Morton Schapiro — economist, former Northwestern president, and pro-Israel Jewish voice in higher education — withdrew as Georgetown Law's May 17 commencement speaker after a student petition with 282 signatures called his views "controversial, Zionist, and harmful," the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.
Said Schapiro to the Jewish Journal: "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."
The replacement: David Cole, a Georgetown professor and former ACLU national legal director who compared congressional hearings on campus antisemitism to "McCarthyism" and cautioned universities against restricting pro-Palestinian student speech after October 7. That's not keeping politics out. That's picking a side under cover of neutrality.
Not Georgetown Law. An institution that folds to a 282-signature petition — at a law school, where students are trained to distinguish legal argument from mob veto — has just announced its price. The cost of your commencement speaker invitation is a Google Forms campaign.
The students who circulated the petition get the win on paper. But the strategic blunder is theirs too: the replacement speaker, David Cole, is not a neutral figure. He is the former ACLU national legal director who, within days of the October 7 Hamas attack, issued a statement condemning the ADL and the Brandeis Center for calling on universities to investigate pro-Palestinian student groups. Cole has described congressional hearings on campus antisemitism as “McCarthyism.”
So the sequence is: remove a pro-Israel Jewish speaker for having political opinions, replace him with a speaker whose political opinions align with the protesters. Then tell the community you’re keeping politics out of commencement.
Interim Dean Joshua Teitelbaum — who was, notably, Schapiro’s student at Williams College — announced the withdrawal by email, framing it as Schapiro’s own decision. Schapiro’s note said he didn’t want his presence “to distract from the day’s festivities.” That’s the polite version of a forced exit.
Georgetown Law did not respond publicly to the petition for roughly a week. When it did, it produced a speaker swap that validates every charge in the petition while claiming procedural innocence. That’s not institutional leadership. That’s conflict-avoidance dressed as neutrality.
This is the third commencement controversy in the same news cycle. Rutgers rescinded its invitation to the producer of an Oscar-nominated documentary about Gaza. The University of Michigan’s president apologized after a faculty senate chair praised pro-Palestinian protesters in his address. Every institution is doing a version of the same thing: reacting to organized pressure and then defending the reaction as principled.
The asymmetry matters and should be named plainly. A speaker’s “Zionist opinions” — meaning, support for Israel’s right to exist — became disqualifying at a law school graduation. That is antisemitism operating through institutional process. Calling it a “political” removal doesn’t change what it is.
The symmetric-criticism principle requires honesty here: universities have also disinvited, pressured, and sidelined pro-Palestinian voices, and those incidents deserve the same scrutiny. Rutgers pulling the Gaza documentary producer this same week is a real data point. Institutional cowardice runs in multiple directions.
But the Georgetown Law case has a specific feature the others don’t: the petition explicitly named “Zionist opinions” as the disqualifying trait. That’s not a content-neutral objection. It’s a litmus test. And a law school that accepted it as a valid basis for disinvitation has told its students something important about what kinds of identity-based objections it will honor.
Schapiro is not a martyr — he’s an economist who wrote a column. But the institutional signal Georgetown Law just sent is durable. Every future speaker invitation will now be evaluated against the knowledge that 282 signatures is the threshold for a forced exit. Watch who gets invited next year, and who doesn’t.