Georgetown Law: Worse Than Yale (And That Takes Some Doing!)
Cancel Culture, Georgetown Law School, Ilya Shapiro, Left-wing Intolerance, William Treanor
Georgetown Law
Max Eden, at AEI, informs us that Georgetown Law coddles ;eft-wing students who respond to reading a comment they do not like by demanding “reparations,” “free food,” “and a place to cry”(!) by suspending a distinguished professor.
Georgetown University Law Center had long been at the bottom of the law school world’s elite “Top-14” rankings. It maintained its worst-of-the-best status largely by the draw of its physical location in Washington, D.C. It finally slipped below UCLA this year, just when Georgetown Law distinguished itself above and beyond even top-ranked Yale Law in a category not ranked by US News and World Report: leadership. To wit: Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor has proven himself, almost beyond a reasonable doubt, to be the single weakest leader in American higher education.
An examination of Treanor’s leadership by a jury of his peers should convict him of this weighty charge. Last March, someone leaked a video of professor Sandra Sellers lamenting that black students tended to score poorly on her examinations. Treanor publicly condemned her without speaking to her. Georgetown then violated its own policy and American Association of University Professors’ guidelines and fired Sellers without any due process.
I asked Treanor: Why condemn Sellers before speaking with her? Was there an empirical basis for her lamentation? If there was, then why would he find lamenting an empirical truth to be “abhorrent?” I also asked him to comment on what a Georgetown Law student told me: “[B]ecause of [Treanor’s] action, [students] are now terrified of providing any personal opinion or even putting forward ideas ‘for the sake of argument’ in [Georgetown Law] classes for fear that someone might clip their speech and post a video on social media to destroy their reputation and career.”
Treanor provided no comment. He did, however, publicly vow to consider requiring all students to study Critical Race Theory (CRT), to make professor tenure contingent on CRT-inspired “diversity, equity and inclusion” criteria, and insisted that he was “dedicated to the important work that lies ahead.”
In recent weeks, Treanor has rededicated himself to that work. Read the rest of this entry »