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4.2.12
WC: 191694

Not everyone—even university professors—seem to understand this important distinction. I encountered this intellectual muddle-headedness in 2010 when I received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University and was asked to deliver a talk on behalf of the honorees. In my talk, I defended the right of professors at the University of Tel Aviv to call for boycotts against Israeli universities. This is part of what I said:

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 their right to freedom of expression, I exercised my own right to express my own views about the merits and demerits of their ideas:

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.

Following my talk a group of Tel Aviv professors accused me of McCarthyism and of advocating censorship. The Chronicle of Higher Education "reported" that I was pressuring the University to take action against professors who support boycotts against Israeli Universities. I responded:

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.⁵²

Another example of the confusion between defending someone's right to speak and reporting that person's views on the merits of his speech arose in the context of efforts by Norman Finkelstein, a

⁵² http://www.haaretz.com/full-text-of-alan-dershowitz-s-tel-aviv-speech-1.289841

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