(Feb. 2) Georgetown University law students have been victimized — not by a tweet from legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, but by their own law school’s administration.

The insult to them was born of wokeness run amok.

You may have seen that Shapiro, the highly regarded Cato Institute legal scholar who was supposed to begin this week as executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, posted a series of tweets on Jan. 26 criticizing President Joe Biden’s (quite unpopular) pledge to consider only black women for a soon-to-be-vacant Supreme Court seat.

In the course of arguing that liberal appeals court judge Sri Srinivasan would be far and away the “best pick” for Biden, Shapiro tweeted: “But alas [he] doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”

Shapiro clearly wasn’t saying that other candidates would be “lesser” because they were black women. He was clearly suggesting that any other candidate would have less merit than Srinivasan. Substitute “white men” for “black women” in his tweet, and nobody would have even imagined his point was to say that white men are “lesser” by virtue of being white men.

Nonetheless, the wording was less than ideal, as the wording of tweets often is. And so even before the howls of the outrage mobs reached deafening decibels, Shapiro had withdrawn the tweet and apologized for the poor word choice.

That’s where the whole thing should have ended: no offense meant and none taken.

Instead, William Treanor, dean of the Georgetown University Law Center, joined the mob in piling on Shapiro. Unsatisfied by essentially calling Shapiro a racist (a ludicrous allegation for anyone remotely familiar with Shapiro’s body of work), Treanor placed Shapiro on “administrative leave” pending an “investigation into whether he violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.”

Of course, Shapiro had done no such thing…. [The full column is at this link.]

 

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