September 23, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad V Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:50 PM EST I’m grateful to Fred Smoler for his discussion of the 2002 controversy concerning Tom Paulin’s invitation to speak at Harvard. I agree with him that the Crimson’s position, in favor of withdrawing Paulin’s invitation, was wrong. To kind of backhandedly defend the Crimson, their editorial page has to find reasons to express moral outrage five days a week, and the Paulin controversy gave them a more interesting pretext for righteous indignation than, say, Harvard’s changing the date by which one must declare a major. One imagines this opportunity was too good to pass up. Similar motives could, I think, be accurately ascribed to some of Paulin’s faculty backers as well. Lawrence Summers’s role in the whole affair seems a bit murky to me, but I hope the account Mr. Smoler heard is correct. That would certainly add a measure of irony to Summers’s recent flap with the University of California. Let me quickly address Mr. Gordon’s further thoughts on Columbia University. Mr. Gordon writes: “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 hanging them.” This is a nicely symmetrical but oversimplified description of Columbia’s moral dilemma. The university does not ban ROTC recruiters solely as a means of protesting a policy it does not like. I can think of many government agencies that have policies to which the Columbia faculty and administration most likely object, but their recruiters are still allowed to visit the school. ROTC is singled out for special treatment because the process of military recruitment, as it would take place on campus, might violate the university’s nondiscrimination policies. If recruiters came to Columbia, they would be engaging in an activity that treats some students in a degrading and discriminatory way. Banning them from campus has a whiff of political protest to it, but at heart it is a pragmatic move designed to shield students from immediate and active discrimination. President Ahmadinejad’s visit is different. It is an absolute abomination that his government executes homosexuals. But he’s not going to be executing them at Columbia, and he’s not going to be recruiting for the Revolutionary Guard, either. His visit will be limited to a speech that cannot actually harm anyone, except insofar as it wastes 45 minutes of their lives. As I wrote earlier, I’m not saying that Columbia has resolved these two quandaries—whether to ban ROTC and whether to invite Ahmadinejad—correctly. If I had Lee Bollinger’s job, I don’t think I would have decided to welcome the Iranian president into the halls of my school. But both of these situations are complex and tough to resolve. By answering them differently, the university isn’t showing hypocrisy. It’s acknowledging the individual complexities of each situation and dealing with them independently. A final thought. Earlier today I was discussing this issue with a friend who had an interesting take on Bollinger’s invitation to Ahmadinejad. It’s not an example of moral hypocrisy, this friend said, but rather a case of applying certain moral principles very consistently, and perhaps too much so. Over the summer, Bollinger led an effort to reject a boycott, by some British academics, of Israeli scholars and their home institutions. Bollinger decried the measure, saying it “threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ideas.” In other words: You can’t keep someone out of your school just because you don’t like where he’s from or what he believes. I don’t know whether it’s totally appropriate to apply this principle to President Ahmadinejad. But if this is the reasoning behind Bollinger’s decision, then I’d say it’s at least a little respectable.
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