In some European countries, Holocaust denial can be punished by law; the U.S. has avoided such laws, given the obvious First Amendment objections. But should the notion of academic freedom be construed broadly enough to allow professors to teach students that the Shoah was a hoax? Alan Dershowitz thinks not:
[T]housands of people, many with academic degrees, and some with professorial positions, persist in denying the [Holocaust]. These professional liars were given a degree of legitimacy by Noam Chomsky, who not only championed the right of these fake historians to perpetrate their malicious lies, but who actually lent his name to the quality of the “research” that produce the lies of denial. A widely circulated petition of 1979, signed by Chomsky as well as Holocaust deniers such as Serge Thion, Arthur Butz, and Mark Weber, described the notorious denier Robert Faurisson as “a respected professor” and his false history as “findings” based on “extensive historical research,” thus giving it an academic imprimatur. Chomsky has since argued that he had intended only to support Faurisson’s right to free speech and not the validity of his claims, but whatever his intentions may have been, his name on the petition helped to bolster not only Faurisson’s standing but also that of Holocaust denial.
I, too, support the right of falsifiers of history to submit their lies to the open marketplace of ideas, where all reasonable people should reject them. . . . But the classroom, with its captive audience of students being graded by professors, is never an appropriate place to espouse the view that the Holocaust did not take place. [It] is not a free and open marketplace of ideas. The monopolistic professor controls what can and cannot be said in his or her closed shop. Accordingly, the classroom must have more rigorous standards of truth than the book market, or the Internet.
There is not and should not be academic freedom to commit educational malpractice by presenting provable lies as acceptable facts. Universities must and do have standards: no credible university would tolerate a professor teaching that slavery did not exist, or that the earth is flat. Holocaust denial does not meet any reasonable standard deserving the protection of academic freedom.
Read more on Times Literary Supplement: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/dershowitz-fake-news-holocaust-denial/