What Happened at Georgetown Law with Covid?
Another first-hand account of frightening thought mandates and punishment. “For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations.” Ultimately, the student realized, “The masks, the people, the script: it was all a production…the [Dean of Students] wasn’t an educator, he was a low-level set manager concerned with power, not inquiry.”
After receiving a formal “non-compliance” letter for allowing his ask to slip beneath his nose, Georgetown Law student William Spruance was encouraged to “join the conversation” and soon after attended a Student Bar Association meeting. In this meeting, he asked about the goal of the school’s covid policies, the tradeoffs, the metrics that would be used in deciding to remove the mask mandate, and to explain contradictions such as why faculty were exempt from masking requirements.
Two days later, Ballin, the Dean of Students, informed the student that he was indefinitely suspended from campus, and more. “Bailin told me that I had to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, that I had to ‘voluntarily’ waive my right to medical confidentiality, and that the school could discuss the incidents with state bar associations if I ever hoped to practice law,” among other things.
For Ballin, “socially fashionable talking points were far more important than principles like free expression… [and] my character was not welcome in this script. It was disruptive to the plot line: the leaders were experts, and the students were there to obey their innate virtue… There was no challenging the blatant irrationality underpinning Bailin’s institutional discipline. Submission triumphed over logic, hierarchy over rationality, institutional power over individual inquiry.”
The student realized, “I had naively relied on Enlightenment principles in my arguments, but this was a simple power struggle” yet ultimately, “Georgetown had overplayed its hand. I had taken Bailin’s advice: after consulting with people outside my echo chamber, the script didn’t portray him as the hero.”
