The Patriot Post® · Can the Cancel Crowd Be Canceled?

Yale Law School, the alma mater of three sitting Supreme Court justices, soiled itself this week when its dean, Heather Gerken, failed to hold nearly 120 students accountable for their rotten behavior earlier this month toward a bipartisan panel discussing civil liberties — one of those liberties being free speech. (Here, we’re reminded of the convicts on that doomed Con Air flight singing “Sweet Home Alabama” while the mild-mannered mad dog, Garland Greene, ponders the irony: a bunch of idiots on an airplane dancing around to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.)

Free speech at Yale may indeed be crashing and burning, but Gerken did give ‘em a stern talking to. So there’s that.

The students — ostensibly intelligent ones — were so rowdy and the scene so chaotic that the police were eventually called in to protect the panelists and escort them from the building. The purpose of the panel? To illustrate that a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues. And they could’ve — if only they’d been able to hear each other.

The mob’s main objection was, of course, the conservative portion of the panel — that of Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian organization dedicated to free speech and religious liberty.

As the environment worsened, law school professor Kate Stith reminded the students of Yale’s free speech policy, which forbids any protest that “interferes with speakers’ ability to be heard and of community members to listen.” No dice. According to The Washington Free Beacon, “When the protesters heckled her in response — several with their middle fingers raised — she told them to ‘grow up,’” which, as you might imagine, only further antagonized the privileged young snots.

Stith then offered to “help” the mob leave, which they did, but only to the hallway, where they “began to stomp, shout, clap, sing, and pound the walls, making it difficult to hear the panel.”

Following the incident, the mobsters drafted an open letter of support, an exercise in snowflakery on behalf of the “peaceful protesters,” whom they claimed had been “imperiled” by a modest and restrained police presence there. This imperilment was especially true of the law school’s black LGBTQ population because, you know, cops tend to go out of their way to target and harass black LGBTQ people. Incidentally, the mobsters also put their community organizing skills to work, using social media and other forms of public shaming to coerce their law school colleagues to sign the letter. As of this printing, more than half of them had done so.

Thus, the heckler’s veto now reigns supreme at Yale. And the question is: What can be done about it?

Not much, it seems, if we’re to make anything of Gerken’s “leadership.” Yale Law School’s rules were clearly violated, and its Rules of Discipline were also ignored by the school. This can only encourage the mob and its mobbish behavior.

So if Yale administrators don’t have the guts to enforce school policies, what more can be done? As Stanley Kurtz notes in National Review, any student whose ability to learn was disrupted by the hecklers can file a complaint against them. And this is where the hope is. “Yale’s administration will be forced to act,” writes Kurtz. “In acting, it will either uphold the university’s tradition of free speech or expose itself as having abandoned that vaunted tradition. Whatever happens will rivet America’s attention.”

We’re not sure about the “riveting” part, but here’s an unpleasant thought to ponder: “Yale Law students are our future attorneys, judges, legislators, and corporate executives,” said the ADF’s Waggoner. “We must change course and restore a culture of free speech and civil discourse at Yale and other law schools, or the future of the legal profession in America is in dire straits.”