Georgetown Law School recently announced that M. Elizabeth Magill will be its new dean. For those who follow the inextinguishable dumpster fire that is American higher education, Magill is none other than the disgraced former University of Pennsylvania president, who resigned in humiliation days after telling a televised congressional hearing in December 2023 that “context” should determine whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted campus bullying or harassment.

On Aug. 1, “Context” Magill will replace longtime Georgetown Law School Dean William Treanor, whose greatest claim to fame is his Kafkaesque, four month-long, DEI-driven persecution of constitutional law scholar Ilya Shapiro over Twitter posts Shapiro made prior to his employment at Georgetown.

“We are honored to welcome Liz Magill as the new dean of Georgetown Law,” declared Georgetown University’s interim president Robert M. Groves, who was apparently so “honored” that he made the announcement on the Friday afternoon before a major holiday weekend.

Magill was already embattled on her troubled campus when her embarrassing Capitol Hill crash out cost her Penn’s presidential gig. Earlier on her watch, Penn hosted a Palestinian literary festival that featured graphically anti-Semitic statements and images. After Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Magill failed to condemn terrorism and blamed Israel for “escalating violence and unrest.” Alongside those unpromising episodes in failed leadership, Magill made no effort to end the years-long disciplinary investigation of Penn law professor Amy Wax, a white Jewish woman who, after Magill’s disastrous departure, was severely disciplined for alleged comments about group variations in academic ability.

Penn’s donors and trustees noticed this shocking disparity and withheld hundreds of millions of dollars pending Magill’s resignation and a firmer institutional commitment to academic freedom and free speech than she could provide. Wax has since sued Penn in ongoing litigation for civil rights violations and other torts. Within a short time after Magill’s downfall, most of her fellow Ivy League presidents either resigned or left their jobs early amid similar scandals and losses. Over the past year, more than a few institutions, including Penn, have been fined by the Department of Education and other federal agencies after lengthy civil rights investigations reached adverse findings.

None of this appears to be of any concern to America’s “Catholic Ivy,” however. “Context” Magill, who stayed on at Penn as a law professor with a blockbuster post-presidential salary of over $2.3 million, according to the school’s 2024 tax records, will not quite “fail up” by taking her lower-ranking Georgetown post, but will get another shot at senior university administration despite her track record, losing massive donor support, and exhibiting leadership so poor that she was swept from office like a puny un-American splash of oat milk in raging rapids of national indignation.

It is hard to imagine any aspiring lawyer jumping to attend any law school—let alone the nation’s 14^th-best, according to U.S. News & World Report—when it is run by a person with such a checkered past. “In this time of great institutional churn in higher education, Georgetown has chosen decline,” Shapiro mournfully tells me from his new and freer post at the Manhattan Institute.

But our administrative-managerial class does not live in a world troubled by such concerns. Their cheap brown bag lunches, soporific conferences, rancid food co-ops, and other shallow echo chambers resound with reassuring uptalk chirping that they alone are morally right, that those who disagree with their parroted orthodoxies are too ignorant to hold any valid opinion, and that their ends justify flawed means executed by basket-case people who can be forgiven almost any screwup provided they do not bear the original sin of being white males (has anyone heard from disgraced former Harvard president Lawrence Summers lately?) Indeed, detailed research by the Washington Free Beacon reveals that at least1 11 of the 14 members of Georgetown Law’s search committee are Democratic Party donors, while its student representative member has worked as a Democrat aid. So much for viewpoint diversity.

In a tedious whitewash article in Politico, whose senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein—doubtlessly in an extraordinary coincidence—is married to Georgetown Law’s executive director of communications June Shih, Groves claimed Magill’s downfall “caused her to reflect deeply on the event and learn a great deal” that could “make her an even more effective leader for these times.” Maybe Groves thinks she will do better at the next congressional hearing that grills her on her massively deficient approach to civil rights, but surely one of the country’s putatively “best” law schools might have discovered a well-qualified candidate who had neither to “reflect” nor “learn” from a public disgrace of that magnitude.

As Georgetown raised its sullied finalist out of the gutter, however, it may have recalled accepting over $1 billion from Qatar, where it controversially maintains a campus not far from the Hamas leadership’s Oct. 7 bolt-hold. Notably, Jonathan A. C. Brown, Georgetown School of Foreign Service’s Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization, has been accused of downplaying slavery in Islamic societies even as the university continues to indulge in a seemingly unending struggle against American slavery, which was abolished more than 150 years ago. Just last month, Georgetown’s Institute of Politics and Public Service welcomed as a visiting fellow the journalist Mehdi Hasan, whose anti-Israel diatribes proved too much even for MSNBC, which unceremoniously canceled his show, leaving him to “pursue other opportunities” such as those provided by witless fools at universities propped up by Islamist cash and people dumb or delusional enough to spend $80,000 per year to send their kids there.

For her part, Magill has pledged to take over Georgetown Law mindful of the “need to lead from what you stand for—values and principles.” Sadly for Georgetown, its law students, America, and the world, we already know what Magill’s debased values and empty principles are. But she can rest assured that we will be watching even her devolving career with great interest.