Ilya Shapiro quits Georgetown Law School amid free speech fight


On Thursday, Ilya Shapiro, a jurist, announced his victory in the free speech wars on campus: after a series of tweets were suspended and investigated, he was cleared to take his new job as a lecturer. and Executive Director at Georgetown University. Constitution Center.

But reinstatement was not an unequivocal vote of confidence. Under fire for writing that President Biden would appoint a ‘lesser black woman’ to the Supreme Court, he had been technically cleared – that he was not yet employed by the university when he posted the tweets.

This turned out to be insufficient. On Monday, in a dizzying reversal, Mr. Shapiro announced that he was resigning. Both announcements – to stay in his job and to quit his job – were made in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal.

“I should constantly be walking on eggshells,” he said in an interview Monday after his second opinion essay was posted online.

Mr Shapiro’s about-face is the second case in two weeks of professors leaving a top university amid a rhetoric dispute. Princeton University last month fired a tenured classics professor, Joshua Katz, in what many conservative activists believed was punishment for a 2020 article in the online journal Quillette that criticized a list of what was touted as anti-racist proposals by Princeton faculty, students and staff.

Princeton said he was not fired for his speech, but for failing to fully cooperate with an investigation into a sexual relationship with a student, which he admitted to and was punished for, but which was resurrected during the controversy over his views.

Mr Shapiro, 44, a former Princeton student, had been one of Dr Katz’s supporters. Writing in The National Review after Dr Katz’s dismissal, Mr Shapiro said: “The dismissal of Joshua Katz shows that Princeton no longer stands for tolerance, respect, good faith and excellence.”

On Monday, Mr. Shapiro said the firing of Dr. Katz “was definitely on my mind as part of thinking about what to do, over the weekend, not because of sexual misconduct, but simply because his case shows that anything can be used as a pretext to punish false language.

He said that given his experience, he had no current plans to return to academia. “Academia has become an intolerant place for anyone, not just for conservatives, but for anyone looking for the truth,” Shapiro said. (He calls himself a “classic liberal” but says others describe him as a libertarian conservative.)

Intolerance, he said, has been enforced by non-discrimination and anti-harassment offices such as the Georgetown Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, which investigated him. “It’s one of the most pernicious parts of recent developments in academia where it’s kind of an Orwellian situation, where in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, bureaucrats enforce a orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity,” he said.

A Georgetown spokeswoman, Meghan M. Dubyak, said: “While we protect speech and expression, we work to promote civil and respectful speech. In reviewing Mr. Shapiro’s conduct, the university followed the usual processes for law center staff members. »

Mr. Shapiro’s troubles began with a tweet in late January, days before he started working at Georgetown Law, and just as Mr. Biden was selecting a Supreme Court nominee – whom he had promised he would would be a black woman.

“Objectively, the best choice for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is a strong smart prog&v,” he wrote. “Even identity politics has the advantage of being the first Asian American (Indian). But alas, it doesn’t fit into the last hierarchy of intersectionality, so we’ll have fewer black women. Thank heaven for small favors? »

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr Shapiro quickly apologized for the tweet, calling it “unartistic” and deleted it. Trying to fit his message into Twitter’s short format didn’t help, he said on Monday.

Last week, on the same day Mr. Shapiro said he had beaten the annulment, Georgetown University Law Center Dean William M. Treanor released a statement on the case.

“Her tweets could be reasonably understood, and were in fact understood by many, to disparage any black woman the president might appoint,” Mr. Treanor wrote. “As I wrote at the time, Mr. Shapiro’s tweets are contrary to the work we do at Georgetown Law to build inclusion, belonging and respect for diversity. They have been detrimental to many members of the legal community in Georgetown and beyond.

Georgetown is dedicated to free speech, he said, but that “does not mean individuals can say what they want, where they want.”

The dean said he wondered if Mr. Shapiro could be an effective administrator if his tweets were seen as hostile to certain groups.

Mr. Shapiro said that while giving up the job was a big step, he had foreseen the possibility. “During my purgatory, during this fake four-month investigation, I was approached by various organizations and did my own preliminary investigations to prepare myself as to whether Georgetown was going to fire me or if I should eventually leave,” did he declare.

Credit…Photo by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

In his opinion piece, Mr Shapiro criticized Georgetown’s speech code for being based not on an objective standard or the speaker’s intent, but on the reaction of those who heard it. .

He argued that he could be breaking the rules by, for example, praising Supreme Court decisions that would overturn Roe v. Wade and protect the right to bear arms.

He also argued that inflammatory tweets that reflected mainstream orthodoxy were not punished, quoting Carol Christine Fair, a professor at the School of Foreign Service who tweeted about a “chorus of authorized white men justifying the arrogated right of a serial rapist” upon confirmation by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to the pigs? Yes,” she continued.

Prof Fair said on Monday that by the time she made the tweet she was already the target of death and rape threats, and her posts had become “performative”. The fallout, including threats against “old ladies working in the dining hall, students in the library”, had been so bad for the community that she had taken research leave to travel to Afghanistan, where she felt more secure.

Professor Fair said she was one of the few Georgetown faculty members to sign a petition supporting Mr Shapiro after the heckling over his posts. And she said that without knowing him, she didn’t think his tweet was racist, given that “he actually featured a person of color.”

But student complaints sound “the death knell”, she said.

“I’m a fundamentally principled person,” she said. “I have no patience for cancel culture. None. And I don’t care who pleads for cancellation.

Susan C. Beachy contributed to the research.