Georgetown Law School professor Ilya Shapiro resigned from his position just days after a university investigation cleared him of wrongdoing for tweets criticizing President Joe Biden’s vow to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court.
In a Monday resignation letter to William Treanor, the dean of Georgetown Law School, Shapiro said the university had created a hostile work environment through its monthslong investigation into since-deleted tweets he sent in January and that he was left with no choice but to resign.
“I cannot again subject my family to the public attacks on my character and livelihood that you and [the institutional diversity office] have now made foreseeable, indeed inevitable,” Shapiro wrote. “As a result of the hostile work environment that you and they have created, I have no choice but to resign.”
GEORGETOWN REINSTATES LAW PROFESSOR WHO CRITICIZED BIDEN SUPREME COURT PICK
Shapiro’s self-described “inartful” tweets were critical of Biden for promising to nominate a black woman to fill the Supreme Court seat to be vacated by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. Shapiro said that the president was overlooking D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sri Srinivasan, who he said was the most qualified candidate for the vacancy, and that doing so would result in the nomination of a “lesser black woman.”
Biden ultimately nominated, and the Senate confirmed, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the vacancy.
The tweets came days before Shapiro was set to assume his new position as the executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown Law School. Administrators at the school denounced his comments as “racist” while placing him on paid administrative leave. In the following days, students at the law school protested Shapiro’s appointment and demanded spaces at the school to vent.
Last week, Treanor announced that Shapiro had been cleared of wrongdoing and could not be subjected to discipline, as he was not yet an employee of the law school at the time of his tweets.
In his letter and a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Shapiro ripped Treanor and the law school’s diversity office for clearing him on a technicality.
“Dean William Treanor cleared me on the technicality that I wasn’t an employee when I tweeted, but the [diversity office] implicitly repealed Georgetown’s Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy,” Shapiro wrote. “Instead of participating in that slow-motion firing, I’m resigning.”
Shapiro only worked at the law school for one business day after being cleared in the investigation. In his op-ed, he invoked a famous quote by Soviet dissident and author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to explain his decision to resign.
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“What Georgetown subjected me to, what it would be subjecting me to if I stayed, is a heckler’s veto that leads to a Star Chamber,” Shapiro wrote. “‘Live not by lies,’ warned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. ‘Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.’ I won’t live this way.”
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, a spokesperson for Georgetown said, “While we protect speech and expression, we work to promote civil and respectful discourse,” and the university had “followed the regular processes for members of the Law Center staff” in its investigation of Shapiro’s tweets.
“Georgetown urges members of our community to engage in robust and respectful dialogue,” the university said. “Our speech and expression policy promotes free and open inquiry, deliberation, and debate and does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable.”
