Harvard Law School and The New McCarthyism

by Alan M. Dershowitz, GATESTONE IONSTITUTE  •  March 5, 2021

• This self-serving defense of censorship is intended to convey a crass economic threat: if you want to get a good job after law school, make sure that Harvard bans teachers and speakers who are trying to “rehabilitate their reputations and obscure the stain of their complicity in the Trump administration….”

• One would also think that signatories would be aware that if these vague criteria — anti-democratic, racists, xenophobic and immoral — were applied across the board, they would result in bans on anyone who was associated with the current regimes in China, Cuba, Turkey, Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, the Palestinian Authority and other repressive governments.
• It would also apply to supporters of American anti-democratic and anti-free speech groups, such as Antifa, and the very organization — People’s Parity Project — that is promoting this anti-free speech petition. Indeed, historically, repression and censorship have been directed primarily against the left.
• The Harvard Law School petition is directed only at Trump supporters, not supporters of left wing anti-democratic repression, either here or abroad. It is based on the assumption that there is a special “Trump exception” to freedom of speech and due process. But exceptions to free speech and academic freedom for some risk becoming the rule for all.
• Much of this effort to exclude Trump supporters from campuses comes from individuals and organizations that also demand more “diversity.” But their definition of diversity is limited to race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. It does not extend to the central mission of universities: to hear and learn from the widest array of views, perspectives, ideologies and political preferences.

A recent petition, signed by hundreds of Harvard Law School students and alumni, demands that Harvard not “hire or affiliate with” the “architects and backers of the Trump administration’s worse abuses.” There is no place for selective censorship based on political affiliations at Harvard Law School or any institution of higher education, whether it receives federal funding or not — but especially if it does.

A recent petition, signed by hundreds of Harvard Law School students and alumni, raises the specter of the new McCarthyism coming to the law school at which I taught for half a century. The petition states that “Harvard Law School faces a choice of whether to welcome the architects and backers of the Trump administration’s worse abuses back into polite society.” It demands that Harvard not “hire or affiliate with” any of these sinners, and threatens that “if it does so the school will be complicit if future attacks on our democracy are even more violent – and more successful.”

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