There is a saying in the Catholic Church that “error has no rights.” Yet William Treanor, the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, is claiming constitutional protection for the school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies under the guise of religious freedom. This is as flawed as it is hypocritical.
In a letter dated March 6 responding to interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin’s investigation into the school’s DEI ideology, Treanor said, “Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution.”
In fact, the Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that Bob Jones University’s religious views did not protect its racist policies. Regardless, no Catholic doctrine requires Georgetown to foster racial division. Catholics believe that “redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, all are called to participate in the same divine beatitude: All therefore enjoy an equal dignity.”
Many Catholics have seen how universities’ affirmative action policies and promotion of critical race theory have divided society, and they agree that race-blind admissions and merit-based policies in education better respect the God-given dignity of every person. DEI, on the other hand, often presupposes that educational and employment opportunities and even freedom of speech should not be equal but scaled by race.
Catholic schools and colleges today have a great opportunity to lead the way in witnessing to the Church’s call for “every type of discrimination … to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent.” This is what the Cardinal Newman Society encourages from its recommended colleges, which stand apart from places such as Georgetown by refusing to yield their Catholic identity to ideology and political pressures.
As for Georgetown, its religious freedom claim is hypocritical given the university’s repeated disregard for Catholic teaching. The Church’s document on Catholic universities states that “a Catholic University, as Catholic, informs and carries out its research, teaching, and all other activities with Catholic ideals, principles and attitudes.”
Georgetown University, however, has repeatedly violated its Catholic mission with campus events and university policies challenging Catholic morality on abortion, gender ideology, gender transition, sexuality, and more. The law school’s courses include “Reproductive Health and International Human Rights Law,” a practicum in which students work in organizations “to advocate for the advancement of reproductive health rights,” including pro-abortion lobbies such as the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Women’s Equality Center.
Even Georgetown’s campus ministry is not Catholic — it includes just two Catholic priests on a 30-person “interreligious” staff, with ministers promoting Episcopal, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox, and Protestant spirituality.
As for DEI, the Trump administration is right to investigate Georgetown and 50 other institutions, including another compromised Catholic school, the University of Notre Dame, for civil rights violations. Among concerns at Georgetown is the mandatory undergraduate course “Race, Power and Justice at Georgetown,” which focuses on racial issues and the school’s legacy of owning slaves. In 2022, the university led a coalition urging the Supreme Court to uphold race-based admissions, but the court struck them down.
Georgetown Law is a particular concern. Three years ago, Treanor placed conservative scholar Ilya Shapiro on administrative leave before he could start his new role as the executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. His crime? Criticizing President Joe Biden’s racist plan to consider only black women for a Supreme Court vacancy. Treanor provided students a “safe space” to cry and publicly accused Shapiro of making statements “antithetical to the work that we do at Georgetown Law to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity.”
The prior year, Treanor fired a professor for lamenting the low performance of many black students in her class. Treanor declared, “There is no place for bias in our grading process or anywhere in our community” — as if the professor had admitted to racial bias in grading students, which she did not.
Georgetown Law describes its Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives as “one of the few law journals in the country dedicated to legal scholarship on race and identity” and “grounded in critical race theory.” The school also celebrates the 2008 article by Georgetown professor Charles Lawrence, “The Id, The Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning With Unconscious Racism,” which it touts as “a foundational document of Critical Race Theory.”
Several of Georgetown Law’s courses embrace critical race theory and other divisive identity issues. This includes the first-year “Foundations of American Legal Thought,” which includes “critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, conservative legal theory, and LGBTQ+ legal theory.” Another course, “Race, Inequality, and Justice,” includes texts on critical race theory, as does the first-year course “Critical Race Theory” and the more advanced “The Critical Race Theory Tradition: Canonical Texts and New Directions.”
In its 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court rightly declared that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” The ruling revealed the crack in the DEI logic, finding that discrimination in any form is unlawful and that all students should have an equal playing field when competing for acceptance at a college or university.
We now have a government that is providing opportunities to rid institutions of old DEI habits that have been festering for years. Those institutions that continue to advance woke ideology and race-based policies deserve to be held in violation of civil rights laws and pressured to adopt a more Christian respect for human dignity.
Bob Laird is senior counselor to the president at The Cardinal Newman Society, which promotes and defends faithful Catholic education.