Radical chickens come to left-liberal law dean's home to roost

In the late 1960s, college campuses were plagued by the silencing of speakers and by protests that got out of hand. College administrators responded by attempting to appease student radicals.

They established courses the students demanded, especially “black studies” courses (and so began years of mischief and pseudo-scholarship). They allowed or even sponsored “teach-ins” that were nothing more than platforms for anti-war propaganda, dressed thinly in academic garb.

But when students began taking over college administration buildings and manhandling deans as they escorted them out the door, the coddling finally came to an end (at least for protests led by white students). Eventually, colleges started calling in the police. At Dartmouth, our occupation of Parkhurst Hall resulted in 30-day jail sentences.

Now, 65 years later, history is repeating itself, and not as farce. All of the elements from the late 60s are present in the behavior of anti-Israel, Jew-hating protesters— shout-downs, trespass, and so forth. But this time Jewish students are being harassed and threatened. I have little to say for the tactics we student radicals used at Dartmouth, but at least we never harassed or threatened fellow students.

The question now is whether college administrators will stop coddling the Jew-hating thugs and take meaningful action against them. So far, the answer seems to be “probably not.”

Consider what has been happening at Berkeley. Earlier this week, Erwin Chemerinsky, the distinguished left-liberal constitutional scholar and dean of Berkeley’s law school. hosted a party for law students in the backyard of his home. Chemerinsky always hosts entering law students, but was unable to do so in 2020 due to Covid.

The parties he hosted this week were for third-year students who missed out in 2020. They were purely social events.

A third-year law student and pro-Palestinian activist, Malak Afaneh, smuggled a microphone and an amplifier into one of the parties and launched a diatribe against not just Israel, but also the host. She was supported in this effort by a small number of other pro-Palestinian students.

Chemerinsky told Afaneh to leave his house. His wife, fellow law professor Catherine Fisk, tried to take the protester’s mic away. In the process, she pulled her a few steps.

Afaneh shouted, “We refuse to break our fast [for Ramadan] on the blood of Palestinian people.” No one, of course, had asked her to eat. She continued by accusing the university system of sending billions of dollars to weapons manufacturers. Even if this is true, it’s not something the dean and his wife have anything to do with.

The protesters finally left after Fisk threatened to call the police. However, they returned for the next day’s dinner. This time, they stayed outside the house and protested for an hour and a half, banging drums and chanting what Chemerinsky says were obscenities.

Less than two months earlier, a Berkeley event featuring an Israeli speaker was cancelled after a crowd of protesters broke down doors in the building where the speech was to be given. Berkeley’s chancellor called this “an attack on the fundamental values of the university.” As far as I can tell, however, she has taken no action against the rioters.

The protests at Chemerinsky’s house were preceded by the circulation of an anti-Semitic flier with a cartoon image of him gripping a bloody knife and fork, with the words “No Dinner With Zionist Chem While Gaza Starves.” Chemerinsky is depicted with what the Chronicle of Higher Education describes as “a ghastly grin.” “It’s a nastily assured piece of work, its caricature distorted but immediately recognizable,” the Chronicle states

The flier harks back, not very subtly, to the “blood libel” against Jews. As far as I can tell, the university has taken no action in response to the flier.

In fact, it’s the anti-Semites who went on the offensive after the events at Chemerinsky’s home:

After the dinner altercation, the Law Students for Justice in Palestine chapter demanded the resignations of Mr. Chemerinsky and Ms. Fisk, and called for a Palestine studies program that centers on the “resistance and the right to return in a settler-colonial context.”

It gets even more stupid:

The student activists are characterizing the interaction [at the dean’s home] as involving an act of violence, one with sweeping symbolic resonances. “Last night,” Law Students for Justice in Palestine wrote on Instagram, “Professor Catherine Fisk physically assaulted a Palestinian Law Student activist. . . This attack on a Palestinian Muslim law student is only the latest attack on Palestinian, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian students at the University of California, Berkeley.”

For her part, Afaneh displayed full command of the buzzwords of pseudo-victimization but absolutely no self-awareness:

In a video posted to TikTok after the confrontation, Afaneh expatiated on what she characterized as Fisk’s assault. “She put her arms around me, grasped at my hijab, grabbed at my breasts inappropriately. . . and threatened to call the cops on a gathering of Black and brown students.” In Afaneh’s view, Fisk “assaulted me because to her, a hijabi wearing, keffiyah repping Palestinian Muslim student that felt comfortable to speak in Arabic was enough of a threat to her that I was justified to be assaulted.”

This, she suggested, had its geopolitical analogue in the war in Gaza. “It was the classic thing that Palestinian lives are constructed to be seen as allowed to be harmed, to be killed, and to be slaughtered, while white ones are allowed to live. Professor Fisk embodied the Islamophobia, the deep anti-Arab racism, and the deep anti-Palestinian sentiment, that these Zionist administrations are built on.”

To compare what happened to Afaneh to what’s happening in Gaza shows a lack of sympathy for the suffering there that even I, who don’t have a lot of it, find appalling.

As usual, though, the far left’s offensive has left-liberals on their heels and playing defense. Commenting on the possibility that his wife might be sued, Chereminsky said “I feel confident that there was no assault.”

Berkeley administrators spoke up for the dean and his wife. Chancellor Christ said:

I am appalled and deeply disturbed by what occurred at Dean Chemerinsky’s home last night. While our support for Free Speech is unwavering, we cannot condone using a social occasion at a person’s private residence as a platform for protest.

But what action is the university prepared to take against those who circulate anti-Semitic fliers against its law school dean and then stage a protest in his private residence? As far as I can tell, it intends to take none.

In this regard, I should point out that, notwithstanding the advice the protesters obtained from the ultra-leftist National Lawyers Guild, they had no First Amendment right to stage their protest in the home of Chemerinsky and Fisk. As the Chronicle of Higher Education says:

That view [that the speech of the protesters was constitutionally protected “is unorthodox.”

Most lawyers would agree with Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who tweeted that “there’s no serious argument” for First Amendment protection in such a situation.

The weak reaction to the pro-Palestinian behavior at Berkeley — breaking doors to prevent speech, circulating an anti-Semitic flier, and staging a protest inside the dean’s house — mirrors the weak response to student protests at the law school across the Bay. Recall that Stanford law students disrupted the speech of a federal appellate judge and then tried to intimidate the law school dean after she spoke up in favor of free speech for the judge.

As far as I can tell, Stanford took no action against the students involved. Instead, it cut ties with an idiot dean who supported disrupting the judge.

As we used to say in the late 1960s, this was a cop-out. The disruption came, as it always does in these cases, from the students. Unless students face consequences, disruption will persist and probably intensify.

The New York Times sees it differently. It claims that “some administrators, pressed by donors and politicians, have cracked down on unruly behavior, arresting and suspending students.” Administrators can’t arrest students. It’s true that in a few cases administrators have suspended the worst offenders.

In these cases, the penalty wasn’t for “unruly behavior.” We’re not talking about panty-raids.

Anti-Israel students are preventing the exercise of speech rights, threatening other students, demeaning Jewish faculty members based on religious stereotypes, and disrupting events in private homes. And they are getting away with it.

Not because administrators lack the nerve to punish. For more than a decade, they have been punishing non-leftwing students for “hateful” conduct and “hurtful” speech, judged not objectively but by the subjective feelings, real and pretended, of snowflakes.

What administrators seem to lack is the nerve to punish leftists and self-described victims of oppression.

But maybe it’s not a lack of nerve. Maybe left-liberal administrators just don’t want to punish those whom they regard as on their side “directionally,” but who have simply taken the lessons colleges teach too much to heart. Perhaps administrators sense that the radical protesters are the natural product of the higher education system they’ve created — their chickens coming home to roost.

Maybe they will overcome what I take to be their feelings of guilt and/or knee-jerk sympathy for today’s activists — their heirs and/or the heirs of their radical parents. But so far, they haven’t.