Georgetown University Law Center’s commencement controversy should concern anyone who believes universities have a responsibility to protect open debate rather than surrender to activist pressure.

Morton Schapiro, the former president of Northwestern University, was scheduled to speak at Georgetown Law’s May 17 commencement and receive an honorary juris doctorate. However, after students launched a petition criticizing his views on Israel, Schapiro withdrew. Georgetown then replaced him with David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor and former national legal director of the ACLU who previously compared congressional hearings on campus antisemitism to “McCarthyism.”

The issue is not merely that students objected to a commencement speaker. Students have the right to criticize speakers, write petitions, and voice disagreement. The deeper problem is institutional. Georgetown appeared to validate the exact pressure campaign that treated Schapiro’s pro-Israel commentary as disqualifying.

A law school that trains future attorneys should understand the difference between disagreement and exclusion. Instead, Georgetown allowed a speaker dispute to become another example of how anti-Israel activism can shape university decisions.

According to Jewish Insider, Georgetown Law interim dean Joshua Teitelbaum told students that concerns about Schapiro were raised “due primarily to opinion essays” he had published about Israel and Palestine after Hamas’s deadly and sexually barbaric assault on October 7, 2023. One column that drew student attention was Schapiro’s October 15 Jewish Journal piece, “What I Have Learned Over the Past Two Years About Israel and the World,” in which he criticized progressives, higher education leaders, and the mainstream media for vilifying Israel during the war in Gaza.

Schapiro was not accused of advocating violence or targeting students. His apparent offense was defending Israel and criticizing the intellectual climate that emerged after Hamas terrorists massacred Israelis. On many campuses, that has become enough to trigger outrage. Pro-Israel speech is treated not as a legitimate political position, but as a moral stain that must be removed from institutional life.

Georgetown’s choice of replacement made the decision even more revealing. In testimony submitted to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in 2025, David Cole argued that antisemitic speech, like other forms of hateful speech, is generally protected by the First Amendment. That legal point can be debated seriously.

But Cole also wrote in The Nation that congressional hearings on campus antisemitism resembled “McCarthyism,” framing the hearings as a threat to free expression rather than a necessary effort to examine whether elite universities failed Jewish students.

Georgetown lost a Jewish speaker criticized for defending Israel and replaced him with a professor who criticized congressional scrutiny of campus antisemitism. The school may insist the replacement was practical or convenient, but the symbolism is obvious.

The institution did not merely move past a controversy. It selected a speaker whose public record aligns more closely with the activist narrative that made Schapiro controversial.

A law school should be the last institution to reward that standard. Lawyers are supposed to confront arguments, not erase them. Georgetown Law students will enter a profession built on adversarial debate, constitutional rights, and evidence-based reasoning. If a former university president’s Jewish Journal columns are enough to make him unacceptable at commencement, the problem is not Schapiro’s commentary.

The central issue is an academic culture that confuses ideological discomfort with institutional harm.

Georgetown had an opportunity to show that a university can respect student concerns without capitulating to political pressure. Instead, the school’s final decision sent the opposite message.