Stanford University apologises to Justice Kyle Duncan for ambush by protesters but what’s the real lesson here?

Justice Kyle Duncan with Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at Stanford Law School, this week.

The $8 Ivy League monogrammed T-shirts you can buy from Kmart have more appeal than the schools they promote now.

Attending university is one thing. Gaining entry into some of the world’s most prestigious tertiary institutions like Yale, Harvard and Stanford in the US is a whole other level of academic achievement. Even A-list Hollywood celebrities — US royalty — have gone to such extreme lengths of doing jail time in a bid to get their B+ kids admitted into these exclusive sandpits.

The quadrangles, halls and dorms of these expensive educational enclaves have now morphed into Twitter playing out in real life.

These days they really put the “dead” into Dead Poet’s Society and suck the joy out of that Julia Roberts sleeper hit, Mona Lisa Smile.

This week it’s Stanford in the headlines.

Again.

Stanford has officially apologised to Justice Kyle Duncan.

Last week the school announced an “investigation” after multiple swastikas and an image of Adolf Hilter were found pinned on a student’s door.

This follows other “hate crimes” at the campus earlier this year including vandalism in the form of multiple swastikas, the n-word, and the letters “KKK”.

Now Stanford has officially apologised to a federal court judge after law students hurt the feelings of Justice Kyle Duncan by disrupting his campus appearance (which spruiked a free lunch) last week.

The fracas in this small, but influential arena of the conservative legal fraternity, was caught on video. With both Justice Duncan and those in the peanut gallery filming as he was questioned about his previous dissents to things like constitutional recognition of same sex marriage, something he called “abject failure”.

More videos continue to be released which show him retaliating by calling one angry female protester “an appalling idiot” and saying “in this school, the inmates have gotten control of the asylum”.

Duncan was appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by former US president Donald Trump in 2018 and has been consistently conservative in his findings since his promotion.

That’s the thing about politically appointed judges, it’s viewed as a career path in the US, not an honour bestowed for good public service. Like academic-turned media star Jordan Peterson, who found fame in the trenches of campus culture wars in his native Canada, Duncan getting airtime for being cancelled by undergraduates will help put him on the radar of the next Republican leader.

Jordan Peterson.

This performance – by both the university and Duncan – was about public relations, not political correctness.

Duncan was invited to speak at Stanford by the school’s Federalist Society to ruminate on issues like Covid, guns and social media. He was expecting a hostile audience as people who RSVPed said he had taken positions that disenfranchise and harm women and people from the LGBTQ and Black communities, and they came prepared with placards and bones to pick.

Duncan flailed and didn’t come armed with his best rebuttals or objections. He called on the help of Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach to step in to help him, she acknowledged the “legitimacy of the students’ anger toward Duncan before iterating his right to speak,” Reuters reported.

He then thanked the Federalist Society and called others who questioned his previous decisions as “whatever” before demanding an apology from the school (and even called for the sacking of Steinbach and discipline of the rowdy students).

Stanford acquiesced.

“What happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus,” the uni’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Law School Dean Jenny Martinez wrote in a letter posted to the school’s website.

This is going to sound ridiculous coming from a mediocre (at best) arts and art student. As someone who only attended lectures for the electrifying orations of academics – some bonkers, same banal – and rolled my eyes at private school boys who felt moved enough to dominate tutorials about Plato’s cave, beautifully and blissfully unaware that they sounded like cavemen in Ralph Lauren polos. What happened to uni being the place to experiment? Not just with different types of beer, two-minute noodle flavours and partners, but also ideas and debate?

University should be a place to expand waistlines (with the aforementioned brews and dehydrated food) and mind with opinions and ideas that you may not agree with, or understand. Robust debate, not protests, should be encouraged.

These university speech flare ups have been happening for years and are a fascinating insight into the temperature of younger generations – those who’ll replace people like Duncan one day.

But they are just that, ripples in a turbulent sea of anti-Semitism, racism and sexual misconduct that is happening in these esteemed institutions. Students need to feel safe. Not just physically, but also to express themselves or ask questions without malice or judgment, else we’re just rearing a new generation of dense dimwits who think carving Nazi symbols in toilets, like what happened at Stanford, is acceptable.

Free speech can be brutal and ugly, but the way we respond shouldn’t be with forced mea culpas and federal court judges having a whinge. It can be an opportunity for a beautiful learning exercise, these schools should try it someday.