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Days after a Georgetown University Law School administrator was reinstated after months of investigation into his tweets, he said he had resigned.
Ilya Shapiro, who was hired to head the Center for the Constitution of the Faculty of Law from February, said in a letter of resignation on Monday that remaining at the university “has become unsustainable”. He accused law enforcement officials of creating a hostile environment for him because of his political views.
Shortly before his start date, Shapiro was criticized by tweets about President Biden’s promise to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court. The posts, for which he apologized the next day, included a tweet suggesting that Biden be appointed Chief Justice of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “But unfortunately it doesn’t fit into the last hierarchy of intersectionality, so we’ll have a younger black woman,” Shapiro tweeted. “Thank heavens for the little favors?”
His publications provoked accusations of racism. Organizations, including the Georgetown Black Law Students Association, have repeatedly called for Shapiro’s extinction.
William M. Treanor, the dean of law school, said in a statement on Jan. 27 that Shapiro’s suggestion that a black woman could not be the best nominee, along with her use of “degrading language,” was “creepy”.
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Treanor put Shapiro on paid administrative leave pending investigations conducted by the human resources and institutional diversity offices, equity and affirmative action of the law school. Prior to his appointment in Georgetown, Shapiro worked at the Cato Institute as Vice President and Director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.
University researchers recently discovered that Shapiro was not “properly disciplined” for his January tweets because they were posted before his work began, which allowed the author and lawyer to resume. his charge, Treanor said in an email on campus Thursday. That same day, Shapiro tweeted that he was going to work on Friday.
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On Monday, however, he announced that he had resigned.
“You’ve clarified a jurisdictional technicality for me,” Shapiro wrote to Treanor, adding that the “diversity office report” and your own statements to the Law Center community implicitly repealed the so-called speech policy. and Georgetown’s expression and prepared me for the discipline the next time you transgress progressive orthodoxy. “
He continued to reject the Dean’s previous interpretations of his tweets.
It is a total misunderstanding to read what I said to suggest that “the best candidate for the Supreme Court could not be a black woman,” as you did in your first statement on January 27, or that I considered all black women they were “less than the others,” Shapiro wrote. others less qualified, of course. “
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A Georgetown spokesman said the school “does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or their content, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or reprehensible.”
The school’s Conservative and Libertarian Student Association said in a statement that members are disappointed with the way Georgetown Law handled its investigation, a four-month process that the group said was “unnecessarily cruel. and punitive “.
Luke Bunting, a recent graduate and former co-chair of the student group, said he is concerned about the message the school is conveying to potential applicants. “It sends the message that freedom of speech in Georgetown Law is not really free. It is subject to complaints from students or teachers,” said Bunting, 29. He added that some Conservative students have said they felt pressure. to censor themselves during classroom discussions, for fear that their comments would be taken out of context.
“I think there was a real twist to the worse faith reading of Ilya’s tweets and that was detrimental,” Bunting said. “It’s a real shame and a real loss for the school.”