Georgetown's Ludicrous Double-Standard for Ilya Shapiro
The problem with cancel culture in higher education is not only that it stifles free inquiry and honest debate, but that it frequently targets scholars on the right when those on the left get a pass for similar conduct. Consider the case of legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, now Georgetown University’s executive director for the Center for the Constitution.
Last Wednesday, Shapiro took to Twitter to assess the field of possible nominees for the Supreme Court following the announcement that Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring. Shapiro sparked a culture clash when he wrote, “Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is [a] solid prog[ressive] & v[ery] smart.” Shapiro added, Srinivsan “even has [the] identity politics benefit of being [the] first Asian (Indian) American. But alas [that] doesn’t fit into [the] latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.”
Online commentators quickly noted that Shapiro’s tweet was offensive, and that it was unfair and demeaning to broadly describe black female jurists as “lesser.” Shapiro agreed and deleted the tweet, issuing multiple apologies for his phrasing, saying: “I regret my poor choice of words. A person’s dignity and worth simply do not, and should not, depend on any immutable characteristic.”
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Georgetown Law School dean Bill Treanor, who had already decried the tweets as “appalling” and “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law,” blasted out an email lamenting “the pain and outrage” Shapiro’s tweets had caused and announced that he’d been placed on leave “pending an investigation into whether he violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.”
The idea that Georgetown faculty should take exquisite care to conduct themselves professionally when using social media is a potentially defensible one — so long as it’s consistently applied. It is not.
In October 2018, during the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Georgetown associate professor Carol Christine Fair tweeted, with regards to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, “Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
Fair’s language inappropriately invoked race (“entitled white men”), as did Shapiro’s, but hers also included a graphic celebration of gendered violence. Where Shapiro has been contrite, Fair was defiant. If Shapiro’s tweet is grounds for an investigation and possible dismissal, due to concerns about discrimination, harassment, and professional conduct, then Fair’s certainly was.
But Fair’s actions didn’t seem to unduly bother Georgetown’s leaders. Georgetown president John DeGioia issued a perfunctory statement denouncing violence that never mentioned Fair by name or any specifics relating to her tweet or the situation. Indeed, at that time, he went out of his way to defend the “right of our community members to exercise their freedom of expression.” As of this writing, DiGioia has issued no such statement in regards to Shapiro.
Fair, for her part, showed no remorse about having called for the deaths and castration of the members of the Judiciary Committee. Whereas Shapiro has repeatedly apologized, Fair told the Washington Post, “I aim to create language that creates as much discomfort as I am forced to feel in this regime.” Despite her refusal to apologize, the university pursued no discipline against Fair. Rather, Georgetown sent her on an international research experience for the rest of the fall 2018 semester, after which she returned and was promoted to full professor.
The unapologetic would-be castrator is now comfortably ensconced at Georgetown, watching the Shapiro investigation unfold. It’s almost as if Georgetown employs two different standards for professional conduct, depending on the speaker’s politics.
For her part, Fair has reacted altogether admirably to the Shapiro imbroglio. In a series of tweets this week, Fair came out in support of Shapiro, writing, “Unless I’m missing something, this is hard to fathom. I believe that the only suitable response to speech that offends is more speech . . . When speech is stifled—even speech we dislike—we all lose.”
Georgetown could learn a lot from Fair about, well, being fair. It’d be one thing if Georgetown investigated every professor for every controversial tweet. It’d be a dumb standard but it wouldn’t be a capricious one. Georgetown seems intent, though, on applying a variable standard — one more concerned with ideological content than clear norms of scholarly conduct.
Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
