Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) announced Wednesday morning that Morton Schapiro has withdrawn as their 2026 commencement speaker after students launched a petition condemning his selection. The news was announced in an email to the GULC student body sent by Interim Dean Joshua Teitelbaum.
“In the past week, a number of law students raised concerns about Dr. Schapiro as commencement speaker, due primarily to opinion essays he published on Israel and Palestine in the aftermath of October 7, 2023,” Teitelbaum wrote. “After independently learning of the students’ concerns, Dr. Schapiro informed me that he regretfully has decided to decline our invitation to speak at commencement.”
Teitelbaum emphasized that this was Schapiro’s decision, not the university’s.
“I have listened carefully to the students’ concerns. In my view, withdrawing our invitation to Dr. Schapiro would be inconsistent with Georgetown’s commitment to free and open inquiry as articulated in our Policy on Speech and Expression, and the University has not done so,” he wrote.
Schapiro, who served as the 16th president of Northwestern University and in administrative roles at Williams College and the University of Southern California, was announced as GULC’s commencement speaker on April 27. Soon after the announcement, students published a petition that received over 250 signatures asking for Schapiro to be removed.
In the petition and interviews with the Voice, students expressed concerns about Schapiro’s views relating to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, as well as student protesters and university administrators. Students also took issue with the fact that Schapiro is not a lawyer and has not worked in fields directly related to law, questioning whether his relationship to Teitelbaum, who called him “the best teacher I had in college,” was the sole reason for his selection.
Teitelbaum shared a letter from Schapiro in the email where Schapiro explained his reasoning behind the decision to withdraw.
“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.”
Teitelbaum announced in the email that Schapiro will be replaced by David Cole, former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a current professor of law and public policy at GULC. Cole has litigated several cases before the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson in 1989, which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning, and Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, which maintained that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is an illegal form of sex discrimination.
“In the legal world, few individuals have bridged theory and practice as seamlessly as Professor Cole,” Teitelbaum wrote.
Much of the controversy surrounding Schapiro surrounded his online presence. Since April 2023, Schapiro has written a column discussing faith, politics, and Jewish identity for The Jewish Journal, a weekly Jewish newspaper. Students who spoke to the Voice took issue with some of the articles Schapiro has written, specifically focusing on Israel and its relationship to Judaism and U.S. universities.
In October 2025, Schapiro authored an article titled “What I Have Learned Over the Past Two Years About Israel and the World,” which students said targeted activists and LGBTQ+ individuals. In the piece, he criticizes college administrators for not punishing student activists who participated in what he said was unlawful behavior, and for not limiting professors’ “political agenda” in the classroom.
“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,” Schapiro wrote. “The pronoun police fiddled while the university burned.”
In another article, Schapiro also referred to Jewish people who “condemn Israel” as “useful idiots,” a term widely attributed to Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to describe individuals who support individuals who seek to harm them.
“How shameful to witness how these ‘idiots’ provide solace to the antisemites vowing to destroy not just the Jewish nation, but the Jewish people,” Schapiro wrote.
Speaking to David Sussa, Editor-in-Chief of Jewish Journal, on Wednesday morning, Schapiro expressed being taken aback at the choice of Cole as his replacement.
“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,” Schapiro said.
Sussa pointed to Cole as previously “defending the right to express antisemitic views.”
In a testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce called “Beyond the Ivy League: Stopping the Spread of Antisemitism on College Campuses,” Cole testified that antisemitic speech, along with other forms of hate speech, is protected by the First Amendment, and thus universities should not be targeted for tolerating that speech.
“The vast majority of antisemitic speech is constitutionally protected, even if hateful. We can and should condemn it, but it remains protected,” Cole wrote. “The First Amendment protects antisemitic speech, just as it protects racist, sexist, homophobic, and Islamophobic speech. The only forms of speech not protected by the First Amendment are true threats, incitement, defamation, obscenity, speech integral to illegal conduct, and fighting words.”
Cole wrote that for that reason, universities should not be expected to punish students for harmful speech that is still constitutionally protected.
“Accordingly, it will not do to proclaim that because a student or faculty member on campus engaged in speech that is perceived to be antisemitic, colleges are somehow violating federal law by tolerating that speech. On the contrary, tolerating such speech will often simply be respecting principles of free speech,” Cole explained.
The petition regarding Schapiro was not the first to be launched regarding GULC’s 2026 commencement. In January, students began a petition that has garnered 1,100 signatures after GULC announced that they would no longer hold small cohort ceremonies, instead only offering a large group graduation on the Hilltop, and would be cancelling the Graduation Gala, a formal event typically held at the National Portrait Gallery, replacing it with a smaller “Friends and Family Cocktail Hour.”
