Freefalling at Stanford

By Zhuo Wen Chen @ Shutterstock.com

Originally posted March 24, 2023.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

“Who watches the watchers”? Just in case your Latin is as rusty as mine, the literal translation is, “who will guard the guards themselves?”

The phrase has a universal, timeless application referring generally to problems with people with power:: such as tyrannical governments, uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, and police or judicial corruption and overreach, referring to the impossibility of enforcing moral behavior on women when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible.

In “What Happened to Stanford,” Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, follows the disgraceful performance of Stanford law students. In the case of Stanford, VDH argues, “overweening intolerant ideology has sabotaged disinterested inquiry and meritocracy. Arrogance and sanctimoniousness lead Stanford to continue down this spiral—rather than pause, reflect, and redirect—and thereby only compound the public ridicule.”

Stanford’s law school recently invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to give a lecture by the school’s Federalist Society. A group of incensed law students shouted down the visiting Judge Duncan. Judge Duncan, explains Mr. Hanson, never got a chance.

• The law school students drowned him out.
• They flashed obscene placards. They screamed that he was “scum.”
• One yelled he hoped the judge’s own daughters would be raped.
• “You’re not welcome here, we hate you!”
• “Leave and never come back!”
• “We hate FedSoc [Federal Society] students, f–k them, they don’t belong here either!”
• “We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!”

Mission accomplished, the protestors stormed out. We aren’t talking teenaged undergrads, Mr. Hanson reminds readers of American Greatness. Rather these are wannabee adult professionals. These students are in law school to “learn jurisprudence and to enter the elite American legal system that is supposed to have protocols separating it from the mobocracies prevailing abroad.”

One of those protocols is this fundamental principle: to honor the Constitution’s protection of free speech and expression.

Not to mention, as Mr. Hanson does, “the ancient idea of respecting an invited guest, or the custom to treat with deference a federal judge, to say nothing of the duty to honor the codes and laws of the institution that they have chosen to join, which prohibit disruption of lectures and any effort to drive out public speakers.”

Ethics Embarrassments

The list of serial embarrassments reads like the suicides of Greek tragedy, where divine nemesis follows hubris, reflects Mr. Hanson.

A Once Great University’s Freefall

There’s more. For an exemplary example, there is Sam Bankman-Fried, son of two Stanford law professors. FTX’s $26 billion meltdown destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of investors.

Somehow (the parents) were involved in the Bankman-Fried family’ acquisition of a $16.4 million vacation home gifted to them from FTX shortly before it imploded.

The NY Times reported that both parent professors were intimately involved in their son’s multibillion-dollar business.

He [Professor Bankman] and his wife, the Stanford Law professor Barbara Fried, were more than just supportive parents backing their child’s business. Mr. Bankman was a paid FTX employee who traveled frequently to the Bahamas, where the exchange was based. Ms. Fried did not work for the company, but her son was among the donors in a political advocacy network that she orchestrated.

Former Stanford student Elizabeth Holmes was recently sentenced to a long prison term for defrauding investors in connection with her company Theranos, continues VDH.

(Holmes) had fraudulently claimed to have invented a “revolutionary” miniaturized blood testing device. Many of her corporation’s oversight board members were drawn from the Stanford community.

No Apologies Forthcoming

Eminent Stanford public health experts Drs. Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya were pilloried mercilessly by some of the Stanford faculty and administration. Why? “For daring to doubt the efficacy of what has proved to be disastrous government-enforced COVID quarantines and school shutdowns,” reports VDH. He also notes that neither doctor received apologies from the administrators, faculty, or students who attacked them.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, an accomplished neuroscientist and Stanford’s long-serving president, was “serially” attacked, with the Stanford Daily calling for his resignation.

It alleges the president was culpable of scholarly misconduct concerning the publication of a joint research paper decades ago, stresses VDS.

The charges are not proven and remain under investigation. But they make it difficult for a president to weigh in on the above controversies when some faculty and the student newspaper are serially calling for him to step down for ethics violations.

“Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”

In an article from the Wall Street Journal, ridicule is heaped on a Stanford University group’s publication of a taboo vocabulary list:

“Harmful” words supposedly unwelcome at Stanford included inflammatory expressions such as “American” and “immigrant.”

Ethics/Anger Management Seminar?

As VDH sadly reports, the university “requires an array of compulsory workshops that faculty and many students must undergo.”

But given these recent debacles, perhaps two additional new training sessions are needed: required ethics instruction and a mandatory anger-management seminar.

Read more about VDH here.