Recent Georgetown Law Center grad William Spruance has written a chilling account of how he was treated by the administration at Georgetown Law Center when he challenged the school’s pandemic edicts. he begins “What Happened at Georgetown Law with Covid?” like this:

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. 

The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.

All the harrowing and, for a Georgetown Law Center grad (and former assistant dean and director of development) like me, profoundly embarrassing and depressing details follow. Read it.

Observations:

• I don’t know Spruance, but I plan on contacting him. I can’t vouch for his account, but it is consistent with what I have seen and observed from the regime of GULC Dean William Trainor over several years. Spruance is also a lawyer, and misrepresentation in public, which is what his article would be if not true, would be professional breach of ethics. I have no reason to doubt him.
• What disturbs me most is that Spruance received no support from other students in a dispute that would seem to be made for lawyerly dissent. Has my alma mater so thoroughly stocked a student body with ideological clones and compliant young totalitarians?
• The article comes to use via the Brownstone Institute, of which I had no knowledge before learning of Spruance’s ordeal. Here is how it describes itself on its website;

The Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization founded May 2021. Its vision is of a society that places the highest value on the voluntary interaction of individuals and groups while minimizing the use of violence and force including that which is exercised by public or private authorities. This vision is that of the Enlightenment which elevated learning, science, progress, and universal rights to the forefront of public life. It is constantly threatened by ideologies and systems that would take the world back to before the triumph of the ideal of freedom.

The motive force of Brownstone Institute was the global crisis created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. That trauma revealed a fundamental misunderstanding alive in all countries around the world today, a willingness on the part of the public and officials to relinquish freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of managing a public health crisis, which was not managed well in most countries. The consequences were devastating and will live in infamy.

The policy response was a failed experiment in full social and economic control in most nations. And yet the lockdowns are also widely considered a template of what is possible.

It’s not just about this one crisis but past and future ones as well. This lesson concerns the desperate need for a new outlook that rejects the power of the legally privileged few to rule over the many under any pretext.