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Law Center announced that former Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro, its 2026 commencement speaker, had withdrawn from the ceremony.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.
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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.
The drift was undeniable after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, murdering roughly 1,200 civilians and taking 251 hostages — the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Within hours, weaknesses that had long festered on American campuses were on open display. A Cornell University history professor publicly called the massacre “exhilarating.” Activists overran buildings. Harassment of Jewish students reached alarming levels, and too many administrators proved unable or unwilling to distinguish protected speech from targeted intimidation.
For decades, elite universities thrived on a broad societal consensus that they embodied academic rigor and truth-seeking. Parents and students paid staggering tuition costs, and alums gave generously because they believed they trusted their alma mater. The congressional hearings and the campus chaos that followed revealed that something had gone badly wrong with that bargain.
Georgetown University shows the same pattern. Fewer than 300 signatures drove a former university president off the stage at a law school commencement. Worse, the replacement speaker was a Georgetown professor who has publicly criticized congressional scrutiny of campus antisemitism. The message is clear: defending Israel is disqualifying, but treating antisemitic speech as a free-speech footnote is not.
This is the impulse that should worry every parent writing a tuition check. Rather than engage with ideas they oppose, organized campus factions increasingly decide who deserves a platform at all. That is a direct repudiation of one of higher education’s central purposes: exposing students to new perspectives.
Not every institution has yielded. Dartmouth College, under President Sian Beilock, and Cornell, under President Michael Kotlikoff, show that institutional clarity is still possible. Both presidents have set clear rules, enforced them, and refused to outsource their judgment to whichever campus group shouts loudest. Their public regard grows, while peer institutions remain stuck in crisis.
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Universities rely on public trust and on the continued investment of students, families, alums, donors, and taxpayers. Once that trust erodes, even the nation’s most prestigious institutions cannot assume their standing will hold. Congressional inquiries did not invent this crisis. They reflected what parents, students, and alums had already sensed.
At Alums for Campus Fairness, we are working with alums across the country to push their alma maters to uphold the values that earned them their status, such as open debate, equal protection for every student, and leadership. University leaders face a simple choice: run their schools or be run by the loudest faction du jour. Georgetown just gave us the latest answer. The public is keeping score.
Avi D. Gordon is the executive director of Alums for Campus Fairness.