Legal scholar and Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz is taking aim at left-leaning academics in a sharply worded op-ed, accusing them of hypocrisy and antisemitism over their opposition to federal pressure on Columbia University to crack down on antisemitic activity on campus.
In a piece published Monday, Dershowitz defended the Trump administration’s recent threat to withhold $400 million in federal funding from Columbia unless the university took action to protect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation by anti-Israel demonstrators. That move, he argues, is no different from federal interventions that civil rights advocates once applauded — and he condemned the backlash as politically motivated and steeped in “intersectional bigotry.”
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“Many left-wing university faculty members (a redundancy if there ever was one),” Dershowitz wrote, “are rebelling against the Trump administration’s threat to cut federal funding to universities that tolerate antisemitic actions against their Jewish students.”
The criticism follows the resignation of Columbia’s acting president, who had accepted conditions to restore the threatened funding — a move that led to faculty outrage and her eventual ouster. Dershowitz lambasted the reaction, calling it a “double standard” in how antisemitism is treated compared to other forms of discrimination.
Dershowitz drew a direct comparison between the federal government’s response to segregation-era discrimination in the South and the Trump administration’s intervention at Columbia. He imagined a hypothetical scenario where the government in the 1960s cut funding to a university that allowed Ku Klux Klan members to block Black students from classrooms — a move liberals of the time would have supported.
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“Liberals and civil rights advocates would applaud the threats of the federal government and the compliance by the university,” Dershowitz wrote. “But now… many liberals and civil rights advocates are complaining about the government’s threats… Why the difference?”
He argues the difference stems from how Jews are perceived under “intersectional” ideology — not as victims, but as “privileged oppressors.” According to Dershowitz, this warped worldview justifies treating Jewish students as less worthy of protection.
In addition to what he sees as discriminatory logic, Dershowitz suggests the opposition stems from partisan hostility to Donald Trump.
“Even if [the administration’s] actions are logically indistinguishable from past approved actions,” he wrote, “they are rejected because the current government is presided over by President Donald J. Trump.”
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He accused faculty of engaging in ad hominem fallacies, rejecting policies not based on principle, but based on who proposes them.
Dershowitz did acknowledge the need for caution when it comes to government involvement in academia. He emphasized that the federal government should not intrude on matters like faculty hiring or course content. However, he argued that targeted financial pressure is appropriate when taxpayer money is used to enable harassment or promote propaganda.
“The government is entirely within its rights and power to condition what it provides in discretionary taxpayer funding,” he wrote, so long as it avoids a “chainsaw” approach and instead uses a “scalpel.”
He compared recognizing extreme political indoctrination in classrooms to former Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line on pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
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Dershowitz concluded by stating that pressure on Columbia could lead to greater protection for Jewish students, more accountability, and even an increase in genuine academic freedom — if the university follows through on reforms.
“This would be a good thing,” he wrote, “just as federal pressure on some southern universities that reduced discrimination against Blacks in the 1950s and 1960s was a good thing.”
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