Georgetown’s Ivory Tower Becomes a Leftist Citadel

AMAC Excluisve – By – David P. Deavel

Georgetown’s recent suspension of Ilya Shapiro, incoming director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, for tweets about President Biden’s promise to look only at black women for a replacement of retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, has provoked a great deal of controversy about “free speech” in the academy. Yet the episode brings the controversy into sharper focus. It’s not just a “free speech” issue at Georgetown or elsewhere. It’s simply another bit of evidence that contemporary higher education, with some exceptions, is no longer an ivory tower. It is a leftist citadel keeping the gates up for all those not in the progressive camp.

Shapiro’s suspension was for a pair of tweets:

Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?

“Because Biden said he’s only consider[ing] black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached. Fitting that the Court takes up affirmative action next term.

The leftist mob got kicked into gear because of that phrase “lesser black woman,” as if Shapiro had been making some sort of generalized claim about black women rather than making a case that any black woman—or black man or white man or woman—would be lesser compared to Sri Srinivasan and that thus we can see how racial discrimination does not even benefit the progressive side. And though Shapiro had deleted the tweets even before the controversy and wrote an apology very quickly for his “inartful phrasing,” calls for his removal have continued apace and Georgetown Law dean William Treanor pusillanimously offered to pay for food for protesters who organized a sit-in and claimed that they were unable to function because of the horror of said tweets.

Those commenting have noted that Georgetown seems to have extraordinarily flexible standards about such things. During confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, Georgetown professor Christine Fair tweeted about her desire for “terrible deaths” for Kavanaugh’s supporters, whose corpses she wished to castrate and feed to swine.  In 2020 Professor Heidi Li Feldman tweeted that the Law School should not support any applications of Georgetown Law students to clerk for judges appointed by Donald Trump and that law firms should not hire anyone who did so.

Fair was briefly suspended for her violent comments but was then vindicated and praised. Feldman apparently faced no scrutiny despite university and city non-discrimination rules forbidding discrimination based on political affiliation.

In short, it’s not “free speech” that’s in danger. It’s simply speech that purportedly offends—I say purportedly because the meaning of Shapiro’s tweet, though “inartful,” in his words, is pretty easily understood—the left.

This has long been known and was demonstrated by Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College, London, whose research group CSPI released a study in 2021 finding that conservative academics, who make a smaller and smaller share of the professoriate, have encountered more problems with disciplinary action for speech and are much more likely to self-censor. The mainstream academy has become more and more left-leaning and secular. Conservatives and even classical liberals face increasingly high barriers to work in the academy, while those on the left have been finding a safe haven for years.

Think Angela Davis, who went from outright Communism to positions at Cal Santa Cruz and Rutgers, with distinguished visiting professorships at Syracuse and Vassar. Or Bill Ayers, whose Weather Underground terrorism was no barrier to becoming a professor at University of Illinois-Chicago. Or Melissa Click, the University of Missouri professor who assaulted a student journalist and screamed profanities at the police during protests in 2016; she was released by Mizzou but immediately picked up by Gonzaga University and remains to this day. Or Pete Buttigieg, the mediocre mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who somehow caught enough attention to mount a presidential campaign and was rewarded with a position at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Studies doing work on (I’m not making this up) regaining trust in political institutions. Or Joe Biden himself, who taught a course in international diplomacy at the University of Pennsylvania after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. Not a bad gig for a guy about whom Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in a memoir has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

One could name more figures who show that being liberal means never saying sorry or, in Mayor Pete and the President’s case, actually accomplishing anything. It does, however, mean gigs at top tier institutions. But given that we started with Georgetown, it might be worth noting two specifics persons on Georgetown’s website.

Peter Stzrok II has been an adjunct professor teaching a course on “Counterintelligence and National Security” since the fall of 2020. Yes, the Peter Stzrok whose text messages put such a cloud over the FBI with their implication of “a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects,” as the Inspector General’s report would conclude. The same Peter Stzrok involved in the “Russia investigation” whose only supporting material was the fraudulent dossier provided by Christopher Steele through the funding of Hilary Clinton.

But if there’s one name on Georgetown’s website that’s more breathtaking than Stzrok’s, it is a Georgetown “affiliate” named Hunter Biden, who spent time in 2014 teaching a course at his alma mater titled “Art of Advocacy In and Out of Government.”

There aren’t enough jokes in the world to cover that one.

Especially when you factor in the calculation made by journalists that Master Hunter created his infamous Ashley Madison account from the campus during the semester he was teaching. Hunter is still listed on the website at Georgetown, while the country’s greatest essayist, Joseph Epstein, who taught for thirty years at Northwestern University as a lecturer and had been given emeritus status, has been scrubbed from that institution’s English department page because he wrote a joking op-ed for the Wall Street Journal encouraging Jill Biden to drop her use of “Doctor” as a title.

Georgetown is not alone in its determination to become both a home and a safe space for wayward liberal politicians and leftists. This is the way of most universities these days. But it is quite remarkable that a university founded by Catholic priests seems to offer institutional absolution strictly on partisan lines. Alas, as too many commentators over the years have noticed, Georgetown long ago lost the Catholic and Christian vision that animated its founders. Instead of the prophetic hope that every valley be exalted, Georgetown has set its hopes on exalting those who emerge from or serve the swamp.

David P. Deavel is editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, co-director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy, and a visiting professor at the University of St. Thomas (MN). He is the co-host of the Deep Down Things podcast.