Israel Matzav

Alan Dershowitz speaks about academic freedom, rips the Left

Alan Dershowitz received an honorary degree from Tel Aviv University Saturday night, and was the keynote speaker at its commencement. In his speech, he spoke about academic freedom and ripped the Left for violating it.

Academic freedom requires that professors be free to challenge governmental policies, government officials and the status quo. Israel boasts that the highest level of academic freedom in the world today—if not in theory, then certainly in practice. I emphasize practice, because few nations in the world—even those who in theory proclaim strict adherence to academic freedom—confront on a daily basis kind of academic dissent experienced in Israel. Israeli academics regularly and falsely compare their nation to the tyrannical regime that murdered 6 million Jews. Academic dissenters regularly and freely call on other academic institutions around the world to boycott the very Israeli universities which grant them academic freedom. Professors from this university are currently in Boston demanding the shutting down of an exhibit in the Boston Museum of Science featuring Israeli scientific and technological advances in medicine, clean energy and other contributors to humanity. [Matar, Giora]

Israeli academics are free to challenge not only the legitimacy of the Jewish state but even, as one professor at this university has done, the authenticity of the Jewish people. Israeli academics are free to distort the truth, construct false analogies and teach their students theories akin to the earth being flat—and they do so with relish and with the shield of academic freedom. So long as these professors do not violate the rules of the academy, they have the precious right to be wrong, because we have learned the lesson of history that no one institution has a monopoly on truth and that the never ending search for truth requires, to quote the title of one of Israel’s founders autobiography, “trial and error.” The answer to falsehood is not censorship; it is truth. The answer to bad ideas is not firing the teacher; but articulating better ideas which prevail in the marketplace. The academic freedom of the faculty is central to the mission of the university.

But academic freedom is not the province of the hard left alone. Academic freedom includes the right to agree with the government, to defend the government and to work for the government. Some of the same hard leftists who demand academic freedom for themselves and their ideological colleagues were among the leaders of those seeking to deny academic freedom to a distinguished law professor who had worked for the military advocate general and whose views they disagreed with. To its credit, Tel Aviv University rejected this attempt to limit academic freedom to those who criticized the government. As Professor Shlomo Avineri, no right-winger, put it:

"The attempt to 'protect' those who belong to the left while employing McCarthy-style methods against those associated with the right is nothing but hypocrisy, which has no place in academia."

Rules of academic freedom for professors must be neutral, applicable equally to right and left. Free speech for me but not for thee is the beginning of the road to tyranny.

Nor does academic freedom belong to the professor alone. As Amnon Rubenstein has brilliantly argued, academic freedom belongs to the student as well as the teacher. He has pointed out that Article 5 of the Student’s Rights Law guarantees every student “the freedom to express his [or her] views and opinions as the contents of the syllabus and the values incorporated therein.” The right of the student’s academic freedom, however, goes well beyond this law. It includes the right not to be propagandized in the classroom by teachers who seek to impose their ideology on students. It includes the right of the student to express opinions contrary to those
presented by the teacher without fear of being graded down and without fear of being denied recommendations or job opportunities. Indeed, any professor who punishes a student for not agreeing with his controversial opinion is guilty of academic harassment, which is a variant on what we all would agree is an academic violation, namely sexual harassment. No teacher is permitted to threaten a student with lower grades or poorer recommendations if the student refuses to consent to sexual .contact. Nor should any professor be permitted to threaten lower grades or recommendations if a student refuses to agree with a teacher’s ideology. Students are the consumers of the university and consumers have rights that, if they don’t trump those of the producer, are at least equal to them in the context of controversial ideas.

There were some professors at Tel Aviv who were not very happy with Dershowitz's remarks:

In a letter to the university's president, Joseph Klafter, a group of faculty members demanded that Tel Aviv University disassociate itself from Dershowitz's comments and "unequivocally defend the freedom of expression of all the members of the academic community."

They wrote: "The fact that Dershowitz mentioned the names of [university] lecturers and accused them of hurting students and harming the resilience of the State of Israel already borders on incitement."

The letter was initiated in the history department and within hours attracted the support of 80 faculty members.

...

In their protest letter, the faculty said that Dershowitz "has no evidence that anyone on the faculty has forced his views on students."

Tel Aviv University issued its own statement last night. "Prof. Dershowitz enjoyed the right to freedom of speech and to express his views. Klafter emphasizes that the university will continue to unequivocally defend freedom of expression of all the members of the academic community."

Dershowitz mentioned three faculty members - Rachel Giora of the linguistics department, Anat Matar of the philosophy department and Shlomo Sand of the history department.

Outgoing university rector Dan Levitan recently threatened to bring disciplinary charges against Matar after she took part in a conference in London - while classes were in recess at the university - dealing with the general and academic boycott of Israel. But no action has been taken.

Regarding Levitan's threatened action against Matar, the university said in its statement that "by virtue of his position, the university rector is entitled to approve or not approve vacation time for a member of the faculty during the academic year."

You will note that in the interests of free speech, Haaretz omitted the specific accusations from its transcript of Dershowitz's speech.

Heh.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:22 PM