As college students nationwide garner national media attention for their protests against school administrations and perceived racial injustices on their campuses, famed Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz has a word for them: hypocrites.
In a no-holds-barred interview with Business Insider, Dershowitz argued that “the last thing these students want is diversity.”
“They may want superficial diversity, because for them diversity is a code word for ‘more of us,’” he said. “They don’t want more conservatives, they don’t want more white students, they don’t want more heterosexuals.”
Alan Dershowitz, gestures during his press conference in Kiev on April 11, 2011. Ukraine's ex-president Leonid Kuchma hired Alan Dershowitz, a star US lawyer, who worked on the O.J. Simpson trial to act as an advisor in his defence against charges over the murder of a reporter. AFP PHOTO/GENYA SAVILOV (Photo credit should read GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/Getty Images)
Alan Dershowitz gestures during a press conference in Kiev April 11, 2011. (Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images)
Dershowitz went on to criticize Yale University student protesters in particular as “hypocritical,” especially as they spit on their peers who attended a free speech event at the William F. Buckley Jr. program several weeks ago.
“I think the most important thing to point out is the double standard and the hypocrisy,” Dershowitz said. “These are students who want safe spaces for themselves but not for others. They’re prepared to spit on people going out of lectures.”
Dershowitz, who is Jewish, also told Business Insider that the students who protest against these racial injustices on campus have been the same students who commit anti-Semitic acts against him. For example, the professor said that students shouted, “Zionists out of CUNY” when he spoke the City University of New York. While at Johns Hopkins University, he was met with pictures of himself defaced with the Hitler mustache.
“These students don’t want me to be safe,” he said. “They don’t want students who agree with me to be safe. They just want their ideas to be safe and protected from any contrary point of view.”