September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:10 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, of President Ahmadinejad’s invitation to speak at Columbia University, “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.” In 2002, I heard this view ascribed to Lawrence Summers, when Harvard’s literature faculty extended an invitation to the British poet and Oxford lecturer Tom Paulin, who had recently remarked that Brooklyn-born Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza strip should be shot dead (it is not clear why Paulin wanted to spare Bronx-born settlers, but in any case, Brooklyn Jews did seem to peculiarly excite his animus). After the Harvard English department had first proffered and then withdrawn an invitation to deliver the Morris Gray Lecture, Lawrence is said to have counseled that they were wrong on both counts, at which point Paulin was reinvited. Other accounts allege that Summers in fact (or first) pushed for the withdrawal of the invitation, and that the English Department first submitted and then resisted, but if the version I heard is correct, Summers believed that the harm done by appearing to legitimize a call for murder was more than offset by the danger of making it look as if Harvard could be bullied into withdrawing an invitation to speak. The Harvard Crimson made the opposite case, arguing for canceling the invitation: “When the English department learned that he advocated killing civilians and considered the Israeli military a modern-day incarnation of the SS, the content of his poetry became immaterial. . . . To let Paulin give a distinguished lecture at this University after expressing such an offensive and violent message would inevitably legitimize his hateful rhetoric.” I think (although I am not quite sure) the Crimson was wrong about that, although less wrong than some of the Harvard faculty, who couldn’t see any problem at all and in a curious non sequitur asserted that Paulin’s critics had yet again failed to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (no kidding). I think Alexander Burns is wise to distinguish between the right of free speech and the seemliness of Columbia’s higher echelons extending what rather looks like an honor. It is indeed odd to extend what looks like an honor to a man who in his official capacity presides over the judicial murder of homosexuals and the more surreptitious murder of many others. As I read John Steele Gordon, Mr. Gordon in this particular respect agrees with Mr. Burns. As I read the Columbia Spectator online, I notice that at least one student leader is “disappointed” that President Bollinger has spoken more harshly about President Ahmadinejad than he has about an abrasive opponent of illegal immigration, who at the invitation of a student political group addressed a Columbia audience last year. That undergraduate is probably not the only American who this week finds President Bollinger a bit of a disappointment.
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