Many readers will be familiar with the case of Ilya Shapiro, a libertarian "kook" (that's a term of art!) formerly of the Cato Institute, who was supposed to assume a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown's law school, until he tweeted that the best liberal judge on the federal courts was Judge Srinivasan on the DC Circuit, and since Biden had promised to appoint only a Black woman to SCOTUS, therefore that meant the next Justice on the super-legislature would be a "lesser Black woman."
This was a stupid tweet (but surely "stupid tweet" is by now redundant?): it was stupid because people are not chosen for the Supreme Court because they are the best judges; indeed, that has probably not happened since 1932, when President Hoover appointed Cardozo. People are appointed to SCOTUS for political and ideological reasons, since SCOTUS is a super-legislature. Biden followed in the tradition established by Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Reagan...all the way back to at least FDR. If I were choosing judges for ideological reasons, I probably would not choose Srinivasan or Brown Jackson, but that's neither here nor there.
Is Ilya Shapiro a racist? I don't know, but his Tweet doesn't reflect racism but ideological zealotry, of a particularly clueless kind. I can see the case for firing clueless faculty, but it would also violate academic freedom, in most (not all) cases, to do so. (It would also deplete the ranks of U.S. law faculties, and even more so philosophy departments!)
The Georgetown Law Dean Bill Treanor, who was a serious constitutional historian once upon a time, did not cover himself in glory during this episode. A Dean with a spine and a commitment to academic freedom (non-tenure-track faculty at Georgetown have academic freedom rights) would have said in response to the initial uproar: consistent with AAUP principles, we can neither investigate nor sanction Mr. Shapiro's lawful speech. That is not what Dean Treanor did, instead an "investigation" was launched. The investigation was a fraud, as its conclusion made plain: Shapiro was not going to be sanctioned because he was not employed at the time of his tweet. As many observed, that conclusion did not require a 3-month investigation, but rather a 3-minute one.
Mr. Shapiro has now resigned his position in light of the report by Georgetown's diversity police, which made clear that had he tweeted his original statement while employed by Georgetown, he would have been sanctioned. Indeed, the report by Georgetown's diversity police is a stunning, neon lights, fireworks proclamation that: "Offensive or even possibly offensive extramural speech is forbidden by Georgetown faculty." Georgetown has just told the AAUP to "fuck off." Will the AAUP do something? If Georgetown, as a putatively serious university, does not suffer adverse consequences from this egregious display of contempt for basic academic freedom rights, then we are all in trouble.
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