Academia, Constitutional Law, Free Speech, Lawyering

Shapiro Resigns From Georgetown After the Law School Reinstates Him on a “Technicality”

Last week, many of us initially celebrated the reinstatement of the Center for the Constitution Director Ilya Shapiro as a belated but important victory for free speech and academic freedom. Then we all read the rationale from Law Dean William Treanor, who adopted a technicality that not only avoided a full endorsement of Shapiro’s rights but left a menacing uncertainty as to his (and any other conservative’s) future protections at Georgetown University Law School.  Shapiro has elected to leave Georgetown to take a position with the Manhattan Institute given the lack of support for his right to speak freely at the law school. Unfortunately, most schools want to avoid litigation (and the controversy) over terminating dissenting faculty. The preference is to make life on faculties so hostile or intolerable that faculty will simply resign.

Shapiro is under fire for his opposition to the pledge by President Joe Biden to limit consideration for the next Supreme Court nominee to a black female. Shapiro sent out a horrendously badly worded tweet that supported a liberal Indian-American jurist as opposed to a “lesser black woman.” He later removed the tweet and repeatedly apologized. He explained that he was referring to lesser qualifications vis-a-vis his preferred nominee, Sri Srinivasan, a liberal judge on the D.C. Circuit.

Georgetown faculty has supported the effort to fire Shapiro, including my former colleague Paul Butler who wrote a condemning op-ed in the Washington Post. Some faculty insisted that Shapiro is a raving racist who actually believes that, while supporting other minorities for the Court, African American women are unqualified as a group from sitting on the Court. That has been presented as more plausible than a poorly worded tweet.

Many of us have encouraged Georgetown to resist such calls in support of free speech and academic freedom protections. However, the school kept Shapiro suspended for months and offered little public support for his rights. As we have seen at other schools, those faculty who were not actively seeking his termination were conspicuously silent over his rights and treatment.

Then came the reinstatement. As Shapiro noted in his resignation letter, Dean Treanor “cleared me on a jurisdictional technicality, but the IDEAA Report—and your own statements to the Law Center community—implicitly repealed Georgetown’s vaunted Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy.” Indeed, it is not clear why this took months if the law school is saying that he was not subject to the school’s standards at the time of his tweet.

The Dean, however, added the menacing statement that if Shapiro “were to make another, similar or more serious remark as a Georgetown employee, a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex likely would be created.”

This was not the response given at the university to an earlier professor who suggested castrating Republicans or other racially or politically controversial comments from faculty.We recently discussed the different treatment given liberal and conservative speakers at Boston University after students passed a resolution calling a conservative speaker a danger to their safety. They further declared that “intentionally incendiary speech and rhetoric” is unprotected by free speech principles. Yet, Boston University Professor Saida Grundy the same week made incendiary comments to justify criminal acts, including looting, as racial justice. Grundy has a history of racial statements against white students and faculty. As I noted, both speakers should be protected by the same free speech values.

The support enjoyed by faculty on the far left is in sharp contrast to the treatment given faculty with moderate, conservative or libertarian views. Anyone who raises such dissenting views is immediately set upon by a mob demanding their investigation or termination. This includes blocking academics from speaking on campuses like a recent Classics professor due to their political views. Conservatives and libertarians understand that they have no cushion or protection in any controversy, even if it involves a single, later deleted tweet.

One such campaign led to a truly tragic outcome with criminology professor Mike Adams at the University of North Carolina (Wilmington). Adams was a conservative faculty member with controversial writings who had to go to court to stop prior efforts to remove him. He then tweeted a condemnation of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for his pandemic rules, tweeting that he had dined with six men at a six-seat table and “felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina” before adding: “Massa Cooper, let my people go.” It was a stupid and offensive tweet. However, we have seen extreme comments on the left — including calls to gas or kill or torture conservatives — be tolerated or even celebrated at universities.

Celebrities, faculty and students demanded that Adams be fired. After weeks of public pummeling, Adams relented and took a settlement to resign. He then killed himself a few days before his final day as a professor.

Like many schools, Georgetown cannot continue the pretense of protecting free speech and academic freedom when it is actively creating a hostile workplace for those with conservative, libertarian or dissenting views. The double standard is evident in schools across the country. Liberal faculty can expect full-throated and unqualified support for their free speech while conservatives understand that they have no margin for controversy or error.

 

165 thoughts on “Shapiro Resigns From Georgetown After the Law School Reinstates Him on a “Technicality””

  1. Universities are no longer places of intellectual debate and discovery. By shutting out professors with political beliefs anything right of Stalin, and encouraging politics to infest every class, academia has become little more than far Left madrassas.

  2. It’s both sad and funny watching commentators in the West come to the realization that Ukraine(and the West) have lost the war and that everyday that passes their position gets weaker. Now, after having their collective asses handed to them, the Ukrainians(and the West) wish they had followed through with the Minsk accords. This is pure humiliation.

  3. I am ashamed that I must use the inferior and primitive language of Earthlings to express my views. It’s not worth trying
    to save your sorry asses.

  4. Waging war against warmongers brings peace. Doves should like this. Doves should celebrate the nuking of Hiroshima, because it brought peace.

  6. Good men are doing nothing about Ukraine, so I guess that means that evil will triumph there.
    The military might of the United States is such that the war in Ukraine could be brought to end tonight. But it’s not.

    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

    – Sir Edmund Burke

    1. AnilliterateNinny:

      “Good men are doing nothing about Ukraine, so I guess that means that evil will triumph there.
      The military might of the United States is such that the war in Ukraine could be brought to end tonight. But it’s not.

      “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

      – Sir Edmund Burke”
      ****************************************
      Like so much of your political/social commentary, it’s just plain wrong. Burke never uttered, wrote or likely even considered those words. The sentiment was best expressed by John Stuart Mill when he wrote: “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

      As for Burke, he did write: “”Justa bella quibus necessaria.” [Wars are just to those to whom they are
      necessary], Reflections on The Revolution in France, Part 20 (1791).

      Pray tell how is this Ukrainian Civil War is “necessary” to us?

      1. War is necessary because our diplomatic core and foreign service experts didn’t read Burke’s Reflections. Charles Hill was asked what the best training is for an ambassador or the foreign service. His response was, read the classics, history tells us what is in store in the future.

        All need to read Reflections and then read a concise history of the American Revolution and its reasons (in the Declaration of Independence). When one compares the two, one quickly learns that the left is following the path of death and destruction.

  7. I don’t like the way humans are. God should punish them somehow if they don’t get their act together.

    1. Some say He already is, anonymous.

      Perhaps those at Georgetown Law bragging about “academic freedom” can list the number of conservative members of their faculty. Anybody? Anybody? Beuhler?

  9. Just another data point proving the leftist administrative state is hopelessly corrupt

    Pelosi’s Husband has had all drunk driving charges dropped. Video of his arrest is “missing”

  10. Joseph Welch’s words to McCarthy need to be said to Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and the DNC over and over until all of America are uttering them to every single comment by them. They need to ostracized, ignored and broken like McCarthy

    “The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

    Overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.”

    For more information: U.S. Congress. Senate. Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations (McCarthy Hearings 1953-54), edited by Donald A. Rtichie and Elizabeth Bolling. Washington: GPO, 2003. S. Prt. 107-84. Available online.

    1. Except McCarthy was right. As proven by the sh*thole leftists have now driven us into.

    2. The release of one name who Welch was pushing for a position on a committee, and had been a member of a group with communist ties, came after an entire day of Welch demanding that the names be released. McCarthy refused to do so until he released one name a member of Welch’s law firm. Based on that I never understood why they blamed McCarthy, except Republicans have difficulty standing up for themselves. McCarthy was not a nice man, was a drunk and nasty, but on this single issue, one has to ask themselves whether or not McCarthy did anything wrong.

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