change.
        I would guess that you have seen it happen with people on both sides politically.
        As have I. Although yes it is seemingly quite rare these days. But does happen.
        -Cat

  13. Is there any more clear evidence that your views are wrong than not being willing to let opposing views to be heard?

    1. The inevitable part of this kind of intransigence in America will be violence, leading to bl00dshed, somewhere at some point in time. I pray this can be avoided, but Americans must demand their right to free speech regardless!

  14. Don’t be naive and get real: “students have been taught for years that “speech is violence” and harmful” Sounds good but we know from repeated statistics that teachers have been doing a LOUSY job of teaching ANYTHING. But on this one, they got it right???? ROTFLMAO!

    It is much more likely that law schools and universities have a very limited qualified pool of student candidates to pick from and, from the combination of DEI and political agendas, they pick those with expressed, acceptable beliefs. And why not? That is EXACTLY the incestuous process (process= joining the on-the-dole club) that took place to get faculties overly represented by ‘liberals’. C’mon, one only has to watch the news media or entertainment media to get the exact same pablum of “speech is violence” and harmful”…it does not require a faculty to do get that.

    And we are thinking some rube that is a product of a faculty incestuous selection process is actually teaching this stuff to students?? This situation arrived at this state from a combination of the majority of faculty being passive and tolerant of poor behavior while a vocal few faculty and administrators manipulated students so as to benefit those same faculty and administrators. Add to that the basic ingredient of failed parenting (yes parents, you were supposed to teach your kid not to be a stooge) and voila!

  15. Just FWIW, there is LEGAL PRECEDENT for EXECUTING people for exercising their right to speak. The United States did that, at least once, and I am OK with it. Here is what happened.

    In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the world was faced with a challenge—how to hold individually accountable those German leaders who were responsible for the commission of monstrous crimes against humanity and international peace. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) held in Nuremberg, Germany, attempted to face this immense challenge. On October 18, 1945, the chief prosecutors of the IMT brought charges against 24 leading German officials, among them Julius Streicher.

    Trained as an elementary school teacher, Julius Streicher (1885–1946) was an early member of the Nazi Party. In 1923, he founded the virulently antisemitic and racist newspaper, Der Stürmer. Streicher was a leading organizer of Nazi Germany’s first official nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933. Although Streicher had lost credibility in party circles by 1940, he continued to edit and distribute his antisemitic propaganda newspaper to hundreds of thousands of Germans.

    For his influential role in inciting hatred and violence, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg indicted Streicher on count four, crimes against humanity. Streicher was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.

    Most of the evidence against Streicher came from his numerous speeches and articles over the years.[69] In essence, prosecutors contended that Streicher’s articles and speeches were so incendiary that he was an accessory to murder, and therefore as culpable as those who actually ordered the mass extermination of Jews. They further argued that he kept up his antisemitic propaganda even after he was aware that Jews were being slaughtered.[70]

    Streicher was acquitted of crimes against peace, but found guilty of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death on 1 October 1946. The judgment against him read, in part:

    For his 25 years of speaking, writing and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as ‘Jew-Baiter Number One.’ In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution. … Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.[2]
    =================

    1. Anyone yelling “death to America” while inside our nation needs the death penalty due a traitor/ terrorist. Instead these soros agent DAs Let them free without bail. I say that these DAs are culpable in 2wnabling traitors/ terrorists

    2. Oh, of course, the jew exception, who could have guessed the propaganda would be so purim.
      Jews declared war on Germany, so death penalty for the attempted annihilation of Germans.

    3. “Godless” was appropriate. Just another example of our country having leftist indoctrination vs an open education system.

      It’s the communist way…shout down or physically stop anyone with an alternate view and/ or irrefutable facts from being heard.

      Guaranteed these students have had little to no history knowledge. Their ripe to be picked for emotional manipulation & be induced with fear to think independently and engage in free & open debate, where facts matter. It’s lockstep & gang mentality.

      America, the enemy is within the gates. Especially in the case of former learning institutes like Stanford.

      1. There could be a slippery-slope argument made, but I am glad his neck got stretched. FWIW, even today, in America, being a liar can be punishable by DEATH!

        Perjury under California Penal Code Section 118 PC is a felony offense that can carry prison sentences of up to four years and could include substantial court fines. An allegation of aggravated perjury may apply if the act of perjury led to the conviction and execution of another person. Aggravated perjury is punishable by life imprisonment or death.

        1. Why isn’t Bragg hounding these brainwashed tools shouting death threats with the same or more gusto as he is politcally using weak arguements to hound Trump?

  17. The NeoMarxist ‘repressive tolerance’ closing of the American Mind proceeds apace at our once august institutions of higher learning. The Academy sacrificed on the Altar of Political Correctness by its tenured Priesthood.

  18. If I bought the Internet and made it my private property, could I delete all of your comments, preventing other people from reading your ideas?

  19. Thank goodness for university students and their wealth of experience……In some ways reminiscent of the King and Country debate…and we all know how well that worked out…..(The King and Country Debate was a debate on 9 February 1933 at the Oxford Union Society. The motion presented, “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”, passed with 275 votes for the motion and 153 against it. The motion would later be named the Oxford Oath or the Oxford Pledge).

    1. You may be thinking about the oath they took prior to WWI and then they all abandoned it when they decided that they were wrong and country came first.

    2. As we have seen, all the talk in the world does nothnig and the new wars rage on, and those claiming moral superiority lose their minds instantly when it is their perceived ox getting bombed. They turn into instant fascist nazis full of tyranny and extermination threats willing to wipe the entire opposition out and blame it 100% on them. They EXCEED nazis in this modern era.
      All those here know who they are, and there are a LOT OF THEM.

  20. In other news, looks like there’s jury and a wildly corrupt ex president to put before it. Party on!

      1. The fact that you think that story is more interesting to you makes you a crucial fact witness on the state of being ‘nuts’.

        1. Of course that story is more interesting.
          It is a gross display of how nuts leftists are.
          Meanwhile, no one cares about another Democrat made up lawfare suit to “GETTRUMP!” The good professor has already pointed out how corrupt and rigged the NY judicial system.
          Everyone knows it. We all see it.
          Only a true zealot cultists cannot.
          N.Y. Gives Trump the Anne Boleyn Treatment
          https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/04/16/ny_gives_trump_the_anne_boleyn_treatment_150804.html

          1. This is a criminal trial against trump. Not a suit. But the fact you don’t know that isn’t surprising.

        2. I have seen the USA promote love of animals to a demented degree for many years. First we have the dog and cat lovers, online we have the cat fetish for coding nerds, the dog fetish for cop supporters, and the enstranged who loudly proclaim they love animals more than any human. Then we have the national sports insanity, with the big clowning furry running around all over the place during the game. The end game is getting as many “horibble people” put in prison for leaving their pet in a car while shopping (a craze of online hatred and parking lot patrolling by activists). Then there are endless discovery and nature shows and girl and women videos screaming how cute the animal is on screen – they chirp and squeal as attractively as possible and demand the chance to hug and cuddle the beast, whatever the mammal species.

          So the depravity continued. The new generation took up the perversions of the boomers, donned their animal costumes, and realized they couldn’t lose, they would be showered with love and protection and hugs and cuddles and the hot vixens beneath their own animal costumes would cooing and grabbing at what their paramours naked visage could not achieve.
          That combined with the hippies express yourself no dress codes, go stoner grunge to wiccan to goth to punk rock to rainbow, we now have the lovely results.

          Congratulations to the morons who always go over the top in their virtue signaling and FAKE moral outrage, with equal achievement by the go along to get along COWARDS.

          Pure blood pure skin no jabs no tests not duped, checking in.

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