Shapiro: Learning From My Lived Experience With Academic Intolerance

Ilya Shapiro (Manhattan Institute), Learning from My Lived Experience with Academic Intolerance, 27 Tex. Rev. L. & Pol. 743 (2023):

“Shut up.” That’s the response, cleaned up for publication, that I got from students at the University of California Hastings College of Law—since renamed University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, or “UC Law SF”—when I tried to speak there on March 1, 2022. They prevented the event from taking place, chanting and banging as if it were Occupy Wall Street.

It’s the first time I’d ever been protested in more than 1,000 speaking events—and it’s a damning indictment of the state of academia at a time when a toxic cloud has enveloped all of our public discourse.

Although the Federalist Society chapter had booked a room and invited me to discuss a subject on which I’d written a book—the politics of judicial nominations, which became all the more timely when Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement—a heckler’s veto prevailed. Applying a bad-faith lens to a poorly phrased tweet in which I criticized President Biden’s nomination criteria, activists adjudged me a racist misogynist and my expertise illegitimate.

Specifically, back in January 2022, I criticized the president’s decision to limit his candidate pool by race and sex. I argued that the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Sri Srinivasan, was the best choice, meaning that everyone else was less qualified. But given the “latest hierarchy of intersectionality,” if Biden kept his promise, he would pick what, given Twitter’s character limit, I inartfully characterized as a “lesser black woman.” I deleted the tweet and apologized for my poor choice of words, but I maintain that Biden should’ve considered “all possible nominees,” as 76% of Americans agreed in a poll conducted by that semi-fascist, ultra-MAGA media outlet, ABC.

I was suspended from my new position at Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution pending an investigation into whether my comments violated university policies regarding antidiscrimination and harassment. Now I wasn’t allowed to express my ideas on another campus.

The vocal minority of students who shut down my event wanted to hear neither my reasoning about President Biden’s selection criteria nor my broader analysis of the confirmation battle now that there was an actual nominee. And they did so in the vilest language imaginable, which I won’t repeat here, several times getting literally in my face or blocking my access to the lectern.