(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Despite a recent announcement that he was returning to work at Georgetown Law School, Ilya Shapiro has resigned due to a “hostile work environment,” after coming under intense criticism and harassment for his tweets and political views.
Shaprio, who questioned President Joe Biden’s SCOTUS nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, expressed the belief that she was hired because of her race and sex. The tweet and subsequent reaction landed Shapiro on administrative leave pending an investigation, which was recently lifted, Legal Insurrection reported.
Georgetown’s dean, William Treanor, weaseled out and said that Shapiro was not “properly subject to discipline” for his tweets, as he was not technically an employee at the time he posted them.
However, the actions encouraged students to make complaints about Shapiro so he may be subject to further discipline or firing, and he was required to take a “cultural competence” program.
“Mr. Shapiro will also participate in programming on implicit bias, cultural competence, and non-discrimination, which the Law Center is requiring senior staff to attend,” Treanor statement reads. “Finally, I expressed my concern that his tweets would potentially have the effect of making some students feel unwelcome in any elective course he might teach.”
In response Shapiro handed in his resignation, as the bureaucrats decided to tie up his position in red tape and made it clear that anything he said would be scrutinized to the highest degree by the school’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action.
Although I scored a technical victory last week and was reinstated, @GeorgetownLaw and its diversicrats created a hostile work environment that made my remaining on the job untenable. https://t.co/F4vo8ZYcMe
— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) June 6, 2022
In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Shapiro laid out his rationale for not participating in the “slow motion firing” that likely would have taken place had he remained at Georgetown.
“Fundamentally, what Mr. Treanor has done—what he’s allowed IDEAA to do—is repeal the Speech and Expression Policy that he claims to hold dear,” Shapiro wrote.
“The freedom to speak is no freedom at all if it makes an exception for speech someone finds offensive or counter to some nebulous conception of equity.”
Concluding, Shapiro made clear that he will not be beholden to bureaucratic ideas of what speech should be at Georgetown:
“Proliferating IDEAA-style offices enforce an orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices,” the piece concluded. “Even the dean of an elite law school bucks these bureaucrats at his peril… I won’t live this way.”
