September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:55 AM EST The University of California Regents recently invited Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, former Secretary of the Treasury, and distinguished economic scholar to speak to the Regents at a dinner in Sacramento. President Summers accepted. But then a petition signed by 130 or so feminist professors in the vast U.C. system protested having someone speak at an institution dedicated to the free expression of ideas who had once allowed himself to entertain the possibility of the existence of a feminist heresy and to allow that possibility to escape his lips. In a display of abject academic cowardice in the face of race- and gender-obsessed faculty such as is all too common these days, he was promptly disinvited. No diversity of ideas at the University of California, please, we’re scholars. Columbia University, meanwhile, has invited the president of Iran to speak on Monday, causing protests from a far larger number of people inside and outside the academy. President Bollinger of Columbia University has issued high-minded statements about the need to hear everyone speak at an institution dedicated to the free expression of ideas. Yeah, right. I might point out that President Bollinger recently refused to allow ROTC to return to the Columbia campus, because the American military, obeying an executive order issued by Bill Clinton, requires homosexuals in the military to hide their sexual orientation, a policy that is unacceptable to President Bollinger (and, incidentally, to me). Ahmadinejad, of course, doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals. He hangs them. Hypocrisy, if not diversity of ideas, is welcome in academia, apparently. More, the audience that will hear Ahmadinejad directly has been carefully chosen so good behavior can be assured. No such courtesy was extended to the head of the Minutemen last year when a group of liberal thugs ran him off the stage at Columbia University. The fate of the liberal thugs was to be told they had been very, very naughty and shouldn’t do it again. Personally, I think President Ahmadinejad should be as welcomed as President Summers should have been, and all those who try to prevent others from peacefully having their say should be told to drop dead in so many words. That, of course, would require having at least as much backbone as is possessed by a banana, and backbone, if not hypocrisy, is in short supply among university administrators when faced with their faculty. Of course, as speakers should be free to speak, so audiences should be free not to come hear them. I would be delighted if President Ahmadinejad faced nothing but empty seats on Monday. I am reminded of a classic New Yorker cartoon that ran after Houghton Mifflin published the English-language version of Mein Kampf. It was entitled, “Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin Tender a Tea for One of Their Authors.” It shows a hotel private dining room with an elaborate high tea laid out on a long table. In the room are two elderly gentlemen in frock coats and striped trousers and a Nazi-uniformed Adolf Hitler—holding a tea cup with pinky raised in the approved Emily Post manner. They are all elaborately ignoring the fact that there is no one else in the room. As the perpetrator of the Holocaust was treated in the cartoon, so should the advocate of another holocaust be treated at Columbia University. Alas, I’m sure the seats will be filled with people who think he should be heard but not Lawrence Summers. Lawrence Summers, if not the man who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, raises possibilities simply too dreadful for academics to contemplate.
| 
