Stanford Law School Taps Student Organizer Of Shout-Down Protest Of FedSoc Event Featuring Judge Duncan To Help Find New Dean

Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), Stanford Law School Taps Organizer of Shout-Down Protest To Help Find New Dean:

Stanford Law School has tapped a student involved in the successful effort to shout down a federal judge to serve on a search committee for the law school’s next dean, raising questions about the school’s stated commitment to free speech.

The only student on the law school’s search committee, Matthew Coffin is the co-president of Stanford OutLaw, the LGBT student group that led efforts in March to disrupt a Federalist Society event featuring Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan. Along with nearly a dozen faculty members, Coffin will help identify candidates to replace former Stanford Law dean Jenny Martinez, who was named provost of the university in August.

It is not clear how Stanford chose the committee—the school did not respond to a request for comment—but its members were announced in an October 4 email to the school.

Students say Coffin’s appointment is a betrayal of the promise, made by Martinez in a 10-page memo about the Duncan brouhaha, that the law school would recommit itself to free expression. “It’s really disappointing and seemingly rewards the behavior that the law school rightly rebuked last year,” one Stanford Law student said. “It’s like the moment Dean Martinez got one foot out the door, Stanford stopped trying to hide its antipathy to the Federalist Society.” …

Even universities that commit publicly to intellectual diversity are often working behind the scenes to undermine it, stacking decision-making bodies with the most radical students and professors. Many hiring committees, including at the University of California, Berkeley and George Mason University, now include an “equity adviser” who monitors the search process, and schools have long used diversity statements to weed out candidates deemed insufficiently progressive. …

Stanford illustrates how … ideological screening can happen without an explicit litmus test. Though Martinez said in March that law school shouldn’t be an “echo chamber,” the committee searching for her replacement includes no conservatives or moderates. All of its faculty members are quite far left, four current and former students said, with even liberals friendly to the Federalist Society left off the list. …

The search committee is the second time in recent months that Stanford has cast doubt on its commitment to free expression. Martinez said in March that the law school would host a mandatory half-day session for all law students about free speech and civil discourse. The promised training turned out to be an online program that some students completed in under a minute.

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