College campuses are ground zero for cancel culture.
Americans are fed up with the speech police.
And now the woke mob just made the worst mistake ever, and the bill is coming due.
The Mob Got What It Wanted
Georgetown Law announced on April 27 that Morton Schapiro — economist and former president of Northwestern University — would deliver the commencement address at its May 17 ceremony. Interim Dean Joshua Teitelbaum praised Schapiro as someone with “a uniquely informed perspective on American society and the challenges facing colleges and universities today.”
Students launched a petition almost immediately.
The petition, which gathered 282 signatures, declared that “Schapiro is not a lawyer, has no connection to Georgetown, and holds controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions.” The students pointed to a column Schapiro published in the Jewish Journal in October 2025, in which he criticized progressives, university administrators, and major media outlets for their treatment of Israel during the war in Gaza.
Georgetown caved. Teitelbaum sent an email to the law school community announcing that Schapiro had “regretfully” withdrawn. The school replaced him with David Cole, a Georgetown professor and former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union — a man who, after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, condemned the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for calling on universities to investigate pro-Palestinian student groups.
Schapiro kept his dignity throughout. “I have presided over 28 commencements as a president and dean, and those ceremonies are about celebrating the graduates and their supporters,” he wrote. “I was looking forward to giving a talk about humility and gratitude, but I don’t want my presence to distract from the day’s festivities. I wish the law school graduates the best of luck in the days ahead.”
He also had a pointed observation for 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.”
Turley Defends a Man He’s Long Criticized
Here’s where it gets interesting. Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a Fox News contributor, spent years hammering Morton Schapiro for being one of the biggest enemies of free speech in American higher education. And now Turley is defending him.
“The problem with believing in free speech is that you have to believe in free speech even for those whose speech you abhor,” Turley wrote in his Fox News column.
Turley isn’t wrong, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s the first to admit the irony is uncomfortable.
While Schapiro ran Northwestern, he rejected what he called “absolute” free speech positions and endorsed speech sanctions — including the idea that offensive speech could be treated as a form of assault. Under his watch, a wide array of speech was deemed “microaggressive” or intolerable in the name of harmony and inclusion. Conservative faculty were effectively purged from departments. Student mobs shut down classes, and Schapiro’s administration largely stood aside and let it happen.
One episode in particular tells you everything you need to know. A Northwestern sociology professor named Beth Redbird invited both an undocumented person and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement representative to speak to her class — a balanced setup designed to expose students to competing perspectives on immigration. Student groups organized a protest outside the hall, screaming profanities. University administrators, rather than turning them away, promised the protesters they could enter the classroom if they agreed not to disrupt the class. They agreed. They lied. The ICE official was forced out, and Redbird canceled the class.
Northwestern took no action against the students.
One of those students, sophomore April Navarro, rejected the idea that faculty should be allowed to invite ICE representatives for a “good, nice conversation.” She added, “We’re not engaging in those kinds of things; it legitimizes ICE’s violence, it makes Northwestern complicit in this.”
Turley saw that episode for what it was — a preview of things to come. The culture Schapiro allowed to take root at Northwestern produced exactly the kind of people now running petition drives at Georgetown Law.
The Mob Eats Its Own
Turley noted that Schapiro’s gracious withdrawal was “the product of the very same cringing-concession policies I previously criticized Schapiro for enabling at Northwestern.” There’s a grim satisfaction in watching a man who helped build the machine get fed into it. But Turley isn’t celebrating.
Past commencement speakers at Georgetown Law included Henry Louis Gates Jr. — also not a lawyer, also with no connection to the school. No petition. No outrage. The difference, of course, is that Gates holds the right politics. Schapiro supports Israel.
Being Jewish and pro-Israel has become a disqualifying identity at some of the most prestigious law schools in the country. A student named Julia Wax Vanderwiel, founder of Georgetown Law Zionists, told Jewish Insider it was “extremely heartbreaking and devastating to the Jewish students” that the school asked Schapiro to step down “because of his belief in a Jewish homeland.”
And the school that just booted him for being too political replaced him with a man who opposed congressional hearings into campus antisemitism, calling those hearings a form of “McCarthyism.”
Georgetown Law has also come under scrutiny for receiving more than $1 billion from Qatar and for scheduling a discussion featuring a convicted member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The incoming dean of the law school, Liz Magill, resigned from the University of Pennsylvania presidency in December 2023 after her congressional testimony on campus antisemitism — during which she said calling for the genocide of Jews could be “context-dependent” — set off a national firestorm.
But Schapiro’s column criticizing the media’s treatment of Israel? That was a bridge too far.
What This Tells You About American Universities
Turley draws a straight line from what happened at Northwestern under Schapiro to what just happened to Schapiro at Georgetown. “In Rage and the Republic, I write about how academic and political figures are ignoring history as they pander to radical groups,” Turley wrote. “What they ignore is how these revolutions ultimately ‘devour their own.'”
That’s not a partisan talking point. It’s a pattern with a long historical record. The people who dismantle the norms protecting speech don’t get to decide when the dismantling stops.
Schapiro spent his career telling students that some speech was too harmful to tolerate. His detractors can now quote him back to himself. As Turley noted, “his detractors can quote Schapiro himself in dismissing objections as reducing free speech to mere ‘slogans or free speech at all costs.’ It appears that he is now one of the prohibitive costs to be avoided in our academic echo chamber.”
Every year, commencement lineups at elite law schools lean predictably left. Conservative speakers rarely get invited in the first place. When a moderate — or even someone who simply won’t condemn Israel — gets on the list by accident, the petition drives start. And administrations fold.
Turley has spent decades making the case that free speech only means something if it protects speech you find offensive. The First Amendment doesn’t need to protect popular ideas. Popular ideas don’t need protection. The whole point is to protect the ones that make people uncomfortable — even the ones coming from people who spent years trying to suppress other people’s uncomfortable ideas.
Georgetown Law students got their speaker removed. They’ll graduate in a few weeks and head into careers as attorneys. And somewhere along the way, nobody taught them that the rule of law depends on principles that don’t bend when the target is someone you don’t like.
That’s a problem that goes well beyond one commencement ceremony.
Sources: Fox News, Jonathan Turley column, “Defending free speech means defending even this guy,” May 2026; Times of Israel, “Georgetown Law graduation speaker backs out after students protest his ‘Zionist opinions,'” May 8, 2026; Jewish Insider, “Georgetown Law replaces Jewish commencement speaker with critic of antisemitism hearings,” May 2026; Jewish Journal, “Georgetown Commencement Speaker Mort Schapiro Withdraws,” May 2026; The Hoya, “GU Law Center Commencement Speaker Withdraws Following Student Petition,” May 6, 2026; jonathanturley.org, “The Mob Comes for Morton Schapiro,” May 8, 2026.