Georgetown University law students have been victimized — not by a tweet from legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, but by their own law school’s administration.
The insult to them was born of wokeness run amok.
You may have seen that Shapiro, the highly regarded Cato Institute legal scholar who was supposed to begin this week as executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, posted a series of tweets on Jan. 26 criticizing President Joe Biden’s (quite unpopular) pledge to consider only black women for a soon-to-be-vacant Supreme Court seat.
In the course of arguing that liberal appeals court judge Sri Srinivasan would be far and away the “best pick” for Biden, Shapiro tweeted: “But alas [he] doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”
GEORGETOWN LAW STUDENTS DEMAND SPACE TO CRY
Shapiro clearly wasn’t saying that other candidates would be “lesser” because they were black women. He was clearly suggesting that any other candidate would have less merit than Srinivasan. Substitute “white men” for “black women” in his tweet, and nobody would have even imagined his point was to say that white men are “lesser” by virtue of being white men.
Nonetheless, the wording was less than ideal, as the wording of tweets often is. And so even before the howls of the outrage mobs reached deafening decibels, Shapiro had withdrawn the tweet and apologized for the poor word choice.
That’s where the whole thing should have ended: no offense meant and none taken.
Instead, William Treanor, dean of the Georgetown University Law Center, joined the mob in piling on Shapiro. Unsatisfied by essentially calling Shapiro a racist (a ludicrous allegation for anyone remotely familiar with Shapiro’s body of work), Treanor placed Shapiro on “administrative leave” pending an “investigation into whether he violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.”
Of course, Shapiro had done no such thing. Moreover, Treanor’s vapors were particularly hypocritical, considering that Georgetown took no disciplinary action in 2018 against a feminist professor who said that “entitled white men” supporting the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh “deserve miserable deaths while … we castrate their corpses and feed them to the swine.” In fact, Georgetown went out of its way to defend that female professor’s free-speech rights.
Yet Treanor’s investigation will continue, presumably until he can find some lame excuse for dismissing Shapiro altogether.
In mistreating Shapiro, Georgetown committed a serious affront against the wokest of his own students, even if they don’t recognize it.
Students claiming to have been hurt by Shapiro’s tweet (they weren’t) demanded catered food and a space in which to “cry” while conducting a sit-in protest. Rather than tell these students what they need to hear — “grow up” — dean of students Mitch Bailin promised to “find you space” to cry, while Treanor said the school would reimburse them for any food they ordered during the sit-in.
The deans’ response is risible and pathetic. These students attend a top university. They deserve to be treated like adults preparing for a notoriously demanding career, in which mental and emotional toughness is virtually a prerequisite. Instead, Georgetown’s deans indulge their reversion to the childishness of 6-year-olds looking to mommy for solace from the boogeyman.
The implied insult is remarkable: Law students are treated as fragile buttercups. They are not adult enough, the deans are saying, to handle a badly worded tweet without getting all verklempt. They are not adult enough to understand context and perspective. And at the very least, they are not mature enough to find a space where they can have their little pity party without an authority figure specially providing that space.
The patronizing condescension is alarming.
The ongoing, mass infantilization of students promoted by today’s therapeutic culture, not to be confused with the real benefits of professional therapy for individuals suffering from diagnosed depression or other disorders, is a plague on society. The Georgetown deans, inexcusably, are encouraging this pitiful, emotional neoteny.
