September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST Just let me note that I entirely agree that the hiring, firing, and now rehiring of Erwin Chemerinsky to be dean of the new law school at the University of California–Irvine was a profound embarrassment. It at least has had a happy ending. But Chancellor Michael V. Drake has admitted “bungling” the whole business and taken the blame entirely upon himself. He did not act at the behest of an intolerant bunch of faculty members. So I think the Chemerinsky incident was a one-off. People being disinvited (not to mention fired) because of protests from the left-most members of university faculties are quite common, partly because college administrators (noting the fate of Lawrence Summers at Harvard, perhaps) are unable or unwilling to confront them. But Mr. Burns writes, “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.” Indeed there is, but that is not the case here. ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by publicly hanging them and many have been hanged. See here and here. (Warning: The pictures are very, very ugly.) If representatives of governments that discriminate against homosexuals are unwelcome on the campus of Columbia University, then why is President Ahmadinejad, the head of a government that hangs them, being welcomed there? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the blood of homosexuals on the hand that Lee Bollinger will shake on Monday.
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