College campuses used to be a bastion of protest and free speech, but they are now some of the most restrictive places for speech in America, including government-funded institutions, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz warned.
"Students are terrified to express views in class that are not politically correct," Dershowitz told "The Mark Levin Show" on Rumble. "They know that they will be subject to peer pressures, as well as by pressures by the administration.
"Remember, these universities now are loaded with administrators, assistant deans, associate deans in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion that really are involved deeply in censorship of ideas."
Dershowitz helped set up a council on free speech at Harvard, but he questioned why just 100 members signed up for it amid thousands, when its goal is "to simply demand diversity that is intellectual and academic diversity, rather than merely diversity that is skin deep."
"We're trying very hard to fight against what has become a repressive environment," Dershowitz continued. "If you're, for example, an Orthodox Jew at a major institution today and wear kippah or a Star of David and you're perceived as being a Zionist, you are no longer allowed to join clubs, speak at clubs.
"At Berkeley, for example, 14 clubs — this is the University of California Law School — 14 clubs have banned, permanent, total, full-time ban on any Zionist speakers, including the dean of its own law school, who is a Jew who supports Israel's right to exist."
Zionism is merely a group that supports "Israel's right to exist as a nation state of the Jewish people," Dershowitz noted.
"I can't speak at any of those clubs on abortion, on gay rights, on the separation of powers, on the Constitution: I have been banned along with every other Zionist in the United States, in the world, from speaking at those clubs," Dershowitz lamented.
Dershowitz noted he is no longer welcome to speak at Harvard, much less teach a class.
"I have not once been invited back to speak at Harvard or at any other major law school except by the Federalist Society at Stanford, but no major law school," Dershowitz said.
"We are seeing now an abolition of grades of meritocracy and the introduction of propaganda. Instead of teaching students how to think, teachers are insisting on teaching them what to think, and not brooking any dissent and letting it be reflected even in grades."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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