A leading American university has just organized a glitzy media event for an oppressor of religious minorities, debaser of academic freedoms, and sponsor of war crimes by private death squads (a.k.a. terrorists). Of course the university is Columbia and the invitee is Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, the world’s leading proponent of ethnic annihilation, who has boasted of his desire to wipe out a country and is busily assembling the weapons with which to do it.
Objections were raised, petitions signed, demonstrations organized-it was protest, wasn’t it? Certainly not. Everyone knows that when friends of Israel are prominent among the objectors it’s not protest but “pressure.” Check the news coverage to verify. In the days after the event, Columbia students and faculty were, ahem, protesting President Bollinger for having been rude to the visitor; the university, it seems, must not only invite a tyrant but treat him with respect.
The supporters of Columbia’s invitation rest their case on the principle of academic freedom. In the service of this principle, it’s not relevant that Ahmadinejad’s regime purges and imprisons professors and has, according to an estimate in the Wall Street Journal, expelled an estimated 3000 dissident students. Rather, the principle of academic freedom requires Columbia to use its facilities to showcase a leader who rules by being that freedom’s destroyer. According to John Coatsworth, Columbia’ morality-challenged Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, the university should in the service of this principle even extended the courtesy to Hitler.
To be sure, Columbia has on occasion relented on this hard rule. In 2006 Columbia administrators punted when Chris Gilchrist, the opponent of illegal immigration who founded the Minuteman Project, and who had been invited to campus by the college Republican Club, was forced off stage by student thugs-I mean protesters. Just last week, Columbia Political Union, which was considering a re-invitation to Gilchrist, decided after consulting with student groups (so AP reports; it’s unclear why such consultation is necessary on matters of principle) that there was no need to actually give him a chance to talk on campus. And certainly the principle does not require Columbia to make room for ROTC, which fails to give equal rights to homosexuals; only to make room for Ahmadinejad, whose regime executes them.
What indeed is the university’s obligation under academic freedom? I would have thought that it is to give scholars the right to pursue inquiry without the fetters of dogma.
But the Columbia incident has taught me that I’m wrong. Are researchers inquiring into the causes of crime? In defense of academic freedom, the university must set up the stage for self-glorification by criminals. Perhaps the subject is child sexual exploitation. The university president must now provide a public platform for the Man/Boy Love Association. Examining war, peace, and human rights? Let the university lend its facilities to an inciter of genocide.
According to my former and more modest understanding of academic freedom, the university should protect scholars’ privilege to pursue inquiry as the evidence leads them and to stand for theses that advance our knowledge. Now I’ve graduated to the higher principle that the university as an institution must present to students no ethical stand whatsoever. The university in its institutional capacity is allowed no moral discernment. It must give the privilege of the podium to all, the sole exceptions being American military recruiters and opponents of illegal-immigration.
Had Columbia embraced this enlightened principle sooner, it could have built up quite a record. After a rousing visit by Hitler, it could have hosted an extended free-speech seminar series, featuring Mussolini, Stalin (many Columbia profs would have been thrilled in his day), Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam, and Milosevic, among other 20th century notables. It’s not too late, Columbia. It’s only proper and in keeping with principle to show no prejudice against the Sudan and now organize a special reception for president al-Bashir.
Ernest Sternberg is a professor at the University at Buffalo and serves on the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
