September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad II Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:00 PM EST Following this comment in the discussion section of the site, I hesitate to respond to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, lest something tiresome should result. I’ll limit myself, therefore, to a few very brief comments. First, I agree with Mr. Gordon that the withdrawal of a speaking invitation to Lawrence Summers was an embarrassment for the University of California, for obvious reasons. Similarly, it was appalling to see the University of California, Irvine, offer and then rescind the deanship of Irvine’s new law program to the accomplished constitutional lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky, a famous liberal, for fear that he might be “polarizing.” There are certainly more liberals in academia than there are conservatives, but the politics of academic discourse is rather more complicated than Mr. Gordon’s barb—“No diversity of ideas at the University of California, please, we’re scholars”—suggests. I don’t really believe the Summers incident has anything to do with Columbia University’s extension of a speaking invitation to the President of Iran. It’s not really employing some kind of academic double standard for the University of California to do one thing while Columbia does another. Focusing on Columbia alone, though, Mr. Gordon suggests that it is hypocrisy for the university to allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus while banning military recruiters. William Kristol recently made the same point. This seems a grotesque distortion—in the literal sense of grotesque as the yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. There is a difference between the beliefs of an individual, expressed publicly, and the policies of an organization, maintained by law. Ahmadinejad’s politics are repugnant to me, but if I listened to him speak on the campus of an American university I would be doing so with all the protections of an American citizen. The good president could say what he likes and then I could go on my way, without any fear that his rhetoric of prejudice and hate might subject me to immediate harm. In contrast, homosexuals who wish to enlist in the armed forces are subjected to immediate and absolute discrimination, as mandated by the U.S. government. Whether or not you believe Lee Bollinger should let Ahmadinejad speak, or let ROTC recruit, it seems crude to call his decisions hypocritical. The two issues are entirely different. Perhaps surprisingly, I think I’m actually less warm than Mr. Gordon to the notion of letting President Ahmadinejad speak on Columbia’s campus. Everyone’s entitled to free speech, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s entitled to an auditorium, an audience, and a microphone at one of America’s greatest institutions of learning. Once an invitation is extended, however, it should be maintained unless there is an exceedingly compelling justification for its withdrawal. By my calculus, whiny complaints from The Weekly Standard or from P.C. faculty members don’t qualify.
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