Stanford Law student Tim Rosenberger says the ugly protest against U.S. Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan earlier this month is indicative of a broader problem with speech and culture on campuses, and not just at his own.
"There definitely is a problem with speech and with the culture, I don't think it's unique to Stanford," he told Fox News Digital. "I think it's true of the other schools, too, but there's work to be done."
"I think for the average person who just has normal views, it's a very confusing place because you're sort of invited to join the mob or whatever that was that shouted down Judge Duncan, or you're told you're some kind of bigot, and you might not really agree with Judge Duncan's positions, but you might also think very reasonably that if you disagree with some of these positions, and you're planning on entering the legal profession, you send them an email or talk to them privately," he said. "You don't paint your face and yell at them about how you hope their relatives get raped."
The Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, invited Duncan from Louisiana to come speak on March 9, and his status as a Trump-appointed judge made him persona non grata with some of the elite campus' left-wing students. Video and audio has gone viral of students interrupting, shouting and insulting the judge, who was appointed by former President Trump, over his conservative views. He was unable to give his prepared remarks, although he had some spirited back-and-forth with the angry onlookers before eventually departing with federal marshals in tow.
Rosenberger, the Federalist Society's chapter president, said even Duncan's entrance into the room was a "dark moment," noting he'd gotten coffee with the judge before they returned to school, and "you could hear this din" from the building as they approached where he would be speaking.
"They were just yelling at him," he said. "People are yelling really horrible things about him, about his family members being raped, I assume an allusion to his support for [Dobbs v. Women's Health]."
Rosenberger said he didn't think the kind of campus disruptions against conservative speakers that have been occurring around the country would happen at Stanford, one of the top law schools in the United States.
"We've had hostility, but we haven't had anything like this," he said. "I mean, it was like a train crash, right? It just kept getting worse and continuing."
"Specifically, I was told that if people tried to disrupt the events, they would be warned once and then ejected from the event," he added. "So we're sitting there and there's just this loud noise and there's all the crosstalk and people heckling him, and he can not get on to his prepared remarks."
Duncan was repeatedly shouted down and drowned out by the angry students, at times with highly vulgar remarks. He fired back at times, telling them they were infantile and rude. Adding to the strangeness was an impromptu lecture by the school's associate dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, who suggested free speech wasn't worth giving Duncan a platform and scolded him as doing "harm" with his rulings.
Students screamed "this is our jurisdiction!," "this is a valid form of communication!," and "you don't respect us!" at the judge. Later in his remarks, the judge questioned whether the event had become a "struggle session" – a reference to forced re-education that plagued communist countries in the 20th century. A recording showed students even could be heard making gagging sounds as he spoke.
The behavior of the students appeared to be in clear violation of the school's free speech policy against "disrupt[ing] the effective carrying out of a University function or approved activity, such as lectures, meetings, interviews, ceremonies, the conduct of University business in a University office, and public events."
Rosenberger said he was surprised but also "heartened" that the incident had attracted widespread attention.
"I didn't think it would go viral the way it has," he said. "I'm really sort of heartened that people are interested in this and find it shocking, because for about a day there, I just wondered if I was a crazy person. But I thought this was so horrifying and inappropriate, and no one cared. Nobody on the faculty emailed me. No one."
Stanford Law School dean Jenny Martinez apologized to Duncan after the incident went viral, drawing yet another protest from students for what they viewed as a capitulation to an unreformed bigot. Rosenberger said Martinez had met with him and appeared to recognize this was bigger than a mere policy about campus speech.
"Something has gone very wrong culturally with our school if we're going to treat each other with such hatred and contempt," he said. "It's not really about what speech is allowed… Even if you really disagree with someone, even if you kind of suspect someone is evil, you don't do whatever happened [on March 9]."
"This is not productive discourse," the Manhattan Institute's Ilya Shapiro told Fox News Digital. "It's not engaging or trying to convince or anything like that… It's not like they were, you know, paid protesters or something. This is how they think they need to behave."
Shapiro has some unfortunate experience on this front. Hundreds of Georgetown Law Center students sought his firing last year after he sent a tweet lamenting President Biden's stated desire to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court; while he meant it as a critique of identity politics in terms of restricting candidates by race and gender, Shapiro's terminology was construed as racially biased, and the firestorm began.
Georgetown launched a months-long investigation just as Shapiro was set to take over the law school's Center for the Constitution. Hundreds of students continued to demand his firing. Shapiro was reinstated from leave after the probe ended, but he resigned, saying the school was a "den of vipers" that had made his job and mission impossible.
Shapiro called for consequences for those who violated Stanford's free speech policies. The same students who were eager to shout down Duncan, however, aren't eager to say their names in print; some of them told Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium he couldn't identify them by name in his story because it would violate their privacy.
"You can't make it up," Sibarium tweeted.
Shapiro was shouted down himself last week while speaking at the University of Denver. At the University of California-Davis last week, the appearance of conservative activist Charlie Kirk led to far-left violence and vandalism at the school.
Fox News' Joe Silverstein contributed to this report.
