Employers Need to Put the Squeeze on Woke Intolerance Young people like the Stanford students who heckled Kyle Duncan should be unemployable. Gerard Baker
Stanford Law School’s career services website boasts the kind of professional opportunities the school’s graduates can expect when they venture beyond the safe spaces of the palm-speckled campus.
Ninety-seven of the nation’s top 100 law firms employ Stanford graduates as partners; 92 have Stanford alums as attorneys. For 48 consecutive years Stanford graduates have clerked on the Supreme Court. Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many other top firms have employed a graduate as general counsel.
So my question to the senior partners of law firms, corporate chief executives, judges and others who will employ these privileged people is: Do you stand with Jenny Martinez or do you cower behind Tirien Steinbach? Do you want your institutions to be places where the law is respected as the authority that mediates our disputes is blindfolded or are you going to continue to connive at the transformation of the law into a tool of the new identity-class struggle? Are you going to keep facilitating the degradation of the most basic of our freedoms—speech—or will you begin the long struggle against the controlling zeitgeist of totalitarianism?
A brief primer for those who haven’t followed the latest outbreak of modern Maoism on our campuses:
This month, Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee, was repeatedly shouted down at a Federalist Society event at Stanford. An intimidating mob of students who objected to his views made sure he wouldn’t be heard. But most memorable was the intervention of Stanford Law’s associate dean of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Ms. Steinbach, who berated Judge Duncan and sided with those who shut him down.
Ms. Martinez, the law school’s dean, apologized to the judge and reprimanded the students. But last week, as the controversy boiled, she went further and issued one of the more important memorandums a university official has written in years.
In calibrated prose, punctuated by multiple citations of law and precedent, she laid out why the students’ behavior in disrupting the event was a breach not only of university rules but also of the very principles of freedom which the law is designed to protect. She explained—in language that may come as a shock to the hordes of DEI officers who now exercise ideological sway in so many workplaces—that the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion are inconsistent with and can’t be allowed to validate intolerance of free speech.
“The cycle of degenerating discourse won’t stop if we insist that people we disagree with must first behave the way we want them to,” she said—words that should be read by every CEO and senior law firm partner.
Meanwhile, in what read like a semi-apologetic effort to keep her job, Ms. Steinbach took to these pages last week. She claimed to be all in favor of free speech but repeated the intimidating words she used at the time to the judge when she asked him: “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Is standing up for what you believe in really worth all this hassle?
By contrast, Ms. Martinez’s screed was a principled and honest stand. We can hope her authority prevails. But the fight for ideological diversity and free speech is being lost on most campuses, so here’s a better way to protect wider society from this repressive wave: Employers should stop employing these jackals and make it clear that anyone who has been actively involved in blocking people from expressing a legitimate opinion won’t be hired. We are by now used to the way in which employers scour social media for indiscretions that doom job applications. Do the same for these campus extremists.
A reminder, by the way, of the kinds of people, who, on current trends, will be general counsel at Microsoft or top partners at the big law firms:
“We hope your daughters get raped!” one of them shouted at Judge Duncan, as he recalled in his own Journal op-ed.
I am not urging intolerance of diverse ideas in the workplace. On the contrary, you are perfectly entitled to be a radical and to express yourself openly. What you can’t do is bar viewpoints you don’t like.
For a long time we tolerated campus behavior much as we used to tolerate the behavior of toddlers. They’ll grow out of it, we thought, when they enter the real world. But the joke was on us. They graduated into the real world and started to impose their views on it. Weak-kneed managers, eager to protect their privileges and preserve a quiet life, couldn’t face the hostility they’d get from their employees and a media of the same ideological mindset always willing to air the grievances.
We see the implications—occasionally bursting into the open—as when the New York Times forced its opinion editor to resign for publishing an article the radicals didn’t like, or Google dropping a Pentagon contract because employees objected to helping the U.S. defend itself. Most of the time it advances without publicity, as steadily, day by day, the former campus totalitarians make their way in the “real world.”
It’s time employers started to resist, and began to educate their employees—the hard way if necessary—why free speech is so important.
They’ll find this juice is definitely worth the squeeze.
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