Harvard Law prof Alan Dershowiz has a long track record of leftist political views and defense of human rights. After 9/11 he began to speak out openly on the need to confront militant Islamacism and terror tactics. So it's not surprising that yesterday he took on Columbia Univ. and its faculty.
It's not often that a professor tells a packed crowd at Columbia University that Edward Said was a political extremist and that faculty members in the school's Middle East studies department encourage Islamic terrorism.The professor who made those statements yesterday isn't from Columbia but from Harvard. Law professor Alan Dershowitz showed up at the intellectual home of Said, a literature professor who was a fierce critic of Israel, to rebuke Columbia's faculty and administration for tolerating an atmosphere on campus that he said promotes the hatred of Israel.
"This is the most unbalanced university that I have come across when it comes to all sides of the Middle East conflict being presented," Mr. Dershowitz told hundreds of students and a smattering of Columbia faculty members. "I have never seen a university with as much faculty silence," he said.
Dershowitz also threw down a gauntlet:
Mr. Dershowitz's speech, which lasted about an hour, drew a few catcalls from some hostile members of the audience, who accused the lawyer of supporting torture. It also prompted frequent outbursts of applause from many in the audience, as he repeatedly expressed contempt for the Columbia scholars in the Middle East studies department who are the subject of an internal campus inquiry. One of the best-known defense attorneys in the country, Mr. Dershowitz, who is 66, said he would help organize an independent committee to look into the student complaints if the faculty committee appointed by Mr. Bollinger came to a "biased" conclusion.
There are problems with our tenure system, but the fact that Dershowitz can travel to Columbia and Speak Truth to Power(ful faculty) illustrates why academic freedom is so important. On the other hand, it has to be used or in effect faculty throw it away:
Speaking to a mostly friendly audience, Mr. Dershowitz said he was struck by the reluctance on the part of faculty members at Columbia to demand publicly more intellectual diversity within the Middle East studies department. Such silence, he said, has turned the controversy at the university into a student-versus-teacher dispute."Having tenure means you have no excuse for not speaking out," Mr. Dershowitz said. "I'm appalled at how many professors at Columbia University privately support Israel, and privately support many of the students, but are publicly afraid to speak out."
One Columbia scholar who attended Mr. Dershowitz's speech, Judith Jacobson, shared his opinion that Columbia faculty members have been reluctant to speak out about the controversy.
"The faculty have been afraid," Ms. Jacobson said. She is an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia's school of public health and a leader of a pro-Israel academic group called Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
Mr. Dershowitz, she said, "is a little ungenerous about the nature of their fear." Ms. Jacobson said faculty members do not want to risk being subjected to ostracism and even jeopardizing their careers if they speak out.
Which is why it's important that they do - so that the tenor and tone of academic discourse is restored to a healthy exchange of ideas rather than groupthink.
And, oh by the way, they prolly wouldn't want to enrage any US Muslims, who might well do to THEM what was done to the New Jersey Coptic.
Keeping their heads down makes daily life easier -- they wouldn't have protested at a Nazi takeover in Germany, either.
Frankly, I'd settle for intellectual honesty, coupled with a strong relationship to facts. Diversity is just another shrioll promoter of unsupported opinion. You and I have opinions, but academics must adhere to a higer calling. At least in their field.
Its ironic that in America's 'climate of fear' professors feel more free to bash 911 victims than to support Israel publicly.
Mr. Dershowitz, she said, "is a little ungenerous about the nature of their fear."
So Dershowitz, if anything, is underestimating the climate of fear, and engaging in rhetorical understatement. Another first!
Very few Americans have the level of job security possessed by a tenured professor...yet this security seems ineffective in promoting the willingness to speak out in ways that might offend other people in the academic world. Why might this be?
One hypothesis might be that the prospect of a highly secure job tends to attract people who are not very courageous in the first place.
Another, and more charitable, explanation might be that the job structure of academia has become so specialized and ingrown that if you alienate a few key people in a field, you have nowhere to go.
Thoughts?
-Risk not getting invited to the hip cocktail parties.
Oh, it's more than that, I think.
Articles in peer-reviewed journals are essential to academic promotion and tenure, but also to grant funding. Institutional Review Boards at university have to pass on any research in which human subjects are involved at all -- even interviewing people for a study. Lots of venues for people to be frozen out or at least to feel vulnerable about.
What Robin said. I would add that peers and department heads can make a professor's life miserable--false allegations of racism or sexual harassment, organizing like-minded students to stage protests at classes or lectures, freezing them out of important committees, giving them only basic undergraduate courses (happened to a friend of mine at Duke). So there's plenty of incentive to shut up and go with the flow.
It seemed apropos
Of course, this goes against the leftist lie that the church was in bed with the National Socialists, well sorta they was, after all the clergy was sent to the gas chambers, those not shot on the spot, those that wasnt delt with during the night of the long knives. and they was replaced with Hitlers stooges.
One "nice" touch, is the catholic nuns was allowed to wear their habit into the extermination chambers, how "polite" of them eh ?
Before the purge of the church in Germany, A Hitler Youth marching song (Grunberger, A Social History) illustrates it:
After the installation of Hitlers stooges into germanys churches to replace the shot and the gassed, Hitler installed a new Christianity based on worship of hitler as being god sent.
Stalin did the same thing, after wholesale destuction of the church in Russia, he resurected it in Moskow, staffed by his own stooges, because he saw its utility in the war with Germany.
Its also part of the leftist lie that the National Socialists, and the Socialists of Italy, the facists was not a part of the left, never mind that Benito chided both Hitler and Stalin for not properly following the doctrines of Marx.
Universitiy is in the chokehold of Churchill and his familiars, leftism, and liberalism, has no limit, both are a constant force leftward, the only difference is that one is in more of a hurry than the other.
Robin, remember?
The next step, is your son, after losing a Job assembling fighter planes due to a canceled contract, being told his unemployment will be cut if he dont accept a job at a Gay brothel.
No limits remember, ever further leftward always, thats exactly the result of the normalization of perversity, and the a-moralist mindset that presents the predicament to the woman who refuses the government command that she must become a whore. nightmare is reality, thanks to leftism liberalism.
It is only mildly interesting that a pro Israel leftist is becoming alarmed, because he is not yet fully aware of the toxicity of his positions on other issues, but perhaps its a start.
Elsewhere, well just about everywhere, The bloodstained left are attacking jews and demonising them with acusataions of ritual murder of arab children and feeding their meat to their own children on college campus.
Where did this come from ? this offers some clues.
The left has always hated the Jews, I expect Alan to become persona non grata, the same thing that happend to Tammy Bruce, will probably happen to him.
Eventually leftism will turn en total, on their Jewish fellow travelers totaly, its built in, its what they always do.
The new ally in the leftist Jihad agaist America are their head chopper friends, Alan D will learn that, soon enough.
He will be punished for his Heresy, you watch.