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Earlier today, a Stanford class ironically entitled “Democracy and Disagreement” hosted a debate on a potential wealth tax between UC Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers. But what should’ve been a fairly standard exercise in “model[ing] civic disagreement” instead devolved into a spectacle as a few hecklers hijacked the stage for roughly 20 minutes.
In a video provided by a student in the class, a group of ten or so student-activists occupied the auditorium of the Hoover Institution (where the class is held) after Saez finished his remarks, just as Summers was about to begin speaking. For over ten minutes, the protesters prevented Summers from explaining his opposition to the wealth tax. In preventing Summers’ speech, these protesters threw fake dollar bills onto the stage and lambasted Summers as a “capitalist who sold our country out,” and accused him of enabling the rise of the “corporate oligarchy which has caused the rise of Elon Musk.”
Holding signs saying “Tax the Rich” and “Larry Summers Your Time is Up,” the protesters further attacked Summers’ alleged enabling of climate change and his general ethos as a capitalist. The protesters’ ringleader then balked that Stanford would dare to invite someone like him as an authority on the wealth tax.
Larry Summers, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton administration, director of the National Economic Council from 2009-2010, and as the President of Harvard University from 2001-2006, later explained why these rag-tag protesters found his mere presence so objectionable after they left the stage. He proclaimed that Stanford students would hear no discourse from “anyone in the right half of the American political spectrum.”
Ironically, Larry Summers is on the advisory council of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the premier free speech advocacy group in the United States.
Stanford is no stranger to the use of the heckler’s veto to shut down opposing views. In 2023, DEI dean Tirien Steinbach resigned after she participated in a student-led shutdown of federal judge Kyle Duncan. Just last year, pro-Palestine protesters disrupted a Parent’s Weekend event led by former president Richard Saller.
Over the past few years, Stanford has consistently had a dearth of right-wing perspectives platformed on campus. Despite containing vocal conservative voices in the Hoover Institution and an impressive alumni network of right-wing luminaries, most Stanford students have zero exposure to heterodox thought, which, in this case, apparently extends even to Obama-era Keynesian economists.
When our so-called “Democracy Day” events feature a uniparty list of Democratic speakers and our mandatory PWR writing classes exhibit staggering anti-conservative bias, it’s no wonder that Stanford students’ Overton window is dramatically tilted towards the left. This, in turn, creates the ideological intolerance which results in these protests.
On a brighter note, unlike previous incidents at the university, the student body in the crowd vehemently disapproved of the protesters’ actions. When disruptors chanted well-worn platitudes such as “put people over profits” and “we need clean air, not another billionaire,” the crowd drowned them out with a resounding chant to “let him speak.” The audience even poked fun at the apparent lack of enthusiasm among the protesters, with one man telling them to “at least have a little bit of energy.” Summers swiftly shut down the protesters’ after they mounted claims to civility and attempted dialogue (even going so far as to accuse him of “being unwilling to debate"). He was later able to deliver his remarks after the protesters relented.
While these types of protests have unfortunately become a routine part of university life, the ineffectiveness and laughability of this instance perhaps tells us that Stanford is starting to move beyond blindly accepting the heckler’s veto, a trend in line with a wider nationwide shift towards political toleration as well as a President Jon Levin’s advocacy of open discourse. While clearly objectionable, this protest seemed to represent a vestige of the DEI era—an era the Stanford students chanting “let him speak” are vehemently rejecting.
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