On May 6, Georgetown University Law Center announced that former Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro, its 2026 commencement speaker, had withdrawn from the ceremony. His apparent offense: writing opinion essays defending Israel and criticizing higher education’s response to the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.After a student petition labeled his views “controversial, Zionist, and harmful,” Schapiro chose to pull out lest he “distract from the day’s festivities.”That this happened at a law school, an institution whose graduates make their living confronting opposing arguments, not silencing them, should alarm anyone who still believes higher education has a clear mission. It is also the latest sign of why public confidence in America’s most prestigious universities continues to erode.
RESTORING AMERICA: FACULTY POLITICAL BIAS IS EVEN MORE WIDESPREAD THAN WE THOUGHT
For two years now, elite universities have been making headlines for the wrong reasons. In December 2023, nearly a dozen university leaders were hauled before Congress to answer for their failure to maintain order on their own campuses. The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University went viral not for defending their institutions but for legal parsing in response to basic moral questions about the harassment of Jewish students. They were summoned not because lawmakers had just discovered campus activism, but because years of institutional drift had finally collided with public outrage.
