Columbia, the Germ of the Ivies
Nick Gillespie | September 21, 2007, 9:55am
The Wall Street Journal lays it on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's U.S. host, Columbia University:
[H]is regime also executes homosexuals for the crime of being themselves. Maybe if Columbia University President Lee Bollinger were aware of the latter fact he would reconsider his invitation to the Iranian president to speak on his campus next Monday.
Mr. Bollinger, notoriously, voted in 2005 not to readmit an ROTC program to Columbia (absent from the university since 1969), ostensibly on the grounds of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gay service members. Never mind that other upper-tier schools, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania all have ROTC programs. Never mind, too, that in 2003 the Columbia student body voted in favor of readmission by a 2-1 margin. In Mr. Bollinger's view, "the university has an obligation, deeply rooted in the core values of an academic institution and in First Amendment principles, to protect its students from improper discrimination and humiliation."
Mr. Bollinger's position might at least be coherent were he not now invoking the same principles to justify his invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose offenses to gay rights and any other form of human dignity considerably exceed the Pentagon's....
More here, but only for WSJ subscribers, alas.
I'm not sure I follow the full implications of this argument--so the WSJ would be OK with the visit if ROTC were on campus?--but there is almost always something bizarre about university policies regarding campus speakers, organizations, etc. After having gone through grad school in the late '80s and early '90s, the only thing I know for sure is that there are very few people--in academia and in the press, too--who really are consistently in favor of free speech, especially if it means giving time to something you oppose.
Drew W | September 21, 2007, 1:38pm | #
Lesse here.
Columbia invites a major-league international nutjob (who wants to commit a second Holocaust) and defends its decision on free-speech grounds. Fine. I think that the absurd American Nazi nutjob George Lincoln Rockwell was allowed to speak on college campuses in the '60s for the same reason.
Not too long ago, the decidedly minor-league nutjob Jim Gilchrist was
not allowed to speak at Columbia, because a bunch of simple-minded "activists" decided that what Gilchrist was doing was not speaking, but rather "preaching hate," and thus needed to be silenced.
Anyone who thinks that we're really gonna tear Ahmadinejad a new one during the Q&A session is obviously unfamiliar with how he deals with questioners and will be sorely disappointed. Rest assured, Ahmadinejad will leave the auditorium with the same number of assholes he walked in with.
When I was at Columbia ('77-'81), us straight-but-sensitive types were proud of the fact that the student group Gay People at Columbia was the first campus gay organization in the country. I figured that by now the group would have renamed itself, probably as Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transsexual Questioning And Anybody Else We God Forbid Forgot People At Columbia, but in fact they're now called The Columbia Queer Alliance. Whatever.
Presumably the CQA is pleased that Columbia bars the ROTC, because of their adherence to the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policies towards gays. So what does the CQA have to say about the appearance on campus of a man whose government practices a policy of Don't Ask Just Kill towards gays? Surely they must be planning a major protest, with marchers carrying placards showing photos of gay Iranian men swinging from scaffolds. The CQA must be on high alert and bristling for a fight.
At the top of the CQA
home page, under "Upcoming Events," this is all you see:
Queer Sushi! Join us on Thursday, September 13th at 7pm in C555 Lerner for free sushi, fun, and the first CQA meeting of the year!
Sad. Just sad.
