The June 6 resignation of conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro from the Georgetown University Law Center is a mark of shame for Georgetown and for academia in general — and a badge of honor for Shapiro.
Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor had reinstated Shapiro on June 2 to the top post at the school’s Center for the Constitution, from which he had been suspended (with pay) Feb. 1, the very day he began the job. The suspension itself breached decency and common sense, as it punished Shapiro for a single, substantively inoffensive but poorly worded tweet that Shapiro had quickly removed and for which he quickly apologized. Treanor’s mealymouthed “reinstatement,” fully parsed, was just as objectionable as the original (mis)punishment.
There’s no need to rehash the tweet itself, which reasonably if unartfully objected to President Joe Biden’s use of identity politics to select a Supreme Court justice. At issue here are academic liberty and freedom of speech. Treanor and Georgetown made a mockery of both, thus betraying themselves as petty commissars of a national leftist thought police.
The suspension always was a sham. It sought to penalize Shapiro for something he tweeted before he even took the Georgetown job on the grounds that he may have “violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.” Even if Shapiro had been subject to those “policies and expectations” before joining Georgetown’s faculty, his handling (including quick removal) of his single, brief tweet actually showed high professionalism while manifestly discriminating against and harassing absolutely nobody.
Treanor’s letter of reinstatement was a paean to malice and menace. It again mischaracterized Shapiro’s original tweet as being disparaging of all black women and flatly called his “tweets” (as if more than one were at issue) “harmful to many” and “antithetical to the work that we do at Georgetown Law to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity.”
Then, pretending to pay homage to Georgetown’s speech and expression policy of “free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate and all matters, and the untrammeled verbal and nonverbal expression of ideas,” Treanor claimed that the “equally important principle was our dedication to building a culture of equity and inclusion.”
Note: If the “culture of equity” is defined by hostility to all ideas that don’t toe the party line, it absolutely negates the supposed policy of an “untrammeled … expression of ideas.”
Then, rather than announce the obvious reality that Shapiro’s tweet, made in support of a dark-skinned man from India, did not even come close to violating “equity and inclusion,” Treanor wrote that Shapiro was being reinstated only because of the technicality that he was not yet a Georgetown employee when he issued the tweet. Even in doing so, he wrote, “Mr. Shapiro’s tweets had a significant negative impact on the Georgetown Law community,” which would require Treanor to “put in place actions to address the negative impact.”
What followed was a laundry list of hoops through which Shapiro would be expected to jump, including the woke indoctrination of yet more “programming on implicit bias, cultural competence, and non-discrimination.” In not one sentence did Treanor credit Shapiro’s original motives, his explanation for the tweet, or his prerogative to push back against identity politics in any way.
This stands in stark contrast to Treanor’s refusal to penalize other Georgetown professors who wrote or said far worse things than what Shapiro was alleged to have intended. Did it not cause “pain” in the vaunted school “community” when a professor wrote that defenders of then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh “deserve miserable deaths” so that “we [can] castrate their corpses and feed them to swine”? Or when another defended illegal protests at the homes of Supreme Court justices because at least some “more aggressive tactics” can be “justified” when “the mob is right”?
When “inclusion” only includes one political side, Shapiro is correct: “It stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices.” And, as Shapiro’s resignation letter noted, the problem isn’t limited to Georgetown. It has spread to colleges across the country, with redundant bevies of school bureaucrats enforcing so-called diversity and inclusion of the sort that excludes diversity of opinion.
Shapiro wrote that Georgetown Law “no longer stands for tolerance, respect, good faith, self-reflective learning, and generous service to others.” Georgetown, like far too many colleges these days, has created a hostile work environment for those who refuse enslavement to leftist orthodoxy.
