[Ilya Shapiro] Why I Quit Georgetown: The university didn’t fire me, but it yielded to the progressive mob, abandoned free speech, and created a hostile environment.

IDEAA speciously found that my tweet criticizing President Biden for limiting his Supreme Court pool by race and sex required “appropriate corrective measures” to address my “objectively offensive comments and to prevent the recurrence of offensive conduct based on race, gender, and sex.” Mr. Treanor reiterated these concerns in a June 2 statement, further noting the “harmful” nature of my tweets.

But IDEAA makes clear there is nothing objective about its standard: “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” the report says. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.” That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.

IDEAA asserts that if I “were to make another, similar or more serious remark as a Georgetown employee, a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex likely would be created.” All sorts of comments that someone could find offensive would subject me to disciplinary action. Consider the following hypotheticals:

• I laud Supreme Court decisions that overrule Roe v. Wade and protect the right to carry arms. An activist claims that my comments “deny women’s humanity” and make her feel “unsafe” and “directly threatened with physical violence.”
• After I meet with students concerned about my ability to treat everyone fairly, as Mr. Treanor asked me to do, one attendee files a complaint calling me “disingenuous” and the “embodiment of white supremacy.”
• When the Supreme Court hears the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative-action cases this fall, I opine that the Constitution bans racial preferences. Hundreds of Georgetown stakeholders sign a letter asserting that my comments “are antithetical to the work that we do here every day to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity” (borrowing the language from Mr. Treanor’s statements of Jan. 31 and June 2).
• In a class I’m teaching, a student feels uncomfortable with his assigned position in a mock oral argument in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case that considers whether a designer can be compelled to create a website for a same-sex wedding. “To argue that someone can deny service to members of the LGBTQIA+ community is to treat our brothers and sisters as second-class citizens, and I will not participate in Shapiro’s denigrating charade,” he writes on the student listserv.

I could go on, but you get the idea. It is the Georgetown administrators who have created a hostile work environment for me.

Fundamentally, what Mr. Treanor has done—what he’s allowed IDEAA to do—is repeal the Speech and Expression Policy that he claims to hold dear. The freedom to speak is no freedom at all if it makes an exception for speech someone finds offensive or counter to some nebulous conception of equity.