Ahmadinejad at Columbia

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is due to speak at Columbia University today. Some have condemned Columbia for inviting him. Others are defending the invitation on a combination of free speech grounds and the beneficial effects of giving Ahmadinejad an opportunity to discredit himself by what he says.

Columbia President, Lee Bollinger, appeals to a number of different principles in getting behind the invitation, which was issued by the university's School of International and Public Affairs.

One of these principles is 'the development of freedom of speech'. On that score Bollinger says:

It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas.

He's clearly right about this: listening doesn't imply endorsement. On the other hand, there's nothing in the principle of freedom of speech that requires you to help to promote or publicize views that you find deeply objectionable. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denier and Holocaust-denial is one of the most poisonous forms of anti-Semitism, apart from being a brazen historical lie. Must Columbia, in the interests of 'the development of free speech', host avowed racists of every stripe, other genocide-deniers, men who think that women are, by their nature, born to be subservient, and people who think that homosexuality is a sin and should be punishable? Of course not. Would they host such people? I don't know.

A second thing Bollinger appeals to is the power of 'dialogue and reason', the principle of 'meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs'. Like free speech, this is a good principle. However, the idea that you need to get Ahmadinejad to Columbia in order to be able to meet his bad beliefs and subject them to the power of reason doesn't withstand scrutiny. The man is the president of Iran, his views broadcast across the world whenever he opens his mouth. He isn't beholden to Columbia to obtain a platform for them.

One thing Bollinger says that I agree with is this:

[W]e must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes.

Yes, that's a standard norm of academic freedom. But it doesn't establish that Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs made a good choice (in the light of 'academic purposes') in offering Iran's president the facilities of a distinguished university to propagate his views.