Recently, there has been a brouhaha at Stanford Law School about how students protested and disrupted the presentation of a speaker invited by the school’s chapter of The Federalist Society. In short, the invited speaker was provocative, students were provoked, some protested quietly in a non-disruptive fashion and others appeared to want to disrupt his presentation. It was disrupted. He was rude. They were rude — or at least disrespectful.
The question at hand is whether universities — and particularly law schools — should respect norms of free speech that allow controversial — or even odious — speech, or whether there is some speech that is so disrespectful/harmful that it falls outside those protections.
(No, free speech does it include trying to drown out or disrupt others. Almost all free speech questions can be be address with the answer of “More speech,” not “Less speech.”)
The school’s Dean, Jenny S. Martinez, published a response to the contretemps, siding with the idea that the answer is more speech, disrupting the presentation was wrong, and that this is a particularly important value at universities. She explained that lawyers need to be able to listen to and respond intelligently to the arguments of others. Blah blah blah.
Now, I agree with her. I agree with almost everything she wrote. I agree with the blah blah blah parts, too.
And yet, I think she left something very very important out. I think that she is right. I think that I am right. But there is another perspective — not mine, but one that I want to understand — that she should have addressed. She barely waved a hand at it, and really didn’t even do that.
Imagine this perspective, though it is not mine:
Imagine that you are not part of a traditional elite, not part of a group from which the powerful elite have traditionally come. Imagine that you have lived your life surrounded by popular depictions and assumptions that people who (perhaps superficially?) resemble you are lazy, dumb, criminal, alcoholic, uneducated, criminal and/or otherwise marginal, disempowered, and objectionable. Imagine that you feel deeply defensive that the culture and the elite do not view you as a truly worthy equal, that perhaps you should be tolerated but that you will never actually belong.
I don’t have those experiences. That is not my story. But it is the story of many students.
I have no doubt that deep education requires intellectual — and perhaps emotional — risk-taking, requires openness and requires trust. Learning to think differently is difficult and even challenges one’s identity. It puts one’s old values at risk, requires one to look at the world through different lenses and thereby forces a different relationship to oneself and everything that one has ever known. That is a lot.
So, that is a lot to ask of people who have a lifetime of experiences to tell them that the culture around them does not trust them, does not think well of folks like them. What ought an educational institution do to make their success at this endeavor of such deep learning more likely to succeed? What kinds of support should it supply? When should it introduce challenges? In what manner — and with what timing — should it start to remove those supports?
I have no doubt that educational institutions have a responsibility to educate, and not merely to demand proficiency. No doubt at all. That’s basically a tautological statement, that educational institutions should educate their students to instill in them their most important lessons.
And I agree with Dean Martinez that it is really important that lawyers be able to hear and respond thoughtfully to arguments that they believe are without merit and/or even made in bad faith. Listening to that garbage and not losing your shit? That, that’s a lawyer skill. It’s incredibly important.
It appears to me that Stanford Law School’s answer to throw their students into the deep end. Perhaps to announce that being able to swim is really important, and then throw their students into the deep end — all without any real effort to educate them on this important skill.
And without any consideration at all to how making students who were never taught to swim constantly nervous that they might be thrown into the deep pool…never considering at all what that might do to their necessary trust in their professors and the institution.
Stanford law should teach this. All law schools should teach this, if it is such an important lawyer skill. Merely demanding proficiency is not enough. A one-time lecture on this is not enough, be it in writing or some other form. A one-time workshop is not enough.
And Dean Martinez should be a lot more mindful of the difference between the behaviors and dispositions we expect of experts and the supports that educators need to provide to help our students to become experts. I agree with her goal. I agree with her views on freedom of speech on campus. But I think she sorely misunderstands the needs of her students and her responsibilities towards them.