If we all spoke circumspectly and wisely all the time, who would even need free-speech policies?
In 1985, the Yale anthropologist James C. Scott published a study of how subordinated populations can resist the powerful and dominant. He introduced the idea of “weapons of the weak”: “foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage.” Pilfering aside, Scott anticipated many of the management techniques of the modern university administrator.
For more than three months now, Georgetown University has pondered whether to discipline a staff member whose words offended a number of students and faculty. The university’s written policy on free speech pointed to one answer: No. Georgetown’s protections for free-speech policy are very broad; on April 26, for example, its law school hosted a Palestinian activist who has appropriated Holocaust history to condemn Israel for “Kristallnachting” Palestinians. So that’s in bounds at Georgetown Law.
At the same time, the offended students and faculty are still riled up, and people do not rise through the ranks of university management by brave defiance of local opinion. So perhaps it’s natural that Georgetown has decided to … dither. But the longer the dither, the more painful and embarrassing the eventual outcome, whatever it should be.
The story opens at the end of January. Justice Stephen Breyer had just announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. Ilya Shapiro, a newly hired Georgetown Law staff member, sent tweets objecting to President Joe Biden’s pledge to replace Breyer with a Black woman. Shapiro urged Biden to appoint Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, whom he considered “objectively” the best candidate to replace Breyer. Shapiro lamented that Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman”—whose nomination would always have an “asterisk attached.” A third tweet invited Shapiro’s Twitter followers to opine whether Biden’s promise was racist, sexist, neither, or both.
Shapiro insists that he did not mean to imply that all Black women were inherently “lesser” than his preferred candidate. His choice of words, he said, had been “inartful.” He deleted the tweets and posted an apology and explanation. (The apology and explanation have also since been deleted. Shapiro explained to me that he sets all his tweets to auto-delete after a couple of days.)
But Shapiro was punching buttons wired to a huge explosive charge. In March 2021, two Georgetown professors were recorded during what they had supposed to be a private Zoom conversation about a course they jointly taught. In a clip posted to Twitter, the adjunct professor Sandra Sellers was heard saying: “I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on.’ You know, I get some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.”
Sellers was fired. The professor on the other end of the supposedly private conversation ultimately resigned himself. (My colleague Anne Applebaum wrote in more detail about this case for The Atlantic last October.) But the incident still rankled. The anti-Shapiro student coalition implicitly referenced the Sellers case in its letter demanding that he be fired too: “At Georgetown Law, Black students are haunted by the shadow of impostor syndrome.”
The Georgetown administration at first tried to manage the Shapiro incident like that of almost a year earlier. The dean issued a statement of revulsion and condemnation.
But this time, unlike with the March 2021 controversy, the law school found itself in the crossfire. Pundits wrote editorials and articles defending Shapiro’s free-speech rights. National and international news outlets covered the story. Shapiro has argued his case across many media platforms. He has written articles, made speeches, and given television interviews.
Outside critics quoted the university’s own words in its free-speech policy:
It is not the proper role of a University to insulate individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Deliberation or debate may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.
It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to judge the value of ideas, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting those arguments and ideas that they oppose.
Firing a staff member in violation of a written policy would not only embarrass the law school, but also expose it to considerable litigation risk.