Georgetown Law graduation speaker backs out after students protest his ‘Zionist opinions’ |
JTA — A pro-Israel Jewish economist and former university president will no longer speak at Georgetown University Law School’s graduation next week, after stepping down from the speaking engagement following student criticism.
Instead, graduating students and their families will hear from a Georgetown professor who has disparaged legal efforts to curb pro-Palestinian student protests and compared congressional hearings on college campus antisemitism to “McCarthyism.”
The school announced last week that Morton Schapiro, who led Northwestern University for a decade until 2022, would be the commencement speaker on May 17. Students soon launched a petition calling for his removal.
“Schapiro is not a lawyer, has no connection to Georgetown, and holds controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions,” said the petition, which drew 282 signatures.
The petition called attention to a column that Schapiro published last year in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, where he now lives. In the column, titled “What I Have Learned Over the Past Two Years About Israel and the World and published on October 15, Schapiro criticized progressives, higher education leaders and the mainstream media for vilifying Israel during the war in Gaza.
The petition also linked to a news story about Schapiro’s 2020 comments disparaging student protesters at Northwestern. At the time, he was clashing with students who called him “Piggy Morty,” an epithet that they said was meant to criticize his ties to police but that he said smacked of antisemitism.
Georgetown Law did........