Georgetown graduate says he was subjected to a psych evaluation for questioning school’s COVID policies

An attorney who recently graduated from Georgetown University claims the school forced him to undergo a “psychiatric evaluation” and threatened to report him to state bar associations after he questioned the school’s COVID policies.

William Spruance, who graduated cum laude, was told by school administration that he posed a “risk to the public health,” but he says his crime was “heretical” politics, “not medical” science.

“In August 2021, Georgetown Law returned to in-person learning after 17 months of virtual learning,” Spruance wrote at the Brownstone Institute. “The school announced a series of new policies for the school year: there was a vaccine requirement (later to be supplemented with booster mandates), students were required to wear masks on campus, and drinking water was banned in the classroom. 

“Dean Bill Treanor announced a new anonymous hotline called ‘Law Compliance’ for community members to report dissidents who dared to quench their thirst or free their vaccinated nostrils.”

Meanwhile, members of faculty weren’t subject to any of those policies.

“Though the school never explained what factors caused their heightened powers of immunity,” Spruance added dryly. 

After the hotline was established, Spruance got in hot water for allowing his mask to slip beneath his nose during class. At the time, Georgetown had processed over a thousand COVID tests, with just two coming back positive. 

The school administrator, who met with him about the violation, encouraged him to challenge the policies at the Student Bar Association. Spruance also said that individual professors were willing to talk to him privately, but none wanted to speak out publicly on his behalf.

After giving a short speech without a mask at the association meeting, Spruance was informed by the school that he was suspended indefinitely from campus, that he “had to submit to a psychiatric evaluation” and waive his right to medical privacy.

Spruance also alleged Georgetown said it might discuss his behavior with state bar associations if he chose to practice law.

“During the psychiatric evaluation – It would start with kind of innocuous questions like, ‘Do you ever get angry?’ followed by, ‘Do you get angry about masks?’ And then, ‘Do masks make you want to hurt anybody?’ Spruance told Tucker Carlson at Fox News. “So it was an ongoing cycle of questions that were designed to make me seem unhinged for being willing to question their COVID policies.”

But he thinks his experience is part of a larger pattern at Georgetown.

“We had people like Sandra Sellers and Ilya Shapiro, who were thrown out of the institution just for being willing to question campus orthodoxies,” Spruance told Carlson. “And it was part of an ongoing double standard where if you’re progressive and you regurgitate the proper slogans, then there’s an indemnity built into shouting down speakers.”

The larger problem for Spruance is that many of the people who attend Georgetown go on to top jobs in industry and government.

“These people won’t stay on campus and just make the people there miserable. They’ll be running institutions like Georgetown Law,” he said.  “They will be at various government agencies. They’ll be judges. And that, to me, is the more alarming aspect.”