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April 28, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
08:42
Alan Dershowitz on Tenured Professors' Lack of Courage
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In 55 years of academic life and 10 years before that of being in school, I have never seen a less courageous group of people than tenured, full professors.
Let me give you an example.
Lawrence Tribe.
Lawrence Tribe never met a constitutional provision that somehow couldn't be interpreted to satisfy his own political ends.
Yesterday, he came out in favor of the Human Rights Watch proposal that Israel essentially be abolished.
And that there be a one-state solution with the right of return of 14 million Palestinians coming back.
The only reason Tribe did this is because it's become politically correct.
He was a strong supporter of Israel when that was politically correct to do.
He was a strong supporter of presidential immunity from prosecution when Clinton was president.
The minute Trump became president, Tribe changed his views.
I mean, talk about courage.
This is a guy who's a university professor.
Does not have the courage to stand up for any principles, and he leads the way among many, many academics.
He used to be a strong supporter of due process, a strong supporter of free speech, but the leftists turned against free speech and due process.
Why do you need due process and free speech?
We know the truth.
We know that if a white policeman shoots a black person, of course he's guilty.
We know that if a woman accuses a man, of course he's guilty.
We know that if somebody says, The presidential election was flawed.
We know that that's false.
And if we know the truth, why do we have to bother with such cumbersome things as dissent and due process?
No!
We'll get right to the truth and, you know, bring about our utopia.
And, you know, if that sounds like Stalin and Mao and Castro, you can understand why it sounds like them.
They had the same view.
They knew what the truth was.
And they didn't want anybody to stand in the way by dissenting.
God, I'm reveling in your truth-telling.
So what's your theory?
I have felt this about professors.
Yeah, go ahead.
Forgive me.
I have felt this about professors since I was at Columbia Graduate School.
I couldn't believe.
How the deans had caved in to every radical student demand.
And, you know, oh, you want to take over my office?
Oh, can I get you some coffee?
That was their reaction.
So the question is, why?
Why does the professoriate suffer for so much cowardice?
Well, I think there are two points you've made.
Number one is the professoriate, and you're right about that.
Number two is the administrators.
And the administrators, of course, had no point of view at all.
They couldn't care.
They just want quiet, and so they will always put oil on the squeakiest wheel.
They don't necessarily agree with it.
Let's give you an example of what happened at Harvard.
We had the first African-American dean of a college at Harvard, Ron Sullivan, great professor, terrific criminal lawyer.
Everybody loved him.
He represented the Boston, then New England Patriots guy who was charged with a double murder, and everybody praised him for doing that.
And then he defended Harvey Weinstein for one month.
And as a result, people in his college said, we feel unsafe.
Unsafe?
In front of a professor?
This mild-mannered guy who had previously represented an accused double murderer?
But no, Harvey Weinstein, we feel unsafe.
And the dean fired him.
The dean said, we're not renewing your contract.
We always renew contracts.
But in your case, we're not renewing your contract.
The students don't feel safe in your presence.
And that's what deans do these days.
That's what presidents of universities do these days.
They just go along with the loudest voices.
They don't necessarily agree with it.
When you go to dinner parties with them, I used to get invited to a lot of dinner parties before I defended President Trump.
Now I've lost 15 pounds on the Trump diet because nobody invites me to dinner anymore.
But when I used to go to dinner parties, these professors would express very positive views about freedom of speech and due process in private, but then in public, when it came to doing it, They didn't want to incur the wrath of the most radical students, and so they go along.
I did not know the final stage of, what is it, Sullivan?
Was that his name?
Yeah, Ron Sullivan.
I knew that the students had erupted against him for defending Harvey Weinstein, which is exactly what lawyers are supposed to do.
But I did not know that Harvard fired him.
Well, they claim they didn't fire him.
They claim they just didn't renew his contract.
Imagine if they discovered 50 years ago that a dean was gay, and they said, we're just not going to renew his contract.
Or 75 years ago, if they discovered somebody who's Jewish, and they said, oh, we're not going to renew his contract.
Everybody would understand that was firing.
And so every time I describe the Ron Sullivan case, and him too, because I've discussed it with him, he knows he was fired, and he was fired because.
He followed the Constitution.
Look at the executive of Brooklyn Center, the place where Officer Kim Potter is being charged with manslaughter for making an honest mistake, pulling out what she thought was a taser, yelling taser, taser, taser, taser, and tragically firing a gun.
So the head, the commissioner, said that she's guilty or innocent, but surely she should get due process.
He got fired.
He got fired for advocating due process.
And the reason he got fired is not that the city council necessarily wanted to fire him, but the radical agitator said, if you don't fire him, we're going to set fire to your city.
And just like they said to the 12 jurors of the Chauvin case, if you don't convict him of murder, if you convict him only of mass slaughter, or God forbid acquit him, we'll burn your city down.
And the jurors all knew that.
The alternate juror has basically said...
That she knew, and that's why she didn't want to serve on the jury.
That's not American justice.
You know, in 1913, Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented in the Leo Frank case.
You'll remember the Leo Frank case, the only Jew in American history ever lynched.
In that case, it went after the Supreme Court, and Justice Holmes issued a very, very important decision in which he said, I have grave doubts about whether or not—here, I'll read it to you.
I have very serious doubts that the petitioner has had due process of law because of the trial taking place in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd.
He could have written the same thing, you know, 81 years later, or 108 years later, rather, about the Chauvin case.
Look, I have no brief for Chauvin.
What he did, putting his knee on the neck and keeping it there, especially for the last four minutes, was indefensible, in my view.
But that doesn't mean he doesn't get a fair trial.
It doesn't mean that Kim Potter doesn't get a fair trial.
Due process.
Free speech, the most fundamental liberties, are in danger.
The ACLU is silent.
The Larry tribes of the world are silent.
The radical left is silent.
And us few liberals and genuine conservatives are the only ones who are standing up for these American values, and it's outrageous.
The book, I want to promote it, the book is The Case Against the New Censorship by Alan Dershowitz, to whom I'm speaking.
Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech Progressives and Universities.
It's important to subtitle, and I want to dwell on this depending on how much time you have, but I want to dwell on the subtitle, Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech Progressives and Universities.
I want everybody to note that you didn't write from government.
That's right.
It's just too easy to protect free speech from government.
For the first 45 of my 55-year career, I probably did more First Amendment cases than any American lawyer in history.
And I won them all.
When you take on the government, you win your cases.
I started out defending a movie called I Am Curious Yellow.
I defended hair.
I defended the Pentagon Papers.
I defended everybody against the government.
And when the government does it, we win.
Right.
Hold on there.
Hold on there.
That's right.
The problem is coming up.
And I don't know how it can be solved.
If anyone knows, it would be my guest.
His book is up at DennisPrager.com.
Professor Alan Dershowitz.
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