Professor Alan Dershowitz Comes Home to Brooklyn College
Harvard Law professor, Constitutional scholar, author, academic superstar, and Brooklyn College alumnus (’59) Alan Dershowitz proved “you can go home again” this week when he wowed a standing-room-only audience of students, faculty, staff, and alumni in a wide-ranging, 90-minute lecture in the Brooklyn College Library’s Woody Tanger Auditorium.
Accompanied by his wife Carol, son Elon, and close friends and fellow Brooklyn College alums Dr. and Mrs. Barry and Barbara Zimmerman, Dershowitz was clearly in his comfort zone as he warmed up to discussing his book” Finding Jefferson: The First Amendment in the Age of Terrorism.” Following his introduction by President Christoph M. Kimmich, who lauded the Borough Park native for donating his invaluable personal papers to the Brooklyn College Library in August of 2003, the peripatetic professor alternated seamlessly between shtick and impassioned scholarly analysis.
“My wife has come to love Tony Cucchiara, and she cheers every time she sees yet another box of paper leave our house,” Dershowitz said with a knowing eye-roll.
Possessed of a self-described “inability to throw out anything,” Dershowitz was referring to Brooklyn College Archivist and Professor Anthony Cucchiara, who, with the support of the Brooklyn College Foundation, was the prime mover behind the afternoon’s successful event. With a clear relish, Dershowitz, a self-confessed “hondler looking for a bargain,” then described his discovery and purchase two years ago in New York’s Argosy bookstore of a hand-written letter penned by President Thomas Jefferson on July 3, 1801. It was an acquisition that inspired him to write the first 10,000 words of his twenty-seventh book, Finding Jefferson: The First Amendment in the Age of Terrorism,” that very weekend.
“The letter was electric,” he said, “in that it deals with issues such as the limits of free speech, censorship, and who should be empowered to draw the line between dangerous speech and harmful conduct.”
Dershowitz said that he strongly disagrees with Jefferson’s suggestion that the marketplace of ideas eventually selects and chooses the best ideas, pointing out that because Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, and the tenets of Nazism triumphed in the marketplace of ideas, did not mean that they were sound ideas or a welcome result.
But he does, he said, agree with Jefferson that “though liberty is both dangerous and cacophonous, it is less dangerous to allow provocative speech than to allow censorship. Because history tells us that the appetite for censorship in government is not easily satisfied.”
