Welcome back to the Dershoe. Today there was a congressional hearing at which the

presidents of major American universities including Harvard and MIT and the University of Pennsylvania

testified about the incredibly increasing anti-Semitism on campuses. It was a disaster, the testimony. None of them got to the root of the problem. None of them seemed to understand the problem.

The president of MIT had no idea what academic freedom was about

or the First Amendment.

She was asked a question and she gave the following incredibly dumb answer.

She said under academic freedom a professor is entitled to say anything he wants

in class.

Duh? No you're not allowed to say anything you want in class,

without to say a lot of things outside of class,

but you cannot in a classroom about mathematics say that African American people are racially inferior.

You cannot say in a class in chemistry that communism is better than open market society.

You can say all those things outside maybe.

I don't know if you could get away with saying some of that but you can't say anything you want in the classroom for example

When I taught for 60 years of a student I was teaching criminal law, and a student said, well, raised her hand or his hand,

and said, I really would like to talk a little bit about the New England Patriots and why they seem to be losing game after the game, I would say no, no, no, please.

You can't talk about that in my class on criminal law.

If anybody in the Patriots did anything

that was criminal,

happy to have you raise it in context.

But academic freedom in the classroom, in the classroom, is not a license to say anything.

Indeed, if you're not a particularly good teacher, you can be fired.

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