BY JOHN K. WILSON

Today’s CBS Sunday Morning featured a segment bemoaning the loss of civility, which is apparently the great crisis of our times. It included lawyer (and law professor) Alan Dershowitz declaring, “It’s hard to have dialogue without civility.” Dershowitz has complained about being shunned in Martha’s Vineyard for his defense of Donald Trump and proclaimed on the show: “I don’t care about being shunned….What I care about is the big issue of trying to silence Americans who have a different point of view.”

Dershowitz’s stand against censorship will seem rather hypocritical to anyone who recalls his crusade to silence Norman Finkelstein. Dershowitz campaigned successfully to have Finkelstein (who had written critically about Dershowitz) denied tenure by DePaul University in 2007. Before that, Dershowitz attacked the University of California Press because they planned to publish a book by Finkelstein, asking California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the book from being published. The governor’s legal affairs secretary wrote back to Dershowitz, “You have asked for the Governor’s assistance in preventing the publication of this book,” but “he is not inclined to otherwise exert influence in this case because of the clear, academic freedom issue it presents.”

A Nation article noted that Dershowitz initially denied writing any letter: “My letter to the Governor doesn’t exist.” But when pressed, he said: “It was not a letter. It was a polite note.” Well, as long as the censorship was requested civilly, all is well.

A few years later, Dershowitz admitted in an interview with me that he had written the letter, but justified it this way:

The University of California Press, which purports to publish scholarship, violated their own standard in deciding to lend its scholarly imprimatur to Finkelstein’s unscholarly screed. I never tried to prevent Finkelstein’s book from being published. Indeed, I urged him to publish it so that it could be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. I opposed the decision by a scholarly university press to violate its own rules by publishing his unscholarly book, and I wrote to each member of the Board of the University of California Press expressing my views. The Governor, as a member of that Board, was among those who received my letter. If university presses don’t want politicians involved in their editorial decisions, they should not put them on their boards. They cannot have it both ways.

Even if you believe Dershowitz’s explanation, writing to all the members of the governing board of a university press, asking them to ban a book, is an extraordinary effort at censorship. Some might even call it trying to silence Americans who have a different point of view. I just hope that discussing Dershowitz’s long record of demanding censorship isn’t considered a violation of civility.