To the Editor:
“Israeli Professors Protest Calls For Increased Zionist Teaching ” (The Chronicle, August 20) suggests that I am part of the group that is pressuring Tel Aviv University to take action against anti-Zionist professors who support boycotts against Israeli universities. Nothing can be further from the truth. The speech at Tel Aviv University to which the article referred was a strong defense of academic freedom. The full text of it can be read online (http://www.haaretz.com/full-text-of-alan-dershowitz-s-tel-aviv-speech-1.289841).
In the speech, I made the following statement:
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 has a monopoly on truth and that the never-ending search for truth requires, to quote the title of one of Israel’s founders’ autobiographies, “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.
After defending the right of anti-Zionist professors to call for boycotts against Israeli institutions, I then exercised my own academic freedom to criticize them on the merits and demerits of their ideas. Here is what I said:
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.
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.
The Israeli professors who protested my speech did not like the fact that after defending their right to criticize their government, I went on to criticize some of them for hypocrisy.
I continue to oppose any efforts by any university to punish academics for expressing anti-government views. But I insist on my right to criticize those with whom I disagree. Surely that is the true meaning of academic freedom. I urge your readers to read the full text of my controversial talk at Tel Aviv University.
Alan M. Dershowitz
Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Mass.
