October 16, 2006
Free Speech, Intents, and Effects Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon demands evidence that right-leaning college students share the occasional intolerance of their left-leaning peers toward politically opposed campus speakers. The trouble with Mr. Gordon’s demand is that he seems to be looking for examples of events that have been cancelled due to the intolerant protest of conservative students. Based on my own experience, conservative students certainly do share in the hysteria of their left-wing counterparts. But because college students are largely—and in the case of my college, overwhelmingly—liberal, most conservative protests fail simply because they cannot muster the adequate force to silence the speakers they find objectionable.
Allow me to give an example. On the day after I moved into my dormitory this year, Harvard hosted an unusual guest on campus, the former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami. Khatami was on a short visit to the United States and during his time in the country he agreed to give a speech at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, housed in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Khatami is a controversial figure, with significant blots on his record as president. But he is also widely recognized as a reformer—not a Western-style liberal, but probably the closest thing we can hope for from Iran.
Harvard is, of course, an easy target for right-wing pundits. Khatami’s visit made it only more so. In the august pages of the New York Sun and on what Al Franken has called “the prestigious ‘Internet,’” the oldest university in America was lambasted for hosting a man whom Michael Ledeen compared to Joseph Goebbels. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, grandstanding in anticipation of a presidential campaign, publicly announced that he was withholding state security resources that normally might have been deployed to protect a foreign dignitary of Khatami’s stature.
Less noticed, however, was the reaction on the part of a number of Harvard students. To their credit, the Harvard Republican Club showed uncharacteristic restraint by blasting Khatami but simultaneously urging students to attend the event and challenge him with their questions. Harvard Students for Israel, an organization of which I count myself a member, acquitted itself less creditably. HSI condemned Khatami’s visit, and its president was quoted in the Boston Globe saying that Khatami had not “earned the right” to speak at Harvard. Members of HSI, together with members of the Republican Club and other campus groups, took part in a protest before the event alongside members of the Boston community. Some of these protesters carried signs bearing bizarre, doctored images of Khatami, depicting him as some kind of vampire-terrorist in league with the 9/11 hijackers. So vehement was the outcry in advance of Khatami’s visit that the State Department’s security service, along with Cambridge riot police and snipers, locked down the Kennedy School on the morning of the speech.
In the end, Khatami’s speech went off without a hitch. During his address, he spoke largely in unsurprising generalities. In the question and answer session that followed, he leveled some unexpectedly pointed criticism in the direction of Iran’s current president, Ahmadinejad.
The relevance of all this to Mr. Gordon’s inquiry is obvious: In the first weeks of September, right-leaning members of the Harvard community, as well as influential conservative leaders in the state of Massachusetts and the country at large, attempted to silence a speech before it was given. Operating on the assumption that someone must “earn the right” to speak, they worked to intimidate Khatami and bully Harvard into rescinding his invitation.
This is not a perfect example of conservative intolerance to liberal speech. Khatami can hardly be called, in American terms, a liberal, and pro-Israel students should never be dismissed as right-wing nuts. But Mohammed Khatami’s visit represented a clear challenge to the Harvard community’s tolerance. Liberals, by and large, acquitted themselves well; some conservatives behaved admirably; but some students succumbed to the temptation of reactionary intolerance. The students in the last group were, if not hardcore Republicans, almost uniformly right-leaning on issues of Middle Eastern politics. Fortunately, this group did not constitute a large enough or threatening enough presence to pressure the Institute of Politics into cancelling the event. But, to invert the wise words of Larry Summers, the actions of these students were intolerant in intent, if not in effect.
One final note: While I am happy to provide this as an example of the kind of behavior in which John Steele Gordon is interested, I am puzzled by his fixation on the alleged intolerance of liberal college students. It seems to me that a sitting congressman using his office to disrupt an election is a far more serious offense than the aggressive protest of agitated, left-leaning youths against a speech by Jeane Kirkpatrick. Indeed it also seems to me that Governor Romney’s refusal to protect a foreign dignitary and Michael Ledeen’s hysterical warnings about Khatami’s visit are far more embarrassing examples of intolerance than are the ridiculous signs of a few Cambridge residents.
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