After a Jewish university leader withdrew as Georgetown University Law Center’s commencement speaker following backlash from anti-Israel student activists, the school replaced him with a professor who criticized congressional hearings on campus antisemitism as a form of “McCarthyism” aimed at chilling free speech.

In an email to law school students on Wednesday, Joshua Teitelbaum, the interim dean of Georgetown Law, wrote that “in the past week, a number of law students raised concerns” about the speaker selection of Morton Schapiro, an economist and the former president of Northwestern University for over 10 years. Teitelbaum said those concerns were “due primarily to opinion essays [Schapiro] published on Israel and Palestine in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023.” 

Teitelbaum said he “listened carefully” to students’ concerns but had determined that withdrawing Schapiro’s invitation would be “inconsistent with Georgetown’s commitment to free and open inquiry.” Schapiro then independently “decided to decline our invitation to speak” after learning of the students’ concerns, Teitelbaum said. 

Schapiro has written extensively for the Jewish Journal in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, including criticizing university presidents for failing to protect Jewish students and suggesting that progressive organizations abandoned Israel and the Jewish community after the attacks. Schapiro could not be reached for comment. 

Teitelbaum announced in the email that Georgetown Law professor David Cole would replace Schapiro as commencement speaker. Cole, the former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, last year spoke before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in defense of First Amendment speech that “many of us find wrongheaded or deeply offensive, including anti-Israel advocacy and even antisemitic advocacy.” He also condemned Republican-led congressional hearings into the rise of campus antisemitism.  

“It is beyond antisemitic of the university to do this. It’s extremely heartbreaking and devastating to the Jewish students that [Georgetown Law] respectfully asked [Schapiro] to step down because of his belief in a Jewish homeland,” Julia Wax Vanderwiel, a third-year law school student and founder of Georgetown Law Zionists, told Jewish Insider.

Georgetown University — and its law school — have been under scrutiny for alleged inaction against extremism and the more than $1 billion the school has received from Qatar. Liz Magill, who resigned as University of Pennsylvania president after facing criticism of inaction against campus antisemitism, was tapped in February as the dean of Georgetown’s law school. She will assume the role on Aug. 1. 

Last year, the law school faced criticism for scheduling a discussion featuring a convicted member of the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The event, which was organized by Georgetown Law Students for Justice in Palestine, was postponed indefinitely following pushback from both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY). Weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Georgetown Law hosted Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd, who celebrated Hamas as a “liberation movement” and called the massacre a “resistance tactic.” 

“I have been fighting the university administration on antisemitism since I stepped foot on this law school,” Wax Vanderwiel told JI. “It feels like I’m arguing with a brick wall sometimes. [The administration] doesn’t have any interest in changing their behaviors as they claim to have for the past three years I’ve been here.”