The scandal at Stanford
The University of North Carolina announced recently that applicants for academic admission or employment at any of its 17 campuses will no longer be compelled to submit personal "diversity, equity, and inclusion" statements as a condition of being admitted or hired. Texas A&M University and the University of Houston announced a similar policy this month, removing DEI statements — which have been likened to "woke loyalty oaths" — from their hiring procedures. In Des Moines, the Iowa Legislature is weighing a bill to curb spending on DEI mandates at the state's public universities. At the New College of Florida, the board of trustees has ended mandatory "diversity" exercises and the campus DEI bureaucracy.
These are encouraging signs that the pendulum has started to swing against the reigning DEI orthodoxy in higher education. Far from promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI policies on campus and the infrastructure created to perpetuate them have tended to promote just the opposite: a rigid ideological uniformity, blatant inequity in the treatment of political minorities, and the exclusion of points of view disfavored by the left.
"The imposition of DEI bureaucracy upon the academy has too often come at the expense of academic freedom and freedom of expression," notes the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a respected defender of intellectual liberty. Especially pernicious are "DEI administrators [who] have been responsible for repeated campus rights abuses."
A fresh example of such abuse erupted at Stanford Law School last week when Judge Kyle Duncan of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit attempted to deliver an address at the invitation of the school's chapter of the Federalist Society. A hundred or more students showed up to disrupt Duncan's speech, repeatedly drowning his words with shouted epithets like "Scumbag!" and "You're a liar!"
![]() Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Stanford Law School, attacked US Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan during his appearance at the school on March 9, 2023. |
The title of the judge's talk was "The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter," and he presumably intended to discuss some of his notable decisions on controversial topics. The Fifth Circuit is considered the most conservative of the appellate courts and Duncan's orientation is plainly right of center. In 2015, for example, he was retained by 15 states to prepare a Supreme Court brief opposing nationwide same-sex marriage. Agree or disagree with his politics, his judicial philosophy should be of interest to any serious law student. After all, as legal blogger David Lat remarked, "the opportunity to hear from a sitting federal appellate judge about his court's jurisprudence is why students go to places like" Stanford Law School.
But the students who came to Duncan's appearance weren't interested in hearing him but in silencing him. Lat recounts what happened:
When the Stanford FedSoc president (an openly gay man) opened the proceedings, he was jeered between sentences. Judge Duncan then took the stage — and from the beginning of his speech, the protestors booed and heckled continually. For about ten minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protestors simply yelled over him, with exclamations like "You couldn't get into Stanford!" "You're not welcome here, we hate you!" "Why do you hate black people?!" "Leave and never come back!" "We hate FedSoc students, f**k them, they don't belong here either!"
After a while, Duncan lost his cool, calling the students "juvenile idiots" and condemning the "blatant disrespect" he was being shown. That was unwise; he should have known better. But all that was merely a prelude to the worst outrage of the day.
When it was clear that the abuse would not subside, Duncan asked that a university administrator restore a semblance of order to the room. Whereupon Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law's associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion — who had been in the room the whole time and done nothing to restrain the disruptors — came to the podium. The judge asked to speak with her privately but she refused. Then she took out a prepared text (!) and laced into — Duncan.
Steinbach told the judge that his "work has caused harm" and that his speech "feels abhorrent [and] literally denies the humanity of people." She accused him of engaging in the "absolute disenfranchisement of [people's] rights." She said she was "pained to have to say that you are welcome here in this school to speak" and expressed sympathy for those who oppose free speech on campus. "Is your speaking here worth the pain that it has caused, the division it has caused?" she demanded of the judge.
Rather than rebuke the students whose behavior was so disgraceful, Steinbach applauded them. "I look out," she said, "and I don't ask, 'What is going on here?' I look out and I say, 'I'm glad this is going on here.'"
Video of Steinbach's diatribe and some of the raucous heckling that preceded it has been posted online.
When Steinbach finished, about half the students walked out (one called Duncan "scum" as she passed him). The judge tried unsuccessfully to resume his presentation; when he invited students to engage with him in a Q&A, the heckling resumed. "You are all law students; you are supposed to have reasoned debate and hear the other side, not yell at those who disagree," he said. To which, according to Lat, a protestor jeered: "You don't believe that we have a right to exist, so we don't believe you have the right to our respect or to speak here!"
Why are universities increasingly seen not as a home for open debate but as a gulag of intellectual conformity and the silencing of non-woke ideas? Look no further than Stanford, where an academic official — a dean no less — insults an invited speaker, extols the students shouting him down, and suggests that the school might be better off jettisoning any commitment to free expression.
One day after the fiasco at the law school, Stanford issued a letter of apology to Duncan signed by the university president and the head of the law school. "What happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech," they wrote, "and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus." Without mentioning Steinbach by name, the letter conceded that "staff members who should have enforced university policies . . . instead intervened in inappropriate ways." That was putting it far too mildly. There was no forceful rebuke of the students for their shameful and intolerant behavior. There was no indication that Steinbach, the DEI dean, will face professional consequences.
The Stanford Review, an independent student newspaper at the California university, had a much stronger take.
"The university's apology will be completely meaningless unless concrete actions are taken to rid the administration of anti-speech zealots," declared the paper in an editorial headlined "Fire Tirien Steinbach." It argued that if Stanford's claim to care about free speech is to be taken seriously, "it must fire any administrator who actively encourages these unruly actions against it."
Only as an acronym does "DEI" stand for diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the fever swamps of academia, it has come to stand for everything that academic inquiry and intellectual freedom shun. The debacle at Stanford is only the latest illustration of how toxic higher education has become — and why the backlash against it is only beginning.
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Corporate welfare and the Cuban embargo
The dictatorship in Cuba is the oldest and cruelest in the Western Hemisphere. The island's people live under bitter oppression and the regime in Havana reserves its most poisonous attacks for the United States — the nation to which hundreds of thousands of Cubans have fled, often at the risk of their lives. Yet that never seems to dissuade some US politicians from seeking to reward Cuba's despots with commerce and new wealth.
Last week, US Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran of Kansas, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts introduced legislation to lift the Cuba trade embargo and make it easier to subsidize Cuba's dictatorship. Their pitch is that the measure would make it easier for US businesses and farmers to trade with Cuba, a market from which American exporters are supposedly excluded.
![]() Cuba's people know that their misery is the fault not of the United States but of the oppressive regime that for six and a half decades has kept them in chains. |
"By ending the trade embargo with Cuba once and for all, our bipartisan legislation will turn the page on the failed policy of isolation while creating a new export market and generating economic opportunities for American businesses," said Klobuchar in a press statement. Added Moran: "It is time to amend our own laws to give US producers fair access to market to consumers in Cuba." Nothing in their bill, the senators insist, would impede the ability of the United States to hold Cuba accountable for its human rights enormities.
The only thing wrong with that is — well, everything.
To take the last point first, we have already sat through this feature and we know how it turns out. It was less than a decade ago that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry vigorously set about normalizing relations with Cuba. The US embassy in Havana and the Cuban embassy in Washington were reopened. Obama removed Cuba from the State Department list of terror-sponsoring regimes, attended a Major League Baseball game in Havana as the guest of Cuban President Raúl Castro, lifted most restrictions on travel to Cuba by Americans, and dispatched top officials to the island on trade missions.
Result? The regime's repression intensified. Beatings and arrests of dissidents soared. There was a crackdown on churches and religious groups. By relaxing restrictions on US trade with and travel to Cuba, as I wrote at the time, Obama's policy made life worse for ordinary Cubans, not better. The reason was straightforward: Because the Cuban government owns or controls virtually every major business in the country, doing more business with Cuba meant putting more wealth into the coffers of the regime. A richer dictatorship became, by definition, a stronger dictatorship. "Everybody shares a little bit of disappointment about the direction that the government in Cuba chose to go," Kerry later said. But the outcome was entirely predictable.
US farmers and other producers are not barred by the embargo from selling food and other products to Cuba. In 2022, US exports to Cuba totaled $328.5 million, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, up from $304.7 million the year before. Most of those exports were foodstuffs, especially poultry and soybeans. One source quoted by CBS News last year, Yale professor Carlos Eire, even described the United States as "the largest supplier of food to Cuba."
What the embargo prevents is not selling to Cuba but selling to Cuba on credit. American producers are free to export agricultural commodities to Cuba, as long as the terms are cash on the barrelhead. Exports to Cuba do not qualify for federal credit guarantees and US Agriculture Department export promotion programs — highly lucrative forms of corporate welfare. American agribusiness keeps clamoring for the right to sell more commodities to Cuba on credit terms backed by the federal government, secure in the knowledge that if Cuba fails to pay its bill, some other entity will pick up the tab. The problem is that the communist regime will fail to pay its bills — it is a notorious deadbeat — and US taxpayers will be stuck with the check.
A weirdly persistent myth about the US embargo, one repeated over and over, is that if only it were repealed, Cuba would be inundated by a gusher of tourists, consumer imports, and democratic ideas from America that would topple Havana's communist walls. The silliness of the claim is evident from the energy with which Havana fulminates against the embargo. Besides: If commerce and tourism had the power to undo the regime, it would have been undone long ago. Millions of tourists from around the world, including hundreds of thousands from America, visit Cuba each year. And the US embargo affects only the United States — it doesn't hamper Cuba from trading with scores of countries. If the island remains a despotic economic basket case, that is because it is ruled by a communist police state.
In 2021, when courageous Cubans by the thousands surged into the streets in the biggest anti-government demonstrations in two decades, they cried "Abajo la dictadura" ("down with the dictatorship") and "Libertad!" Some waved American flags. Cuba's people know that their misery is the fault of the oppressive regime that for six and a half decades has kept them in chains. The time to treat Cuba as a normal trading partner will come when that oppression ends — when political prisoners are freed, when emigrants can leave, when political parties are legalized, and when democratic elections are scheduled. That is what Klobuchar and her colleagues should be focused on, not how to sell more soybeans to Havana's ruling thugs.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Why Johnny can't read more than three 'white' books," March 19, 1998:
Only a politically correct fanatic would want children to be taught that what matters most about a book is the color of the author's skin. Or to believe that the only books worth their interest or enthusiasm are those written by members of their own ethnic group. Or to think of "Huckleberry Finn" not as a great American novel, but a great white novel; or "Go Tell It On The Mountain" as a black novel; or "Song of Myself" as a gay poem.
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The Last Line
"She sounded furious and I knew, with considerable relief, that She Who Must Be Obeyed was herself again." — John Mortimer, "Rumpole and the Old Boy Net" from Rumpole and the Golden Thread (1983)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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