When students turned a party into a protest, Erwin Chemerinsky learned the hard way that coddling activists won’t save you when they become the mob.
The moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home — literally — for the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky. On April 9, about 60 third-year students gathered in the dean’s backyard for a pre-graduation dinner. A few of the students co-opted the occasion to rant about their school’s supposed support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Chemerinsky’s avowed Zionism. Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, repeatedly pleaded with these students to leave. When Fisk tried to wrest a microphone from the student leading the demonstration, the student accused Fisk of assault and refused to move, insisting that she had a First Amendment right to continue.
In the days before the dinner, posters had gone up around campus that depicted the dean wielding a bloody knife and fork, with the message, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the National Review Online (paywall)
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a fellow at SAPIR: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
