UCLA Law School’s problems are higher education’s problems. Do campus leaders care that students are not interested in persuasion, or even in hearing what people they disagree with have to say?

By Tal Fortgang ‘17

The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.

Their justifications were perfectly on brand. “By giving Mr. Percival a platform," wrote 18 student groups in an open letter, “the Federalist Society and UCLA Law are legitimizing and normalizing racially discriminatory policies that are actively harming both UCLA students and our broader community.” The tactics are nothing new. The justifications are nothing new. Even the UCLA administration’s reflexive defense of the perpetrators—threatening the Federalist Society not to publicize the faces of students who disrupted the event, and then backtracking, issuing a statement calling the event a successful application of free-speech principles — is more of the same.

The critical reactions to the students violating their code of conduct and basic free-speech principles comes off shopworn as well. Two lines of critique are most intuitive and receive the most airtime. First: How are students who cannot bear to hear someone they detest supposed to defend unpopular clients, cross-examine hostile witnesses, address opposing arguments, or endure the procedural discipline of actual courtroom practice? Second: Don’t these students know they are not persuading anyone by engaging in mindless disruption? Not only will they fail to hone their powers of persuasion in law school; they will alienate people from the very cause that spurred them to disrupt in the first place.

These were once fair questions. The persistence of these infuriating, juvenile displays of intolerance, however, suggests that the traditional criticisms are moot. A consistent cohort of students is not trying to become better professionals at all. Rather, such students are using their education to practice political stunts. They see their job as fighting for a righteous cause, against “policies that are actively harming” people. Part of that fight involves flexing one’s muscles and showing who really belongs in elite universities. Those who violate the rules with impunity, affirming that the administration will reflexively take their side, demonstrate that they “own” UCLA.

One cohort of radicals inviting their own expulsion and thus ending their host university’s descent into intolerance would not be a story, of course. But the UCLA incident reminds us that these events continue in the same form they have always taken, even as the individual participants graduate and new provocateurs fill their spots. This is a story about the university, not the students they coddle. Administrators dissemble, make excuses, and year after year replenish their stock of disruptive radicals. Those decisions amount to a confirmation that the radicals are right: They do own UCLA and have transformed its law school into something quite different from what the public thinks it is.

The March 9, 2023 debacle where Stanford Law students harassed Judge Kyle Duncan and prevented him from speaking was supposed to be a turning point. The students who shouted down the federal judge and disrupted his discussion with disgusting profanity were scandal enough. But the more consequential moment came when administrator Tirien Steinbach infamously rose to affirm that she believed the students were in the right even as she asked them to pipe down, before chiding the Federalist Society for inviting a federal judge with the infamous phrase, “is the juice worth the squeeze?” The question itself revealed the problem: At Stanford Law, the protestors’ views were orthodox, the Federalist Society was deviant. While technically it violated Stanford’s rules to shout things about female reproductive anatomy at Judge Duncan to disrupt his speech, it was understandable given how divisive he — not those who disagree with him — was.

It seemed to have not occurred to Steinbach that a relevant question was not whether Judge Duncan fit comfortably into Stanford Law’s dominant political culture, but whether Stanford Law students were being formed properly by the administration’s choices. Steinbach later stepped down. No students faced any discipline. Stanford Law was doing its job; Steinbach’s mistake was explaining what that job was, out loud.

UCLA’s administrators appear to be following the same script. The accusation bedeviling so much of higher education is especially appropriate at law schools, where ideological capture appears especially acute. Elite law schools have drifted from their core purpose. They still teach doctrine. Students still work through civil procedure and memorize standards of review. But law schools’ cultural self-understanding has shifted significantly. Young people are not there to become refined advocates capable of serving any client within the bounds of the law. Nor are they there to expand their minds so they won’t be caught off-guard when opposing counsel makes an unexpected or seemingly illogical argument. That is why the classic critiques of the UCLA incident don’t land, and critics find themselves seemingly shouting into a void.

Based on law schools’ own behaviors, they consider the ideal graduate an ideologically minded professional equipped to deploy a wide array of tactics in the service of particular social outcomes. They may acquire legal tools along the way, but credentialing these activists with a JD from a reputable school is what animates hiring committees, student organizations, administrative bureaucracies, and much of the faculty culture at schools like UCLA, Stanford, and Yale (another top law school where non-orthodox speakers have been mistreated).

The students who disrupt events embody the best of contemporary higher education, as its ostensible stewards would have it. They aren’t trying to persuade anyone because they don’t need to; they have power in their corner, as UCLA’s administration readily confirmed, and they can simply show the minority of dissenters that their presence is at best tolerated.

In his celebrated 2025 book Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites, my Manhattan Institute colleague Ilya Shapiro showed how law schools’ particular problems are hardly confined to the legal academy. They are a civilizational problem, a higher-education failure distilled to its purest form. Shapiro, himself a victim of a ridiculous smear campaign and cowardly administrators at Georgetown Law, documented how the law schools most susceptible to unhinged displays of intolerance serve as transmission belts for the elite sensibilities that flow outward to our most important sensemaking and taste making institutions. The legal profession is one of the primary channels through which campus culture reshapes American life. Its pathologies cause wider problems, but are also reflections of the ways in which our broader culture has abandoned persuasion and professional competence in favor of strong-arming and the subordination of traditional norms to the achievement of desired social goals.

This goes some way toward explaining why the atmosphere at elite law schools can feel more ideologically rigid than at other parts of the university. Classes are smaller and the stakes are higher. Graduates will become federal clerks, prosecutors, agency officials, policymakers, and judges. The professional norms they absorb in law school will go with them. The gatekeeping that subordinates reason to power, articulated by Steinbach and reinforced once again at UCLA, will not stop unless it has reason to.

It may be the case that many of these graduates will eventually be moderated by clients, courts, and deadlines. But lawyers do lots of things aside from litigate. Most of the individuals who behaved execrably to silence Percival will occupy positions in which they face very little adversarial pressure. Law firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and compliance departments are full of people whose professional judgment is rarely tested by genuine adversarial pressure. Others will work where their zealous ideological purity is considered a strength. The ideological habits formed in law school have ample room to persist, spread, and become orthodoxies themselves. They can reshape important institutions, including the law itself, before there is any opportunity for course-correction. The same is true for other sectors that draw upon newly credentialed elites to repopulate their ranks each year.

Is that a problem? Perhaps once upon a time universities considered it a failure to graduate young people who would become adequate professionals with latent destructive tendencies. Clearly that is not the case now. The debate over law schools is thus ultimately a debate about higher education’s self-understanding, and whether credentialing institutions maintain sufficient commitment to the principles that make them worth taking seriously.

The question that ought to preoccupy university leaders is whether those who train tomorrow’s professionals still believe that being a professional is the point.

Photo by tommao wang on Unsplash.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.