Daniel McCarthy
NY Post, Mar. 12, 2023
“The capture of American higher education by students and administrators with a Maoist mentality has caused a great deal of soul-searching among moderates and conservatives.”
A university president never enjoys being forced to apologize, especially to a conservative. But on Saturday that’s what Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had to do. Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford’s law school, co-signed the president’s letter of apology to Judge Kyle Duncan. When Duncan arrived on campus last week to give a talk on “Guns, COVID, and Twitter,” Stanford law students shouted him down.
An administrator on the scene, Stanford Law’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, essentially sided with the hecklers, asking Duncan if “the juice was worth the squeeze,” according to The Stanford Daily.
Such scenes are all too common when today’s aggressively sensitive college students learn about a speaker or faculty member who has something to say that they find indelicate. A generation has been trained to think of dissent from progressive pieties as “harm.” The only surprise at Stanford is that the president was embarrassed enough to apologize. He’s promised it won’t happen again. But it will — maybe not at Stanford right away, but somewhere. Perhaps the next time a conservative gets canceled on campus will be when Michael Knowles debates Deirdre McCloskey on transgenderism and womanhood at the University of Pittsburgh next month.
When Knowles told an audience at CPAC this month that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” freelance censors of the activist student left set out to cancel any speaking engagements he might have coming up.
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