Education: September 2007 Archives

This Clarence Page column in the Chicago Tribune makes a sane point about the frenzy over visit from Iranian president:

Isn't it ironic? Some of the same people who opposed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University on Monday usually criticize political correctness that suppresses free speech. Everybody wants to censor something sometime.

Ahmadinejad knows. His regime censors people much of the time.

Like the protesters, I disagree with Ahmadinejad, but that's precisely why I want him to be heard. Nothing discredits his credibility more than the sound of his own baloney.

Hallelujah. What's great about America _ and the freedom we're trying to preserve-- is that allows the free an open exchange of ideas, no matter how icky or bizarre. We can and should invite fanatical leaders to our universities, let them rant and rave and make their own worst case against themselves. And absolutely our universities should invite all kinds of people with differing views to challenge and address growing minds. If you start suppressing that free exchange then you get, well, present day Iran.

Now for fun read this hysterical bit of agitprop from Fox News.

For military families who have lost loved ones in Iraq, watching Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak to students at Columbia University showed just how disconnected certain factions of American society have become to the sacrifices of their sons, daughters, parents and spouses .

In case you didn't figure it out, "certain factions" are the godless, baby-killing, tree-hugging, welfare-mom-loving, war-hating, Mexican-loving bleeding heart liberals who are always pushing political correctness on the world (such as protesting world leaders and policies they think are bad or evil).

Lost amid much of the hub-bub over the Ahmadinejad Columbia speech is a point Jonathan makes eloquently in his post below -- namely, that it makes us look bad.

The reason for this is that Columbia president Lee Bollinger, eager to prove to the world that he is not a moral idiot despite inviting a genocidal tyrant to speak on his campus, chose the occasion of the speech to deride his invited guest. This is just bad form. You don't invite someone into your home to mistreat him, and if mistreatment is all he merits, then it's better not to invite him at all.

Years ago, I had the great fortune to work as a research assistant for William F. Buckley Jr. as he wrote his 1999 book, The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy. In that book, Buckley's fictional protagonist, Harry Bontecou, a student at -- coincidentally enough -- Columbia University -- had to present the "no" position in a 1948 debate about whether Columbia should invite Gus Hall, president of the Communist Party of the USA, to speak on campus. The words Buckley wrote for Bontecou were adapted from a speech Buckley himself had given at Yale around the same time. They seem especially pertinent in light of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad controversy, and so I reprint them below:

That's why the university is hosting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right?

But how, then, can Columbia administrators explain this video?

Would-be champions of academic freedom united in howls of protest when the new law school at UC Irvine (briefly) rescinded an offer to make liberal law professor/pundit Erwin Chemerinsky its first dean. Yet curiously, as I noted last week, few seemed willing to protest for the academic freedoms of Lawrence Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Harvard president given the boot for violating PC taboos. Summers has been invited to speak before the UC regents, but had his invite revoked after some professors complained.

Likewise, I've yet to the Chemerinsky Faithful come out in support of Donald Rumsfeld, whose invitation to join the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford has come under fire from faculty and students alike.

Meanwhile, the good folks at Columbia assure us that academic freedom demands giving Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a platform on that prestigious campus -- a platform for which Summers is, apparently, unworthy.

So, this is what "academic freedom" seems to mean in the Ivory Tower today:

Genocidal dictators are in.

Impolitic former university presidents are out.

Taking away a liberal's post is an outrage.

Taking away a conservative's post is necessary to support the "values" of an institution.

Ah, isn't the open and honest free-flow of ideas great?