Third of Stanford Students Find It Acceptable to Use Violence to Silence Speech
“After the Judge Duncan shoutdown, our polls show conservative speech on Stanford’s campus wasn’t just chilled. It was frozen solid”
This would be the same school where a federal judge was shouted down last year.
The FIRE reports:
A third of Stanford students say using violence to silence speech can be acceptable
In March 2023, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan attempted to speak at an event held by the Stanford Law School Federalist Society—and was instead shouted down by dozens of demonstrators.
Under the pretense of quieting the crowd, Stanford’s then-Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach took the podium and delivered prepared remarks scolding Duncan for having “caused harm” and questioning whether his appearance was worth the trouble, asking, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” The heckling and disruption persisted, leading to Duncan’s premature departure under escort by federal marshals.
Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released “The Judge Duncan Shoutdown: What Stanford Students Think,” a retrospective survey detailing how Stanford students felt about the school’s handling of the incident and laying bare the endemic anti-free speech attitudes that led to the disruption.
As the Judge Duncan shoutdown was happening, FIRE and College Pulse were in the process of surveying more than 55,000 college students nationwide, including 284 students at Stanford, as part of the 2023 College Free Speech Rankings. FIRE was therefore able to compare the responses of Stanford students from before the incident to those of students after the incident to track the real-time effect of a high-profile heckler’s veto on the campus speech climate. FIRE also took the opportunity to poll an additional 531 Stanford students and ask specific questions about the shoutdown.
FIRE’s polling shows that while conservative students reported more comfort discussing the Stanford shoutdown after the fact than did liberal and moderate students, they also felt more uncomfortable discussing “controversial political topics” and reported self-censoring more often. In the starkest finding, close to half of conservative students said they felt comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial topic before the visit (45%), but that percentage plummeted to merely 6% after the visit.
“After the Judge Duncan shoutdown, our polls show conservative speech on Stanford’s campus wasn’t just chilled. It was frozen solid,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “An act of censorship doesn’t just silence one speaker. It silences thousands of others who take notice and choose to keep quiet for fear of receiving the same treatment.”
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Comments
The New Red Guard
Someone should inform them that it would be a 2 way street. The people they want to attack tend to be the more law abiding, but when their patience runs out, BOOM! Literally boom.
Liberals see violence as analog, a dial they can turn up and down and set at varying levels.
Conservatives see it as binary.
Off = “Oh look at those idiots, call the cops and let’s go get a beer.
On = “F*** it! Kill them all!
To date, the switch has been in the off position but there are fingers approaching it.
“Dear Mom, silencing events and people we didn’t like was fun…until the shooting started. The nice doctors here at the hospital tell me that with a lot of hard work and a miracle I might even walk again one day.”