Ilya Shapiro has exposed the rot within Georgetown by Kaylee McGhee White,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/ilya-shapiro-has-exposed-the-rot-within-georgetown
Perhaps the only good to come out of Georgetown Law School’s ridiculous response to the Ilya Shapiro controversy is that it has exposed the deep cultural rot within the university and its student body.
This week, Dean Bill Treanor announced he had placed Shapiro on administrative leave over a tweet in which Shapiro criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to consider only a black female nominee to the Supreme Court. Subsequently, a group of students held a sit-in to air their concerns about Shapiro. The meeting quickly devolved into a broader discussion about why Shapiro was even hired in the first place, which led to a condemnation of the school’s Center for the Constitution, which Shapiro was hired to help direct.
“Why was it created?” one student asked, adding that the originalist views of the center’s director, Randy Barnett, make it “seem like [the center] has done more harm than good.”
“You can do as much diversity training as you want with staff,” the student continued, according to National Review. “But I feel like that Center has a certain ideology … so I really want you to defend why we really need it, beyond, like, you know, free speech, and beyond diversity of opinion. I really want us to think critically about why we still need it.”
Another student demanded that Treanor offer a “reparations” package to black students who might be harmed by Shapiro’s hiring. Free meals, excused absences, and a place to cry were some of the things the student said this package should include.
“Is there an office they can go to?” she asked. “I don’t know what it would look like, but if they want to cry, if they need to break down, where can they go? Because we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry. And this is not in the future. This is today.”
And that’s not all. Students who have defended Shapiro, and even students who have stuck up for their peers defending Shapiro, are being bullied into silence by others on campus. Student Rafael Nunez, for example, was kicked out of the law school class of ’23 group chat for defending another student’s right to support Shapiro. Another student, Travis Nix, was in turn kicked out of the chat for defending Rafael!
Academia is supposed to be a place where ideas can be debated openly. Georgetown, however, is evidently dominated by a totalitarian culture that values neither free expression nor ideas that go beyond one specific type of groupthink. Its students are openly hostile and demeaning toward those who hold opinions different from their own.
The law school’s administrators should be forcing these students out of their comfort zones and into something resembling the real world. For example, these lawyers in training might someday have to read a decision handed down by the current Supreme Court that is based on originalist ideas. Are they going to go hide in a bathroom and cry when that happens?
Instead of challenging these students and helping them grow and mature, Georgetown’s administrators are like bad parents, coddling and pleading with children as they throw tantrums.
If I were Shapiro, I might just be relieved that I now have an excuse not to work in a place like that.
Kaylee McGhee White is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
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