Burge’s tweet above was in response to the episode described by ultra-woke UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in the statement below (you can view Chemerinsky’s damning Ethics Alarms dossier here).
Gee what a surprise.
Since Prof. Turley has written an expansive post on his blog explaining why this is yet another example of woke academics and administrators being hoisted by their own petards (there’s been a lot of petard-hoisting lately), allow me to turn the floor over to him. He writes in part,
The problem is that these students have been told for years that deplatforming and disrupting events are forms of free speech. This has been an issue of contention with some academics who believe that free speech includes the right to silence others. Student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech. Academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself and resigned after she made a single analogy to acting like a “slaveholder” as a self-criticism for failing to achieve equity and reparations for black faculty and students).
Berkeley has lost cases in court over its failure to protect free speech.
Many faculty and deans remained quiet for years as conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters were cancelled on campus or deplatformed. It is only recently that some have become openly alarmed over the anti-free speech movement that they have fostered either directly or through their silence.
In this case, the students felt justified to stop a dinner event in a private home. They also showed little fear that they would face any repercussions for their actions….
For many of us, the lack of civility and respect by the students is disturbing but hardly surprising. There are many students who feel enabled for years by administrators and faculty at schools like Berkeley. Dean Chemerinsky can be criticized for fueling this rage by denouncing conservative justices as “partisan hacks” simply because he disagrees with their jurisprudential views. Nevertheless, Chemerinsky has had a long and widely respected career as a scholar and administrator…
Clearly, neither Chemerinsky nor [his wife] Professor Fisk deserved this disruption or the lack of respect. They refused to yield to the threats over this dinner and I respect them for that….I also would not fault the Dean for declining to pursue discipline over the incident since this occurred in a private residence. However, I take a harsher view of disruptions of classes and public events. The protesters can demonstrate outside of a room or a hall to express their opposition to a speaker. What they cannot do is prevent others from speaking or hearing opposing views. Those responsible for such disruptions should be suspended or, for repeat offenders, expelled….
We now have a culture of disruption that has been consistently fostered by academics and administrators on our campuses. When asked “why the home of a dean?,” these students would likely shrug and answer “why not?”
In that sense, this is the ultimate example of the chickens literally coming home to roost. These students have been enabled for years into believing that such acts of disruption are commendable and that others must yield in the cancellation of events. For weeks, they demanded that these dinners be halted despite other students wanting to attend. In that sense, the appearance in an actual home is alarming, but hardly unexpected in our current environment.
Bingo.
And may I add this rueful, perhaps undiplomatic note: many, maybe a majority, of American women will vote for those who have created and encouraged this cultural toxin because their highest priority is being able to kill unborn babies with impunity.
Ethics Alarms 
Is that really his statement? There’s a huge flaw in it with a section being repeated twice word for word. How did he miss that?
It is exactly as I received it, but I didn’t notice the repeated section in the two parts. I fixed it for the Dean.
I assumed since it was a picture, it was his own mistake.
I guess it was. But since I can’t proofread, I’m not one to complain.
I’m more concerned about the misplaced modifier in the second sentence. (No, not really, but shouldn’t a law school dean be expected to write grammatically?)
I’ve been seeing and hearing that particular mistake with increasing frequency. It is common on TV magazine shows like “48 Hours.” It opos up constantly in politician statements. Like everything else right now, this reminds me of Grace, who hated that verbal gaffe almost as much as her all time complaint, using “that” when “who” or “whom” is called for.
I am having a hard time seeing the error. What mistake am I missing?
“Since becoming dean, my wife and I..” He’s the dean, not his wife, nor his wife and he together.
the statement is awful
jvb
I am a little surprised by this (maybe I should not be).
The proper adjective here is simply “rude.”
This was a private event, a dinner party. There is no agenda here. Yet, some feel the need to turn any occasion into a place for protest. If they do this to a host who invites them in to his home, there is probably no place that is off limits.
And, these are law students. They are preparing for a professional life when they have not learned the most basic requirements of social interaction: civility.
How can they be trusted to obey the rules of decorum, when they can’t even observe rules of decorum in their private life?
Despicable.
-Jut
I suspect the student’s law license just evaporated.
jvb
It depends. Their oppressor status will determine that.
Given this was a private home, I would think that after the first request to leave they had every right to have the students trespassed by law enforcement. Trying to wrestle a microphone from the hands of the Jihadist wannabe only allowed the student to claim oppression.
Actually I’m surprised it was even tried. We did a police safety briefing in our church and we were told if people came in and did something like this, even touching them on the shoulder would be considered assault.
“Many faculty and deans remained quiet for years as conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters were cancelled on campus or deplatformed. It is only recently that some have become openly alarmed over the anti-free speech movement that they have fostered either directly or through their silence.“
Man, someone should write a poem about this!
“First they came for the conservatives, and I did not speak up…”
“First the leopards ate the conservatives’ faces, and I did nothing…”
So, the Democrat party is willing to sell American Jewry down the river (into the sea?) for the votes of Muslims in Detroit (gotta win Michigan) and the evidently countless useful idiot privileged white and black students in almost all colleges? Or do they figure they can have both? The anti-Semitic vote and the Jewish vote? Maybe they are right. Jews will still vote for Democrats and figure Israel can just continue taking care of itself as long as Trump is kept out of the White House. Nasty.
In any event, Irwin, Hah! Hah! Wasn’t it your compadre Chuck Schumer who said to the Supreme Court, “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind?” Placate all these radicals and sure enough, they’ll turn on you as well. Hah. Hah. Hah!
It is simple market share. The Muslims have a high birth rate, Jews do not. Islam does not spread by conversions, it spreads by birth rate. As for the Jewish vote, most Jews are secular and the Democratic Party is more important than God to them. When I hear most Jews in the US speak, they seem to have a disdain for Judaism and religious Jews. So, secular Jews will vote Democrat even if their kids are being beaten up on campus by the same pro-Hamas activist the President is inviting to the White House.
That some academics believe that their free speech includes the right to silence others represents the highest level of hypocrisy and intolerance. Put more succinctly, they would deny others that which they demand for themselves.
The event-disruptors and statue topplers have created a monster. I warned 7 years ago that encouraging this kind of behavior was just going to make it go farther and farther. You’d think anyone who knew the history of World War II would know that appeasement is simply feeding the crocodile in the hopes it will eat you last. Now the crocodile is getting to the point where those who fed it look like tasty treats.
What gave anyone the idea that it was somehow appropriate to bring a microphone and an amplifier into a celebratory dinner in someone’s home, then whip them out and try to take over the event? How did we get from “don’t discuss religion, politics, or money,” to “shove your politics in everyone’s face?” If you don’t know the answer you haven’t been paying attention the last seven years.
I take issue with the idea that the dean and his wife ‘didn’t deserve this’. Imagine you took in some dogs. You spent years making these dogs as mean and dangerous as you could. You let these dogs attack neighborhood children for years and only offered lame excuses when people complained. The dogs got bolder and bigger. One day, the dogs attack you. Do you think you wouldn’t deserve it? You made the monster, you inflicted it on others, and they you complain when it turns on you?
This dean didn’t just ‘quietly’ let it happen. He helped make it. I am sure you will find years of conservative speakers disallowed, conservative students not admitted, conservative positions banned in classes that he had a hand in. I’m sure you will find anti-white propaganda inflicted on all law students for years as he thinks, “I’m not white, I’m Jewish”.
I think the same thing about Brett Weinstein. He spent years at Evergreen State promoting the leftist ideology that eventually turned on him. Now, he claims to be a victim and goes on all kinds of talk shows as a ‘prophet’ to the dangers of leftist ideas. He is the one who put those ideas in the kids in the first place! He should hang his head in shame, apologize to the rest of us and vow never to vote again because he makes such terrible choices. That is what I think of this dean. He needs to apologize for letting it get to this point, for pushing it to this point. He needs to apologize to all the people he helped victimize over the years, then he needs to resign, repudiate his work publicly, and then vow to leave public life. He is not to be celebrated or pitied. There has to be accountability at some point for leftist ideology.
When I was in college, way back in the Dark Ages, it was an election year. George H.W. Bush was in the process of dispatching Michael Dukakis without too much trouble. Although he himself wasn’t behind this, there was the infamous Willie Horton ad, that showed Willie Horton, a robber and murderer as well as a stereotypical scary black man, and blamed Dukakis for the weekend furlough program that put him out on the street, where he fled to Maryland, stole a car and raped a woman twice (after which a Maryland judge put him away for a real life sentence, saying he should never draw a breath of free air again). The GOP and surrogates also threw out some other ads that implied black people were a danger and a problem. There was a cartoon at the time that showed an elephant, representing the GOP, dressed as a gardener, with a bucket of fertilizer, marked “Willie Horton ads” and other things, surprised that a flower has grown which has a bloom that looks like a KKK hood.
Simplistic, of course, but it makes the point that if you pound the same ideas again and again, eventually you are going to be associated with the bad part of those ideas. The left and academia have been feeding the kids in school a whole lot of dangerous and just plain bad ideas the last seven years minimum and possibly more. A graduating law student of 25 now would have been in the last year or last two years of college in 2020 and maybe just starting college right around the time Trump assumed office. This was the PERFECT time for the left and academia and the resistance to feed them all those ideas: that America sucks, that Trump is a tyrant, that “resistance” is not just laudable but necessary, that it’s ok to destroy things you don’t like and silence people you don’t agree with. That worked just fine while the enemy was President Trump and the white conservatives. These students were going to be the upcoming generation of shock troops in the fight to end the right in this country permanently. OK, sometimes the fight over transgender stuff got a little extreme, but that is a very small minority.
Unfortunately, world events shifted. The whole Black Lives Matter/police brutality thing has petered out and doesn’t look as appealing now with crime rising everywhere. Now the big issue is the Israel/Hamas fight. These people have been fed the idea for seven years that white=bad, that Israel=colony and oppressor, and that POC=good and Palestinian=oppressed. Does it come as a surprise that they would justify an assault on Israel and pivot right to the assaulters as victims and the assaulted as oppressors? Does it come as a surprise that the same people who were taught to portray Trump as an orange blimp and every other conservative is the most unflattering way possible would turn to simplistic depictions of Jewish people as killers with blood on their hands? Does it come as a surprise that those who bought all the lies about Trump like him being a Russian stooge would grab right on to ugly myths like the blood libel? With all of that in place, something like this, deliberate disruption of a dinner party seems both logical and small potatoes.
The Democratic Party probably could have stopped this or blunted it, but the fact is that the Democratic Party doesn’t want it to stop. They want another movement or combination of movements that’s going to carry them to victory in November, despite their abysmal performance this past four years. If they have to side with terrorists to get Muslim votes in Michigan or turn their back on their own constituents in academia, they’re going to do it. Kind of reminds me of the IRA who made common cause with German, Soviet, and Pan-Arabist alike, or the Imperial Germans who, as they started to see WWI going against them, facilitated the return of Lenin and his political pestilence to Russia, guaranteeing that nation 70 years of tyranny and mismanagement and Eastern Europe 50 years as a giant prison. They will do anything to hold onto power and move their agenda forward, no matter what it does to anyone else, and maybe no matter what it does to them in the long run.