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Treatment of Judge by Stanford Law Students is Only the Latest Embarrassment to Taint the School

Treatment of Judge by Stanford Law Students is Only the Latest Embarrassment to Taint the School

The Stanford law student behavior, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Elizabeth Holmes are just the latest. The school’s been embarrassing itself for years.

What has happened to Stanford University? We’ve covered the obscene treatment of a conservative judge by Stanford law students.

FTX’s former head Sam Bankman Fried is the son of two Stanford law professors. Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who deceived many people with a blood testing device, went to Stanford.

That’s just the latest. Victor Davis Hanson writes at American greatness:

Ethics complaints were lodged last year against Stanford Law Professor Michele Dauber for tweeting a series of gross attacks on Camille Vasquez (“some Pick Me Girl lawyer”), the widely regarded attorney of Johnny Depp. Law professor Dauber also tweeted sick fantasies about Depp’s death—and imagined the actor’s corpse would “end up in a trash can eaten by rats.” Was she the sort of model that the law students had emulated?

Then there was Professor Pamela Karla’s 2019 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the impeachment of President Trump. Off-topic and gratuitously, Karla weirdly attacked the name of the president’s youngest son, Barron Trump: “While the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.” Was that the sort of puerility that the law students sought to embrace?

In 2021, a graduating Stanford law student sent the law school student body a bogus call to violence as if it was authored by the school’s small conservative Federalist Society. The fake call to arms read in part: “The Stanford Federalist Society presents: The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection . . . Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event . . . ” Was that the sort of smear that the law students learned?

The Wall Street Journal recently ridiculed a Stanford university group’s publication of a taboo vocabulary list (“Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”). “Harmful” words supposedly unwelcome at Stanford included inflammatory expressions such as “American” and “immigrant.”

The Journal also noted that perhaps the cause of such Orwellianism was too many idle administrators chasing too few students: “For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.”

More disturbing was the revelation of a “snitch list.” The harmful language initiative apparently is tangential to another new idea of rewarding Stanford snitches who feel offended by hurtful expression. Or, as the so-called “The Protected Identity Harm (PIH) Reporting” system put it, software will monitor campus speech and even offer “financial rewards for finding/reporting” any who supposedly violate approved language usage.

Was this the sort of campus experience that the parents of Stanford students pay for at about $90,000 per year?

Stanford was also plagued by a recent admissions scandal when a former head sailing coach accepted donations to his Stanford sailing program in exchange for trying to help two students’ admission applications.

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Comments

I would be outraged except that I wrote off the entire American “education” (read: propaganda) establishment years ago.

Louis K. Bonham | March 21, 2023 at 8:38 am

Like his fellow Hoover Foundation-mate Thomas Sowell, Victor David Hanson has an incredible knack of succinctly and accurately dissecting an issue, and doing it with no small amount of style. Of all the ink that has been spilled over le affaire Duncan, VDH’s take on it is definitely one of the very best.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

“While the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.”
Fortunately, America is at no risk of a shortage of black “Queens.”

Steven Brizel | March 22, 2023 at 9:35 am

Victor Davis Hanson is a voice of sanity in an asylum run by the inmates