Georgetown Law graduation speaker backs out after students protest his ‘controversial, Zionist and harmful opinions’
A law professor who disparaged legal efforts to curb pro-Palestinian student activism will replace Morton Schapiro
(SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
(JTA) — A pro-Israel Jewish economist and former university president will no longer speak at Georgetown University Law School’s graduation next week, after stepping down from the speaking engagement following student criticism.
Instead, graduating students and their families will hear from a Georgetown professor who has disparaged legal efforts to curb pro-Palestinian student protests and compared congressional hearings on college campus antisemitism to “McCarthyism.”
The school announced last week that Morton Schapiro, who led Northwestern University for a decade until 2022, would be the commencement speaker on May 17. Students soon launched a petition calling for his removal.
“Schapiro is not a lawyer, has no connection to Georgetown, and holds controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions,” said the petition, which drew 282 signatures.
The petition called attention to a column that Schapiro published last year in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, where he now lives. In the column, titled “What I Have Learned Over the Past Two Years About Israel and the World and published on Oct. 15, Schapiro criticized progressives, higher education leaders and the mainstream media for vilifying Israel during the war in Gaza.
The petition also linked to a news story about Schapiro’s 2020 comments disparaging student protesters at Northwestern. At the time, he was clashing with students who called him “Piggy Morty,” an epithet that they said was meant to criticize his ties to police but that he said smacked of antisemitism.
Georgetown Law did not comment publicly on the petition until Wednesday, when Interim Dean Joshua Teitelbaum, who had been Schapiro’s student at Williams College, announced by email that Schapiro had withdrawn from the speaking role. Teitelbaum noted in the email, sent to the Georgetown Law community, that “in the past week, a number of law students raised concerns” about Schapiro’s selection.
“He was invited to address the graduating class to share his insights about the current moment in U.S. higher education and to inspire our graduates to pursue a life’s work in service of others,” Teitelbaum said in the email, which Georgetown Law School shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In an accompanying note, Schapiro said he did not want his presence “to distract from the day’s festivities.”
To the Jewish Journal, he said, “Given Georgetown Law’s desire to keep politics out of its commencement ceremony, I am a little surprised by their choice of a speaker to replace me.” JTA was unable to reach Schapiro on Wednesday.
The replacement speaker, David Cole, is a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown who is the former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. In that role, Cole issued a statement soon after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel condemning the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, two antisemitism watchdogs, for what he said were calls to “investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for exercising their free speech rights.”
Acknowledging surging antisemitism, Cole argued that curbing speech perceived by some to be offensive was not the right response.
“Restricting speech may seem like an attractive option for college administrators to quell campus tensions,” he wrote at the time. “But efforts to censor speech often prove counterproductive, and undermine the very mission of the university. We strongly caution universities against conflating the suppression of speech with the façade of safety.”
The speaker switchup comes amid a string of commencement dustups related to Israel and the war in Gaza. Also on Wednesday, Rutgers University rescinded its commencement speaker invitation to alumnus Rami Elghandour, a producer of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” the Oscar-nominated docudrama about the Red Crescent response to the killing of Hind Rajab in Gaza in 2024, citing a tweet about Israel that it said did not comport with the school’s values. The president of the University of Michigan, meanwhile, also apologized after faculty senate chair Derek Peterson praised pro-Palestinian student protesters in his address Saturday.
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