Former Northwestern President Drops Out of Georgetown Law Commencement After Student Backlash

Former Northwestern University President Dr. Morton Schapiro withdrew from a planned commencement speech at Georgetown Law School after students protested his pro-Israel views.

Interim Dean Joshua C. Teitelbaum announced last month that Schapiro would speak at the May 17 ceremony. He cited Schapiro's "uniquely informed perspective on American society and the challenges facing colleges and universities today."

Students quickly opposed the choice. They criticized Schapiro's lack of ties to the law school and called his opinions "harmful."

"The selection of Morton Schapiro as our commencement speaker is an absolute shame," student Matt Latibashvili wrote Friday to Georgetown Law's student paper The Voice. "His views on the genocide of Palestinians are despicable and disqualifying; instead of holding Israel accountable for the horrors it has perpetrated, he blames the media and universities for allowing people to speak the truth."

Schapiro pulled out on Wednesday after a petition circulated to remove him.

"I have presided over 28 commencements as a president and dean, and those ceremonies are about celebrating the graduates and their supporters," Schapiro 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."

Schapiro had written for the Jewish Journal about universities' failure to address antisemitic protests during the Israel-Gaza war. "College administrators ignored myriad excesses by students and faculty alike, turning a blind eye when the humanities embraced a political agenda, or when student affairs personnel became more interested in excusing behavior that violated school rules than in preparing students for the world," he wrote in October. "The pronoun police fiddled while the university burned."

Georgetown Law School replaced Schapiro with Georgetown law professor and former ACLU National Legal Director David Cole.

Last year, Cole released a statement criticizing a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. He argued that defending "Hamas's right to fight back" does not qualify as antisemitic.

"Most criticism of Israel is not antisemitic; indeed, many Jews are deeply critical of how Israel has responded to the terrorist attacks of October 7, and of how Israel has managed its long-term conflict with the Palestinian people," Cole wrote. "Nor is defense of Hamas’s right to fight back antisemitic, even if it seeks to justify terrorist actions—just as defense of Israel’s bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza is not Islamophobic."

Schapiro expressed surprise at the new speaker choice.