Maybe it's just because I have so many lawyers in my family (and I have spent wayyyyyyyyyy too much time around lawyers in general and *shudders* read their poorly written briefs), but I am so not surprised at the number of law school students who just don't understand how the first amendment works.
When this whole thing at Stanford happened, I was appalled, but not exactly shocked. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people decide to go to law school to either tick a box or to fulfill some sort of ideological vision for themselves (they view it as something adjacent to PR), and don't always realize what the actual practice of law is.
I find a lot of younger lawyers are. Maybe it is just because they are young, but I have noticed a lot of the people I know younger people teaching in law school also have this bent.
To be fair, law school is less about the practice of law and more about the theory of law, and I do think a lot of young attorneys are scared straight as soon as they get their first job after passing the bar and realize they actually have to know some practical things.
The students of top law schools are well aware that most portray themselves as potential activists / world changers on their applications, but nearly all of them go into completely establishment jobs, either large corporate firms or prosecutor-type positions. For law students, being a law professor (hard to get but a totally sweet gig) is considered "public service." I don't think students are insincere when they apply, but they are bizarrely delusional about what the practice of law actually is and once they see an opportunity for a 230K starting salary, it's hard to choose one at 50K.
There are way more law degrees than actual lawyer jobs. I had conversations a decade ago about how even the top schools were having to hire graduates back as admissions reps to inflate their employment stats (they would hire them for the minimum time necessary to count them as employed). Perversely, it may be that the less valuable a law degree becomes as a path to employment, the more people go to law school for reasons other than becoming a lawyer. Forget luxury beliefs, you can get a luxury degree!
It's mind-boggling to me that the education bubble hasn't popped yet. Maybe AI will finally do it.
FOR SURE. Which kind of blows my mind, because most of the lawyers I know hate being lawyers. You'd think there'd be more of a churn rate...
And it seems like it's getting to be that way across the board. I feel like it's almost expected at this point to anticipate working outside of your field of study prompting even MORE people to get a masters or professional degree when they really don't need one. Like, what is even the point of getting an MPA degree?
The lawyers I know are happier, but my sample is biased towards healthcare law and high-end law schools (including more than one MD/JD, a path I might have taken if it had been offered).
To me, the integrity and professionalism of the legal profession is going to retain value far more than their actual knowledge and skills given that ChatGPT can write briefs. And yet, the profession has sacrificed the former.
I went to Stanford Law School in the 90s and found this whole recent episode excruciating. However, I thought Greg was too glib on the response of Dean Jenny Martinez. It took a couple of weeks, but she came out with a resounding and brilliant defense of free speech, which is both scholarly and accessible. I'd recommend it to anyone. (Also, it seems to be the leadership Stanford is now looking for, she's just been promoted to Provost, the role that Condi Rice had for many years.) I can't figure out how to link it, but if you google "jenny martinez next steps on protest and free speech" you will find the docuemnt.
Heather got to say everything she wanted to say so I don't agree that the Berkeley students were obnoxious nor that it was a debacle. The students did have viewpoints I don't agree with and some were quite emotional - but they spoke when it was their turn. They let her speak. It's the way it is supposed to work.
To your point, I intentionally used the word "almost" because unlike Judge Duncan, Heather did get to speak.
I called it a debacle because not a single student presented any facts and worst of all, they resorted to profanity. The use of foul language in that setting goes beyond being "quite emotional."
As someone with treatment resistant life long depression, my heart goes out to Greg. I did find CBT to be really helpful for a good decade. Its utility seems to have faded, but that might be because I'm not doing the exercises as regularly! Oddly, all my therapists and coaches are pointing me away from it and at trying newer modalities. My problems are different now (chronic pain), so maybe there's good cause for that. But part of me wishes I could find a therapist who ACTUALLY does CBT and holds me account to doing daily exercises. (They all say they do CBT but few of them really do and even fewer are rigorous about it.)
Unmentioned here, FIRE doesn't just do free speech. They've been a major player in the campus due process arena for a long time, and I've met several of them on the Hill over the years. They do great first principles, legalese advocacy, while my job was more the human interest side of things. As someone who's known FIRE for a while, the compliment I make works out the same to what I say about Meghan and Sarah: they haven't completely abandoned their principles over the past ten years. This is the same organization with the same principles. It seems like faint praise, but given how many people and groups of people have lost their minds...
Greg Lukianoff I have met only once, when I was graciously invited to FIRE's student gala a year ago. His palpable optimism is indeed a clash with the Sarah Haider vibe. I tried to impress on him the same point I do here and in other heterodox spaces: professional medicine is uniquely vulnerable to authoritarianism. Doctors have huge loans, tons of oversight and structure over our work, so many ways to ruin us and so many weak points in the system subject to institutional capture. And unlike lawyers, we're not even theoretically being trained in knowing our own rights. Medicine is a longer training pathway than everything else, so the generation who took over the New York Times or the ACLU aren't really in power yet. But they're coming.
I had a meeting not long ago about a medical trainee who was under discipline due to inability to interact with people or think under pressure, and everyone said this individual was a hard worker, smart, nice person, who just seemed to be suffering what we call "learning loss" at lower levels of education due to a lack of in-person experience during the COVID lockdowns. Safetyism is no less harmful in medicine than it is anywhere else.
I’m only 8 mins in, but the idea that “you can only be cancelled by your side” reminds me of what Herr von Z. said to Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, “one can only be crucified in the name of one’s own faith”. Its one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books
I don’t know if that’s true actually. The most egregious cancellation I know of is that of Will Wilkinson, who got sacked by his liberal/centrist employer for a Tweet saying “if Biden wanted to unite the country he would hang Mike Pence”. This was a flippant reference to how pointless it is to look for common ground with Jan 6 loonies, not an actual call for Pence’s summary execution. Nevertheless he got sacked and the NYT dropped him as a contributor. The poor man helps hawk Bitcoin now. You could say he got cancelled by his own people, but it was for an offense that drew mostly right-wing ire.
One thing I wonder is how much cancel culture is a US-specific problem. Cases like Wilkinson’s seem more about unlimited leeway for PR-sensitive employers to fire employees for speech outside work, rather than left-wing sanctimony per se. In countries with better labor protections, it might not be such an issue.
So, Meghan said that the Stanford administrator, Trien Steinbach, "just happened to be Black". No, that was not random in the least, on many levels. I am going to my wife's Stanford law reunion ('88) in a couple of weeks. My plan is to ask everyone what they think about his incident. I will report back (though no one will read it, of course...)
But "just happened to be black" I meant that the speaker, Kyle Duncan, did not know anything about the administrator, including her race (she had not introduced herself to him) which is why he didn't initially recognize her in the crowd. The students accused him of racism because he "could not believe" that an administrator would be black. This is a detail in Greg's book. I was not suggesting that her race was incidental to her hiring.
First, because staff on the level totally exist in the milieu of social justice and intersectionality. Therefore, a black woman (often lesbian) is the most likely hire for that DEI position if at all qualified, a gay POC ( female or trans) is second on the hiring totem pole, then white lesbians, then gay white men, etc. Straight white men certainly barely exist in this arena. I know far more about UCSC having been a staff member there - but I went to conferences in NorCal - and it seemed the same story everywhere. Secondly, the person they would send into that situation would hit the most intersectional checkpoints in the hopes of better crowd control. If there is a straight white man in the DEI staff, they certainly would not send him.
Steinbach appears to be biracial,for what it's worth.
It was obvious that Steinbach planned an ambush. What's really sad is that other faculty/administrators say on their hands and watched her hijack a forum instead of restoring order.
Dean Jenny Martinez mouthe the right platitudes about free speech, open discourse, viewpoint diversity blah blah blah. Let's see what happens this school year when the Federalist Society holds another event.
In addition to all of the above, what was remarkable is that she actually thought "is the juice worth the squeeze" was some kind of clever, heretofore unknown argument against free speech.
A lot of speakers get disrupted by angry mobs, but in this case, the agitator is calm, uses words, and probably lives in such a small bubble that she genuinely believed that her words and actions made sense.
Shaking my damn head over here. When is it going to sink in that what so many are calling "cancellation" these days would actually be better thought of as *consequences*? I'm sorry if it comes as a shock that you can't get away with what you used to, but maybe some things are more important than your ability to sound off however and whenever you like. Count yourself lucky that you live in a time when the full and final truth has been revealed, and there are so many who are willing to share it with you, forcefully if necessary. (I need a sarcasm font.)
Decades ago, Martin Amis (speaking in a critical vein) observed that the PC phenomenon would require "a busy executive wing, and constatnt invigilation." And how. Hats off to FIRE.
And I commented about this in another Substack thread, but simply calling something "right wing" so that you can dismiss it with no further effort drives me absolutely nuts, and it really galled me to see it done in that LA Times write-up of the FP debate, even more because of that 'omg-don't-call-it-right-wing-whatever-you-do-tee-hee' childish way that it was done. This is in a major newspaper? Damn.
When I’m feeling especially Midwest ornery, I will say “that’s so gay” and my wife will admonish me. Out of deference to her, I don’t say it outside of the house. : )
Well, to me that was really far from a debacle. Foul language isn't a trigger for me - I was a construction worker - and I didn't even notice any actually. It all seemed - given how much they hated what she was saying - just fine. She was awesome.
Things come up as throw-aways that are such brilliant ideas they make me wish I had talents and skills outside the visual arts."The Hitler Podcast" would be amazing! It's an uncomfortably dry satire. All you'd need is someone who understands Hitlerist "philosophy" (as much as is possible), and can do a good Hitler-in-English impersonation - with emphasis on the fact that he wasn't all that bright. And a little dusted with meth-psychosis towards the end. Bring listeners Hitler's unhinged commentary on contemporary pop culture. What would Adolf's take be on Taylor Swift's NFL romance? Men in women's sports? Megan and Harry's podcast grift? The world would not have seen such humor since the edgier of Monty Python's Nazi sketches.
Alas, I expect it will not happen. What a wasted opportunity. (Though honestly there was a time in the mid-to-late 90's where I could almost see this having happened as a Late Night with Conan O'Brien bit. Or at least part a "deep cable channel" segment - which included gems like "The Lincoln Money Shot Channel.")
Sarah is simp-worthy. Particularly the hair (which isn't something much appreciated until you see it manifested well). And particularly for geeks. I'm not sure women appreciate the difference between "hot" and "cute" the way men do, but "cute" carries a lot of cache with geeks. "Cute" feels more approachable, which is closely associated with "agreeableness" (i.e., if you get shot down it'll at least be done softly). I'd be willing to bet said sentiment led to some disillusioning experiences for a number of young men in Sarah's more youthful days of eligibiliity. (To quote reknowned dating guru and general life-advice expert Admiral Akbar, "It's a trap!")
Maybe it's just because I have so many lawyers in my family (and I have spent wayyyyyyyyyy too much time around lawyers in general and *shudders* read their poorly written briefs), but I am so not surprised at the number of law school students who just don't understand how the first amendment works.
When this whole thing at Stanford happened, I was appalled, but not exactly shocked. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people decide to go to law school to either tick a box or to fulfill some sort of ideological vision for themselves (they view it as something adjacent to PR), and don't always realize what the actual practice of law is.
Are a lot of people going into law activist-minded, too? I’d imagine that’s the case
I find a lot of younger lawyers are. Maybe it is just because they are young, but I have noticed a lot of the people I know younger people teaching in law school also have this bent.
To be fair, law school is less about the practice of law and more about the theory of law, and I do think a lot of young attorneys are scared straight as soon as they get their first job after passing the bar and realize they actually have to know some practical things.
The students of top law schools are well aware that most portray themselves as potential activists / world changers on their applications, but nearly all of them go into completely establishment jobs, either large corporate firms or prosecutor-type positions. For law students, being a law professor (hard to get but a totally sweet gig) is considered "public service." I don't think students are insincere when they apply, but they are bizarrely delusional about what the practice of law actually is and once they see an opportunity for a 230K starting salary, it's hard to choose one at 50K.
There are way more law degrees than actual lawyer jobs. I had conversations a decade ago about how even the top schools were having to hire graduates back as admissions reps to inflate their employment stats (they would hire them for the minimum time necessary to count them as employed). Perversely, it may be that the less valuable a law degree becomes as a path to employment, the more people go to law school for reasons other than becoming a lawyer. Forget luxury beliefs, you can get a luxury degree!
It's mind-boggling to me that the education bubble hasn't popped yet. Maybe AI will finally do it.
FOR SURE. Which kind of blows my mind, because most of the lawyers I know hate being lawyers. You'd think there'd be more of a churn rate...
And it seems like it's getting to be that way across the board. I feel like it's almost expected at this point to anticipate working outside of your field of study prompting even MORE people to get a masters or professional degree when they really don't need one. Like, what is even the point of getting an MPA degree?
The lawyers I know are happier, but my sample is biased towards healthcare law and high-end law schools (including more than one MD/JD, a path I might have taken if it had been offered).
To me, the integrity and professionalism of the legal profession is going to retain value far more than their actual knowledge and skills given that ChatGPT can write briefs. And yet, the profession has sacrificed the former.
Mine are mostly depressed personal injury and divorce attorneys.
There's a novel in that sentence, I think...
OMG. You're right, I totally need to start something.
I went to Stanford Law School in the 90s and found this whole recent episode excruciating. However, I thought Greg was too glib on the response of Dean Jenny Martinez. It took a couple of weeks, but she came out with a resounding and brilliant defense of free speech, which is both scholarly and accessible. I'd recommend it to anyone. (Also, it seems to be the leadership Stanford is now looking for, she's just been promoted to Provost, the role that Condi Rice had for many years.) I can't figure out how to link it, but if you google "jenny martinez next steps on protest and free speech" you will find the docuemnt.
The “cancel culture doesn’t exist” argument seems like a simple product of survivorship bias.
Wonder if Greg has heard about this recent debacle at Berkeley (don't call it Boalt Hall) Law School.
https://youtu.be/55t_AdJEbHg?si=DsgWDWnxX4sGHgux
In a nutshell, Heather Mac Donald spoke and the Berkeley students were almost as obnoxious as their Stanford buddies across the Bay.
Heather got to say everything she wanted to say so I don't agree that the Berkeley students were obnoxious nor that it was a debacle. The students did have viewpoints I don't agree with and some were quite emotional - but they spoke when it was their turn. They let her speak. It's the way it is supposed to work.
To your point, I intentionally used the word "almost" because unlike Judge Duncan, Heather did get to speak.
I called it a debacle because not a single student presented any facts and worst of all, they resorted to profanity. The use of foul language in that setting goes beyond being "quite emotional."
First
But have you listened?
Yes, it only took me 10 minutes to listen to the whole hour because I’m simply da bomb
As someone with treatment resistant life long depression, my heart goes out to Greg. I did find CBT to be really helpful for a good decade. Its utility seems to have faded, but that might be because I'm not doing the exercises as regularly! Oddly, all my therapists and coaches are pointing me away from it and at trying newer modalities. My problems are different now (chronic pain), so maybe there's good cause for that. But part of me wishes I could find a therapist who ACTUALLY does CBT and holds me account to doing daily exercises. (They all say they do CBT but few of them really do and even fewer are rigorous about it.)
Unmentioned here, FIRE doesn't just do free speech. They've been a major player in the campus due process arena for a long time, and I've met several of them on the Hill over the years. They do great first principles, legalese advocacy, while my job was more the human interest side of things. As someone who's known FIRE for a while, the compliment I make works out the same to what I say about Meghan and Sarah: they haven't completely abandoned their principles over the past ten years. This is the same organization with the same principles. It seems like faint praise, but given how many people and groups of people have lost their minds...
Greg Lukianoff I have met only once, when I was graciously invited to FIRE's student gala a year ago. His palpable optimism is indeed a clash with the Sarah Haider vibe. I tried to impress on him the same point I do here and in other heterodox spaces: professional medicine is uniquely vulnerable to authoritarianism. Doctors have huge loans, tons of oversight and structure over our work, so many ways to ruin us and so many weak points in the system subject to institutional capture. And unlike lawyers, we're not even theoretically being trained in knowing our own rights. Medicine is a longer training pathway than everything else, so the generation who took over the New York Times or the ACLU aren't really in power yet. But they're coming.
I had a meeting not long ago about a medical trainee who was under discipline due to inability to interact with people or think under pressure, and everyone said this individual was a hard worker, smart, nice person, who just seemed to be suffering what we call "learning loss" at lower levels of education due to a lack of in-person experience during the COVID lockdowns. Safetyism is no less harmful in medicine than it is anywhere else.
I’m only 8 mins in, but the idea that “you can only be cancelled by your side” reminds me of what Herr von Z. said to Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, “one can only be crucified in the name of one’s own faith”. Its one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books
I don’t know if that’s true actually. The most egregious cancellation I know of is that of Will Wilkinson, who got sacked by his liberal/centrist employer for a Tweet saying “if Biden wanted to unite the country he would hang Mike Pence”. This was a flippant reference to how pointless it is to look for common ground with Jan 6 loonies, not an actual call for Pence’s summary execution. Nevertheless he got sacked and the NYT dropped him as a contributor. The poor man helps hawk Bitcoin now. You could say he got cancelled by his own people, but it was for an offense that drew mostly right-wing ire.
One thing I wonder is how much cancel culture is a US-specific problem. Cases like Wilkinson’s seem more about unlimited leeway for PR-sensitive employers to fire employees for speech outside work, rather than left-wing sanctimony per se. In countries with better labor protections, it might not be such an issue.
So, Meghan said that the Stanford administrator, Trien Steinbach, "just happened to be Black". No, that was not random in the least, on many levels. I am going to my wife's Stanford law reunion ('88) in a couple of weeks. My plan is to ask everyone what they think about his incident. I will report back (though no one will read it, of course...)
But "just happened to be black" I meant that the speaker, Kyle Duncan, did not know anything about the administrator, including her race (she had not introduced herself to him) which is why he didn't initially recognize her in the crowd. The students accused him of racism because he "could not believe" that an administrator would be black. This is a detail in Greg's book. I was not suggesting that her race was incidental to her hiring.
In the context you said it, I didn't hear it that way but I believe you!
Why "of course"? I'd read it. But don't feel obliged to report back just on my account.
First, because staff on the level totally exist in the milieu of social justice and intersectionality. Therefore, a black woman (often lesbian) is the most likely hire for that DEI position if at all qualified, a gay POC ( female or trans) is second on the hiring totem pole, then white lesbians, then gay white men, etc. Straight white men certainly barely exist in this arena. I know far more about UCSC having been a staff member there - but I went to conferences in NorCal - and it seemed the same story everywhere. Secondly, the person they would send into that situation would hit the most intersectional checkpoints in the hopes of better crowd control. If there is a straight white man in the DEI staff, they certainly would not send him.
Steinbach appears to be biracial,for what it's worth.
It was obvious that Steinbach planned an ambush. What's really sad is that other faculty/administrators say on their hands and watched her hijack a forum instead of restoring order.
Dean Jenny Martinez mouthe the right platitudes about free speech, open discourse, viewpoint diversity blah blah blah. Let's see what happens this school year when the Federalist Society holds another event.
In addition to all of the above, what was remarkable is that she actually thought "is the juice worth the squeeze" was some kind of clever, heretofore unknown argument against free speech.
A lot of speakers get disrupted by angry mobs, but in this case, the agitator is calm, uses words, and probably lives in such a small bubble that she genuinely believed that her words and actions made sense.
I trust in this Dean. So I am pretty sure it will turn out differently.
Shaking my damn head over here. When is it going to sink in that what so many are calling "cancellation" these days would actually be better thought of as *consequences*? I'm sorry if it comes as a shock that you can't get away with what you used to, but maybe some things are more important than your ability to sound off however and whenever you like. Count yourself lucky that you live in a time when the full and final truth has been revealed, and there are so many who are willing to share it with you, forcefully if necessary. (I need a sarcasm font.)
Decades ago, Martin Amis (speaking in a critical vein) observed that the PC phenomenon would require "a busy executive wing, and constatnt invigilation." And how. Hats off to FIRE.
And I commented about this in another Substack thread, but simply calling something "right wing" so that you can dismiss it with no further effort drives me absolutely nuts, and it really galled me to see it done in that LA Times write-up of the FP debate, even more because of that 'omg-don't-call-it-right-wing-whatever-you-do-tee-hee' childish way that it was done. This is in a major newspaper? Damn.
When I’m feeling especially Midwest ornery, I will say “that’s so gay” and my wife will admonish me. Out of deference to her, I don’t say it outside of the house. : )
No problem. Just switch to "that's so retarded." Problem solved!
Well, to me that was really far from a debacle. Foul language isn't a trigger for me - I was a construction worker - and I didn't even notice any actually. It all seemed - given how much they hated what she was saying - just fine. She was awesome.
Things come up as throw-aways that are such brilliant ideas they make me wish I had talents and skills outside the visual arts."The Hitler Podcast" would be amazing! It's an uncomfortably dry satire. All you'd need is someone who understands Hitlerist "philosophy" (as much as is possible), and can do a good Hitler-in-English impersonation - with emphasis on the fact that he wasn't all that bright. And a little dusted with meth-psychosis towards the end. Bring listeners Hitler's unhinged commentary on contemporary pop culture. What would Adolf's take be on Taylor Swift's NFL romance? Men in women's sports? Megan and Harry's podcast grift? The world would not have seen such humor since the edgier of Monty Python's Nazi sketches.
Alas, I expect it will not happen. What a wasted opportunity. (Though honestly there was a time in the mid-to-late 90's where I could almost see this having happened as a Late Night with Conan O'Brien bit. Or at least part a "deep cable channel" segment - which included gems like "The Lincoln Money Shot Channel.")
Great conversation, despite Greg simping Sarah at the beginning. Look forward to reading the Cancelling of the American mind
Oh don’t be mean! We are human and sometimes beauty takes us aback. It’s normal!
It was fine, I just found it funny
Sarah is simp-worthy. Particularly the hair (which isn't something much appreciated until you see it manifested well). And particularly for geeks. I'm not sure women appreciate the difference between "hot" and "cute" the way men do, but "cute" carries a lot of cache with geeks. "Cute" feels more approachable, which is closely associated with "agreeableness" (i.e., if you get shot down it'll at least be done softly). I'd be willing to bet said sentiment led to some disillusioning experiences for a number of young men in Sarah's more youthful days of eligibiliity. (To quote reknowned dating guru and general life-advice expert Admiral Akbar, "It's a trap!")