Tirien Steinbach Doesn’t Get to Decide If ‘the Juice Is Worth the Squeeze’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, March 24, 2023

 

In the Wall Street Journal, Tirien Steinbach — the woman who is paid by Stanford University Law School to undermine the free-speech policies at Stanford University Law School — has confirmed that she will continue to undermine the free-speech policies at Stanford University Law School until she is fired.

 

I noted recently that “DEI” people talk like liberals but act like Pol Pot, and Steinbach is a nice example of this trend. “Free speech isn’t easy or comfortable,” she says, but “it’s necessary for democracy, and I was glad it was happening at our law school.” But, quite obviously, she wasn’t. And she still isn’t — as is made abundantly clear by her repeated attempt to convince those reading that the real problem at Stanford was that Judge Duncan wanted to talk in the first place:

 

At one point during the event, I asked Judge Duncan, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” I was referring to the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech: to consider not only the benefit of our words but also the consequences. It isn’t a rhetorical question. I believe that we would be better served by leaders who ask themselves, “Is the juice (what we are doing) worth the squeeze (the intended and unintended consequences and costs)?” I will certainly continue to ask this question myself.

 

That Steinbach will “continue to ask this question” is precisely the problem at hand. In context, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” means, “Is it worth your trying to hold your meeting when an angry mob might come in and ruin it?” “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” is, quite literally, a defense of the heckler’s veto. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” is an invitation to shut up. I would like to write here that Steinbach is wrong to believe that her job is to decide whether each person who might be invited to speak at Stanford meets her definitions of “responsibility” or “benefit,” and to encourage the throngs accordingly. But, actually she’s not wrong to believe that, because that’s her job. That’s what DEI is. When Steinbach writes that her “role was to observe and, if needed, de-escalate,” she means that her role was to help rile up the mob, and, when it got out of hand, to tell them she understood their behavior and wasn’t sure why the speaker wanted to keep going anyway. She’s a blocker, a tackler, a guard — a hired arbiter of taste working to stamp out any dissent from the fringe ideology she represents.

 

Predictably, Steinbach attempts to completely rewrite what happened — and to the point at which, if all you had to go on was her account, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a Lincoln-Douglas debate that went horribly wrong. “How do we listen and talk to each other as people, not with partisan talking points?” she asks. “Whenever and wherever we can,” she avers, “we must de-escalate the divisive discourse to have thoughtful conversations and find common ground.” “Regardless of where you stand politically,” she proposes, “none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue.”

 

Excuse me? “Regardless of where you stand politically”? “How do we listen and talk to each other”? “This heated exchange”? Good Lord. This wasn’t a “heated exchange.” A bunch of wild-eyed hecklers shouted down an invited speaker because they didn’t like him. “Regardless of where you stand politically”? Duncan was shouted down because of his politics. “How do we listen and talk to each other?” By launching Steinbach from a cannon, that’s how.

 

There aren’t two sides to this. This isn’t one of those six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other sorts of things. This is not, as Steinbach insists, a question of ensuring that “free speech, academic freedom and work to advance diversity, equity and inclusion must coexist in a diverse, democratic society.” It’s a lot simpler than that. There was one group in this incident that disgraced itself — a group of which Steinbach was a key part — and there was one group in this incident that did not. When Steinbach writes that “we must strive for an environment in which we meet speech—even that with which we strongly disagree—with more speech, not censorship,” she is trying to cast the hecklers as equal partners in a well-intentioned conversation that went awry. They weren’t. They were a bunch of vandals, and Steinbach — at the invitation of the university — was their patsy.