Even The Dersh? Especially The Dersh

The word went out that there would be students protesting, disrupting, a talk by Alan Dershowitz at Columbia University. So Dersh took to the Daily News in a pre-emptive strike.

On Wednesday evening, I am scheduled to engage in a public conversation at Columbia University about the prospects for peace in the Middle East. The question — a critical one at a time when far too many campuses are hostile to ideas that challenge existing dogma — is whether I’ll be heard or shouted down.

By Wednesday evening, he means yesterday as of this writing. This post awaited the talk to see whether Dersh would get the Milo treatment. As of this morning, I can’t find anything to suggest anybody protested, no less disrupted, his talk.

I am a centrist liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton. I support a two-state solution. I have long opposed Israel’s settlement policies. I am not one of those hard-right provocateurs who come to campus in order to stoke the flames of controversy (though they too, have First Amendment rights). I am a retired professor who wants to contribute to the education of students with regard to a complex, divisive issue.

Yet according to reports in the media, radical students plan to disrupt my speech in an effort to prevent me from sharing my moderate ideas with Columbia students. The protesters are apparently afraid that I may actually persuade some open-minded students that the issues surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict are nuanced and that Israel alone is not to blame for the current stalemate.

Dersh isn’t shy. He may, in fact, have a slightly elevated view of his importance and ability to persuade anyone of anything. He has a tendency to be provocative and just the tiniest bit self-aggrandizing, lately doing a ton of TV to be the voice questioning independent counsel Bob Mueller’s icon status as the only person in America who can be trusted. Fair enough.

The students who would prevent me from speaking would also prevent other centrist moderates from expressing views on other hot-button issues with which they disagree. They see no reason for conversation, since they believe they know the truth. And they are certain that the truth is a matter of black and white, with no greys.

The significance of Dersh’s self-characterization, and description of others whom he doesn’t bother to name, as “centrist moderates” is to show how unreasonably closed-minded these radical students are. As if speakers with ideas that don’t conform to Dersh’s “centrist moderates” ideal, though still entitled to First Amendment protection, aren’t otherwise worthy of being heard. And he attributes his being in the crosshairs to his being potentially persuasive to “open minded students.”

Though young — and enrolled in an institution of higher learning that’s supposed to be opening their minds and challenging their beliefs — they are enemies of ideas, complexity and thinking for oneself. They believe that the university should not be a place for open-minded students to hear diverse views and make up their own minds, but rather an institution where professors propagandize captive students to one particular point of view.

Finally. Dersh’s condemnation of the kids for being boneheads gives way to his criticism of his own, the propagandizing profs, who mold these malleable minds into little twisted balls of hate.

I expect that my speech will be protested not only by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic students and outsiders, but also by some radical feminists, gay rights activists, Black Lives Matter supporters and others who, under the false banner of “intersectionality,” believe they must stand together against their common oppressors.

These days, their supposed common oppressors include the United States, Israel, Christianity and other personifications of western culture. These “intersectionalists” will try to censor me despite my lifelong devotion to feminism, gay rights, civil rights and other liberal causes.

And this is where even Noam Chomsky starts to cry, realizing that he’s now got more in common with the Dersh than the protesters, no matter how “eminently ignoble” he views Dershowitz.

But missing from this discussion is the fact that it’s academics like Dersh who gave life to these little monsters. Radical academics didn’t magically appear on college campuses. Much as with Evergreen State’s Bret Weinstein, the theories developed over the last generation, and taken further by each new Ph.D. thesis that needs to find something newer, something crazier, to assert to make its mark, will eat up yesterday’s liberals and spit them out as today’s conservatives.

But Dersh, seizing the opportunity to be bold in the face of these purported threats, announces that he will brave their threats.

I will challenge that censorious worldview at Columbia on Wednesday night. I will do it politely but firmly, and I expect Columbia to assure not only my physical safety and the physical safety of those students who come to listen to me, but also my ability to communicate my views to openminded students.

If there was a riot, it would be expected that some paper or website would have said so. I found no such report. Maybe there is hope for the future of diverse ideas on campus. Maybe the radical students are saving their anger for someone more worthy, like Ben Shapiro. Maybe they decided that Dersh just didn’t matter enough to pull out the empathy tent.

But Dersh being so very Dersh doesn’t mean the monster academics like him and his Harvard Law School nemesis Larry Tribe created are going away any time soon. Dersh is right that he’s got a long history of defending liberal causes, and yet time has turned him into what he calls a “centrist moderate” and what the students who hate him might call alt-right. Academics created this monster, and now they’ve lost control and it’s turned on them.

Sucks, Dersh. If you have any ability to persuade the left, turn your attention to the disease rather than the symptoms and get your former colleagues to grow up. Maybe you can get a book out of it, since you do nothing that isn’t good for the Dersh, but at least you can use whatever clout you may have for good instead of self-aggrandizement.

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26 thoughts on “Even The Dersh? Especially The Dersh”

  3. Richard Kopf

    Scott,

    Watching the superb documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on Vietnam these last several evenings causes me to think that the academic monster of today to which you refer began in the late sixties. It was then that college students were first allowed to believe–indeed encouraged to believe–that the relationship between student and professor was no longer akin to apprentice and master.

    I was so lucky to have been taught by a few older professors who viciously ridiculed me when I frequently uttered some half-baked idea. Pain-inducing ridicule, when rigidly but fairly employed by a master thinker, turns the mush brain of an apprentice thinker into, at worst, a thoughtful journeyman.

    But the cat has long escaped the bag. Many, perhaps most, college professors of today lack the guts to take back the classroom. What is worse, they don’t believe they should. And it all began when teachers and students held hands and sang Kumbaya long ago.

    All the best.

    RGK

    1. SHG Post author

      From 2012.

      Dear Lawprofs: Take back your classroom. These are not your peers, your colleagues. Perhaps one day they will be, but not now. When you seek their approval, you forfeit your authority to teach them. If they are wrong, someone must tell them they are wrong. If they lack the capacity to become a lawyer, someone must give them a dime and tell them to call their mother.

      But they won’t like you? Too bad. Your job is not to be liked, but to teach blobs of clay to become lawyers. You do not need any more permission than the fact they sit in your classroom. They disagree with what you say? Too bad. They are students. They know nothing. That’s why they’re there.

      I received a great many emails from law profs after this post. Few had the balls to speak publicly. They never will.

      1. Richard Kopf

        SHG,

        And you also said in that post: “Hurt their feelings whenever their feelings need to be hurt. That may be the most important lesson you can ever teach them.” To me, that is the point of the spear you valiantly throw at the citadel.

        All the best.

        RGK

    2. PseudonymousKid

      Dear Judge Kopf,

      Apprentice and Master, eh? Pain-inducing ridicule, you say? Coming from a guy who wears a black robe and wields a lot of power, this raises some concerns. It’s very serious. Are you now or have you ever been a Sith?

      Any formality in the relationship was destroyed as students became customers. Education is a commodity to be purchased. Combine that with the customer always being right, and you have your disaster.

      I await ridicule, if you think me worthy of it. I’m no stranger to the dark side.

      Best,
      PK

  4. Jim Thompson

    Why are you sliming Dershowitz? I see it goes back a while but I didn’t see any specific reason articulated. He makes more money than you, he has much greater name recognition than you, but I’m sure you wouldn’t stoop to envy. Like most criminal defense lawyers his head is larger than his hat but that seems a common characteristic of those who win the PR battles. And the Professor actually makes sense, often enough. So what gives?
    Here, anticipating your rumbling and grumbling that “this blog is for lawyers–non-lawyers don’t understand,” I’ll simply observe that it’s you who opened it to non-lawyers. If you wanted to restrict it, you could.

    1. SHG Post author

      It’s either the money or he’s better looking.

      If you hadn’t asked your question in such a dickish fashion, you might have actually gotten an answer. Oh well.

    2. Eliot J CLingman

      The Dersh advocated for “torture warrants” l, and in his conflict with Finkelstein tried to suppress publication. So its a bit rich when The Loathsome Dersh presents himself as an advocate for the first amendment.

      1. Jim Thompson

        Dershowitz’s advocacy for torture warrants in “ticking bomb” situations has little if anything to do with the First Amendment. The Finkelstein matter is tangled but it’s notable that after the Professor’s tactical attempt to suppress publication, alleging “massive libel,” Finkelstein’s book when published no longer included the supposedly libelous matter.

        He may be “loathsome” to you and, apparently, one would not call him “likable” but to many his numerous well-argued defenses of freedom of speech make him a First Amendment champion.

        1. SHG Post author

          Much as I appreciate the need for blithering idiots to express themselves, Jim, and much as you are absolutely entitled to believe Dersh is a First Amendment champion, I think you’re an asshole, so you’re banned. Bye.

            1. SHG Post author

              Still is.
              null

              Edit: And in came the post-ban email:

              Subject: I am deeply sorry

              for you.

              It’s surely painful for you to suddenly encounter a commentator who doesn’t line up behind you when you indulge in prattle, who’s not an acolyte, who doesn’t sing in your hallelujah chorus. So it’s tempting to excuse your ensuing indulgence in infantile vulgarity and name-calling.

              But when one is a wealthy, New York, gated community defense lawyer as you are, one who gives vent to an occasional right-of-center sentiment but who disguises his core leftism so as not to scare off his white collar potential clients, one who carefully affects not a full but only a scraggly beard so as to appeal to a wider audience, it’s clear that image is all.

              In the meantime with your blog you have it both ways, You can say it’s solely intended for lawyers but you wouldn’t dare exercise your option to restrict it. That would preclude visits from potential clients who might be impressed by your pearls of wisdom, while at the same time noting what a tough guy you are, trampling sadistically on the non-defense lawyers who wander in.

              Altogether a pitiful example of meretricious human failings.

              Volenti non fit injuria, indeed.

              Te futueo et caballum tuum.

              Jim Thompson

              My beard? That hurts.

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