Ilya Shapiro Tells Us Why He Resigned from Georgetown

CLAY: Joined now by a guy who wrote a phenomenal editorial that I read this week in the Wall Street Journal on the opinion pages there. Ilya Shapiro was set to work at Georgetown Law School, and then all hell came loose or came undone because of a tweet he sent out about Joe Biden’s decision to only nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. This is something that we talked about in a big way on the show, Ilya, because to me, the real criticism on many levels for Joe Biden is whoever he nominates when he says, “I’m only going to nominate a black woman,” does not get the proper respect as if they were his choice no matter who he considered.

It’s also a violation, probably, of actual Supreme Court precedent to make that kind of choice in many different parts of our country. And your tweet, I thought, was totally legitimate. You were advocating for someone that would have been a better choice — another minority, by the way — and the people at Georgetown Law School lost their minds. Thank you for joining us. Our audience may not know this full story. So if you can tell us succinctly what happened and why you’ve made the choices that you have.

SHAPIRO: Yeah, thanks for having me on. Indeed, I was pilloried. I was mobbed online, moving offline, as a racist and a misogynist for criticizing the president for choosing his Supreme Court justice based on race and sex. That’s what it comes down to. I was set to join Georgetown. I’d spent nearly 15 years at Cato, the Cato Institute, the nation’s leading libertarian think tank. I was set to join Georgetown as its executive director of the Center for the Constitution.

And I tweeted in late January when news of Justice Breyer’s retirement broke, criticizing President Biden for restricting his pool of candidates by race and sex and all hell broke loose. I was eventually suspended, put on paid administrative leave, and it took four months for them to evaluate whether my tweet violated “harassment and discrimination policy.” At the end of this, they didn’t answer that question. Somebody just looked at a calendar after four months and found, “Oh, since I wasn’t an employee when I tweeted, I was even subject to those policies.” But when they released the report, ultimately it took me a while with my counsel and other trusted advisers, including notably my wife — who’s a better lawyer than all of us combined —

CLAY: (laughing)

SHAPIRO: — to digest all of this report. They were setting me up for a fall. Quite the opposite of vindicating Georgetown’s quite excellent, on paper, free speech and expression policy. They said that the next time I said something that offended or made someone uncomfortable, whether in class, in an op-ed or otherwise, than that would be violating their rules and I’d be subject to discipline. And ultimately, I decided… four days after celebrating my technical victory in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. I wrote that subsequent piece that that you mentioned and a four-page resignation letter that highlights — it was a noisy resignation, highlighting — exactly how Georgetown was failing the rot in academia, that it was untenable for me to do the job for which I was hired. So I had to leave.

BUCK: Ilya, it’s Buck. I just want to know if you had any people from within the university — any fellow professors, administrators — who even if they wouldn’t come out, were they were they willing to at least say to you on the phone or behind closed doors, “Yeah, man. This is like the Stasi. This place has lost its mind.” I just wonder, to what degree…? Especially you’re talking about a law school. They’re supposed to believe in Constitution. Free speech. It’s a university. They’re also supposed to believe in free speech. Was anybody saying, “Yeah, this is crazy; I’m with you, even if I can’t do anything publicly to save you”?

SHAPIRO: So Georgetown faculty is about 150 people. There are 3-1/2 non-progressives. They obviously supported. Of other people… I mean, the associate dean, for instance, is the woman by the name of Rosa Brooks, definitely on the left. She was kind and supportive and showed grace privately to me. She was in the administrative structure. So, of course, didn’t do anything beyond that. But other than that, there’s David Cole, who’s on the faculty, who’s also the legal director of the ACLU. And of course, the ACLU is no longer a civil liberties organization.

They are just another left wing activist group. But he did write a couple of op-eds saying what I did was heinous but shouldn’t be fired for it. So, you know, thanks, I guess. But that was about it. No, I think I think Georgetown — especially the law school — is irredeemable, and I’m putting… I’m trying to use this moment, this opportunity, this platform I have to put pressure on them.

But even more importantly, on academia, more broadly, hopefully some administrators somewhere will say, “Okay, this has gotten too far,” because most administrators are not crazy woke activists. They’re spinless cowards and they just go along to get along, and hopefully they can see how this illiberal trend that’s accelerated in recent years really does a disservice to any educational institutions mission.

CLAY: Ilya, I first of all, I’m a law school graduate myself from Vanderbilt and I read your piece and I followed your story. And I appreciate you coming on with us. And in particular, you laid out other tweets that are being sent that are far more radical in opinion than what you were under siege for in your Wall Street Journal editorial piece. And I think the battle that you’re fighting is so important not only for Georgetown, but just for the purity of intellectual debate, which is supposed to be the foundation of all things and all places of a legal education.

Right? Because for people out there listening, I’ve represented murderers in my career. That doesn’t mean that I agree with potentially someone murdering, right? (laughs) We’re supposed to, as lawyers, take on every different aspect of the law and sometimes defend people who we may find to have been heinous. And this is terrifying to think about, because where it leads to me — and I’m curious if you already buy in on this, too — is at some point certain people don’t even deserve lawyers. That’s where these arguments all lead, it seems to me.

SHAPIRO: We’ve had arguments like that already. Some of these tweets that I cited in my letter in my Wall Street Journal op-ed, yeah, they’re far more outrageous. They’re inflammatory, you know, calling for the death and castration of supporters of Brett Kavanaugh, justifying the mobs outside justices’ homes, saying that anyone who’s a Republican is a terrorist. All of these sorts of thing. Again, I think it’s the right call, as Georgetown did, not to investigate those tweets and punish them.

But it’s free speech for thee and not for me. And that one sidedness, the disparate treatment, depending on where you are on the logical spectrum, is one of many problems with how Georgetown has approached all of these things. Fundamentally, this goes to the proliferation of bureaucrats as opposed to faculty on law school campuses, and especially among the bureaucratic bloat, the predomination of DEI offices — the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — which, ironically or sardonically — bitter irony — subvert intellectual diversity, prevent equal opportunity, exclude those who dissent from a rigid, progressive orthodoxy.

So these are very dangerous trends, and it’s different than decades-old complaints about how campuses, universities have a left-wing bent. The ratio of liberals to conservatives or whatever on campuses hasn’t changed since I was in college 25 years ago, in law school 20 years ago, or the Berkeley Free Speech Movement 50 years ago, all of that. The ratio is not what this is about. It’s about empowering fundamentally illiberal values that undermine the rule of law, that undermine the basic mission of any educational institution.

And I… You know, I’m not trying here to convert anyone who’s like, you know, a radical leftist. I’m here to try to wake up those in the grand moderate majority who either aren’t paying attention or think that they’re isolated incidents. Because, I mean, look, this is just a terrible stuff that’s happening in our society writ large. I’m optimistic about that. But certainly, in academia — and especially Georgetown — which is at the bleeding edge of these negative tendencies.

BUCK: Just wondering, Ilya, based on what you saw at Georgetown from the inside and your short tenure there, do you think that you could…? If you had stayed or if anyone decided to take a position on, say, affirmative action, which is before the Supreme Court and is still being litigated as an issue more generally in the courts, that if you said, “Affirmative action is wrong because it propels people who are not as qualified into roles they would not have otherwise gotten, often because of either skin color or gender or gender identity or whatever,” is that actionable at Georgetown now? Could you get in trouble for that with the political commissars in the diversity office?

SHAPIRO: Without any spin or talk-radio embellishment, I think the answer has to be yes. Based on the report that I got from the diversity bureaucrats — “the diversicrats” — they made clear that anything that someone would object to was actionable, that, you know, “We believe in free speech unless someone feels offended,” and that’s why in my resignation letter in my Wall Street Journal op-ed, I detailed presented various very realistic hypotheticals.

You know, the Supreme Court is deciding cases on abortion and guns this month. If I laud the overturning of Roe v Wade and supporting of gun rights — if this fall, when the court takes up affirmative action, and I argue, as is the mainstream position, that the 14th Amendment prohibits racial discrimination or hiring, admitting someone based on race — if someone is offended by that, and if they quote the dean’s own words…

Bill Treanor, the dean, you know, writing that what I said “undermines and esthetical to our mission of promoting diversity inclusion,” well, that that’s actionable. Absolutely! That’s why this is fundamentally an untenable position. That’s why I would… You know, I don’t shy away from the arena. Nobody would accuse me of being a shrinking violet or backing away from a fight.

But there is no way for me to do the job that I was hired for, and so rather than either try to walk on eggshells to avoid the inadvertent offense that was inevitable, I have to get ahead of this and just say, “This is untenable and I quit and I can’t do this,” and try to… You know, the reason I’m talking to you, among many, many other reporters all week is to sound the alarm about what’s going on in academia and more broadly.

CLAY: Ilya, we appreciate it. Thank you for fighting the fight that you’re fighting. It’s important. You can go read that editorial. Its link is at ClayAndBuck.com. We hope to have you on again at some point in the future.

SHAPIRO: Thank you, and the updated version of the paperback of my Supreme Disorder about Supreme Court nomination politics comes out July 5th. Check it out.

CLAY: Awesome. We will do that for sure. It’s Ilya Shapiro, formerly of Georgetown University Law School.