The Patriot Post® · Georgetown Cancels an Honest Professor
Law professor Ilya Shapiro has resigned from Georgetown University after months of being targeted by the school’s leftist administration. Did he commit academic fraud? Some sexual sin? No; it was Thoughtcrime. He publicly criticized Joe Biden over his blatantly sexist and race-based criteria for picking a Supreme Court justice to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer. Following Shapiro’s social media message, Georgetown suspended him pending an investigation, despite the fact that the school claims to uphold freedom of speech.
Despite the fact that Shapiro sought to correct what he admitted was a poorly worded post, it was clear that the school was not truly interested in retaining a professor who failed to toe the woke ideological line. Shapiro recognized that his only real option was to tender his resignation, but he did so while also publishing a resignation letter expressing the blatant double standard Georgetown holds.
“You told me when we met last week that you want me to be successful in my new role and that you will ‘have my back,’” Shapiro wrote. “Instead, you’ve painted a target on my back such that I could never do the job I was hired for.”
That target he references is the school’s disingenuous decision to reinstate Shapiro following a sham investigation. Part of the condition for reinstatement was that if any student or faculty offered a complaint against him, it would be automatically considered as evidence, with no actual proof required, of his having violated the school’s agreement. In other words, it was designed as a setup for the school to rid itself of Shapiro “with cause” in the future.
Allowing any student to claim offense without having to provide evidence underscores the fact that Georgetown was not acting in good faith. Georgetown wanted Shapiro gone because school administrators cannot tolerate diversity of opinions. “The proliferation of IDEAA-style offices (more typically styled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) enforce an orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices,” Shapiro noted. “Even a stalwart T-14 law school dean bucks these bureaucrats at his peril.”
In his resignation letter, Shapiro again defended the intended observation of his original social media post by explaining: “No reasonable person acting in good faith could construe what I tweeted to be ‘objectively offensive.’ It’s a complete miscomprehension to read what I said to suggest that ‘the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman,’ as you did in your very first statement back on January 27, or that I considered all black women to be ‘lesser than’ everyone else. … Its meaning that I considered one possible candidate to be best and thus all others to be less qualified is clear. Only those acting in bad faith to get me fired because of my political beliefs would misconstrue what I said to suggest otherwise.”
He further noted that the only one actually being harmed by the whole fiasco is in fact Shapiro himself. Those with a clear ideologically woke vendetta intentionally sought out his deleted social media post in order to get him fired. “I deleted my tweet well before any student was likely to learn of it,” he said. “Screen captures of the tweet were then disseminated by others seeking to harm me because of my political views. It was they, not I, who intentionally and knowingly caused any harm to any student who later came to learn of and read their screen captures of the tweet. It is they, not I, who are morally culpable for any such resulting harm.”
Finally, to prove his point of Georgetown’s blatant double standard, Shapiro listed several instances over recent years of leftist school professors posting controversial as well as offensive messages that disparaged conservatives and Republicans. In each of those instances, the administration defended the professors on free speech grounds. But when it came to a conservative professor who challenged their leftist ideology, no free speech is tolerated.