Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Posted by Naomi Rockler-Gladen Sep 25, 2007

Colleges and universities compete to bring in big name speakers. Securing a popular speaker is a great way for a school to land some positive media coverage. So I have to ask--what was Columbia University thinking when they invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak? Surely they must have known the amount of controversy this would evoke-- especially in New York City, of all places.

Seriously, I'm curious about Columbia's motives. Is it all about free speech? The introductory remarks of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger attest to this motive. To quote Bollinger, "The scope of free speech and academic freedom should itself always be open to further debate. As one of the more famous quotations about free speech goes, it is “an experiment, as all life is an experiment"...[T]his is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself."

In light of the recent mess at Colorado State University, we need to be very concerned about the issue of freedom of spech on college campuses. But does freedom of speech mean you have to invite controversial speech of this nature? I don't know the answer to that question.

Perhaps part of the point of the speech was to let Ahmadinejad hang himself on his own free speech noose. Thanks to Columbia, we all got to hear Iran's leader claim there are no homosexuals there-- and we got ot hear his evasive and creepy answers to questions about Israel, the Holocaust, and nukes.

Honestly, I'm not sure what I think of Columbia's decision to bring Ahmadinejad to campus. But it must have been one heck of a day on campus, huh? To read the play-by-play of the Iranian president's visit, check out the Columbia Spectator's Ahmadineblog.