Columbia's Fiasco, Or, How To Give Free Speech a Bad Name

By: Robert Zaller

Posted: 10/5/07

As everyone now knows, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the front man for the ayatollahs' regime in Iran, gave a highly controversial speech at Columbia University while visiting the United Nations.

It would be an understatement to say that Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose credits as an historian include denying the Holocaust and whose diplomacy features regular calls for Israel's extinction, was an unwelcome guest in New York City, with its Jewish mayor and its two million Jewish residents.

He is not particularly dear in Washington, either, where Iran, as a charter member of the Bush Axis of Evil, sits squarely in Dick Cheney's gunsights.

Nonetheless, Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger, whose foot has been in his mouth before, managed to make his guest nearly sympathetic by his stunningly uncivil treatment. It was a propaganda coup for Tehran, and a black eye for academic discourse in this country.

Columbia has a tradition of inviting politically problematic figures; nothing wrong with that. I would personally have drawn the line at Ahmadinejad, but they did give Uganda's Idi Amin a forum, and he had to deny the charge of eating people.

There was something to be said, too, for offering the representative of a country we have been demonizing for nearly thirty years a chance to speak, however unsavory and repellent his views.

We fought a proxy war with Iran in the 1980s, using the good offices of our then ally, Saddam Hussein, and the bitter-enders in the Bush administration will apparently not rest until they have renewed it.

Unfortunately, the Columbia episode played right into their hands, and thus did a political disservice into the bargain.

President Bollinger might have absented himself from Ahmadinejad's speech, but he faced such a community backlash for the invitation that he dared not avoid it.

He might have sat silently, and let someone else introduce Ahmadinejad. Having decided to speak, he might have said simply that giving his guest a platform did not mean an endorsement of his views, but was simply an opportunity for dialogue.

Instead, he delivered a ten-minute tirade against Ahmadinejad to the latter's face. He called him "a petty and cruel dictator" who appeared "fanatical" and "astonishingly undereducated," not to say "quite simply ridiculous." He accused Iran of being a "well-documented" sponsor of state terrorism, thus lending the imprimatur of a great university to the rhetoric of The Weekly Standard.

Alas, it was Dr. Bollinger who made himself appear ridiculous. If Ahmadinejad were in fact as the President described him, then his presence on campus was inexplicable.

Why listen to a fool and a despot? Why dignify the ravings of a tyrant and an ignoramus? Bollinger even expressed doubt that his guest would have the "intellectual courage" to engage in debate. What purpose, then, could lie in having invited him? Was the university trying to bait him, like a circus bear?

If that was the intention, the bear clearly won the round. Ahmadinejad responded that Iranian students did not need to be 'vaccinated' against guest speakers, but were trusted to form their own judgments.

He scored some easy points on American foreign policy, and even his deadpan line about the absence of homosexuality in Iran was clearly meant to amuse. Ahmadinejad is a skillful performer who has honed his reputation for outrageous remarks carefully, simultaneously provoking Westerners and playing to a back-home crowd.

What he is not is a "dictator," as Dr. Bollinger ignorantly suggested. He is the secular clown-face of a theocratic state, whose role is a good deal closer to that of Baghdad Bob than, say, Chemical Ali.

When it comes to hosting real dictators, nobody does it better than Drexel. Ten years ago, we wined and dined Jiang Zemin, then President of the People's Republic of China, on whose hands the blood of Tiananmen Square had hardly yet dried.

Some few of us then expressed our personal revulsion at receiving Jiang in his official capacity, though of course he was welcome as the parent of a Drexel alumnus, Mian Heng (Ph.D., Electrical Engineering). I am sure President Jiang was not discommoded by any moral disgust directed his way, and his visit was, as I heard, a great success.

About a month later, in response to a solicitation for honorary degree nominees for the June commencement, I suggested the name of Wei-Jing Sheng, who had just been flown into exile in the United States after two decades of captivity as China's most celebrated prisoner of conscience.

Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had hailed his release, and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger had called it "a very happy day." I wrote:

"So it is, for in his campaign to bring democracy to one-fifth of the world's population, much of it waged in solitary confinement and under the most brutal conditions of captivity, Wei-Jin Sheng has written a significant chapter in the moral history of our time. Many institutions will want to honor this remarkable and courageous man; Drexel should be first among them."

Wei-Jing Sheng has not received an honorary degree from Drexel. I am still waiting for a reply to my letter.