The only reasonable response is, "Who gives a rat's patoot?" If I deny the
reality of the Holocaust, or insist that "2 plus 2 equals a duck," or that I
can make 10-minute brownies in six minutes, responding that you may disagree
with what I say but will defend my right to say it is a shabby way to sound
courageous while actually taking a spineless dive. How brave of you to
defend me from a threat that doesn't exist while lamely avoiding actually
challenging my statements.
Similarly, there's been a lot of high-minded gasbaggery over this elusive
idea of "academic freedom." A more selectively invoked standard is hard to
come by. Somehow, when former Harvard President Larry Summers, one of
America's most esteemed economists, told a group of academics that the
distribution of high-level cognitive abilities may not be evenly spread out
among men and women, activist feminist professors got the vapors and
claimed, from the comfort of their fainting couches, that their hysteria
could only be cured by Summers' head on a platter. But Ward Churchill, a
penny-ante buffoon who seems to have downloaded his Ph.D. from
cheapdegrees.com, compares the victims of 9/11 to Holocaust planner Adolf
Eichmann, and suddenly academic freedom demands Churchill keep his tenured
job forever, at taxpayers' expense.
More to the point, academic freedom wasn't at issue in the Columbia case.
Unlike Summers and like Churchill, Ahmadinejad wasn't trying to explore the
truth. Holocaust deniers aren't truth-tellers, they are deliberate liars and
hucksters. Ahmadinejad didn't want "dialogue," he wanted propaganda points.
He was there as the mouthpiece for a dangerous, oppressive regime. But many
opponents of the Bush administration think the Iranian regime has been
inappropriately demonized, and the Columbia crowd thought they could help
defuse tensions. The irony is that Columbia's decision backfired, and the
university actually magnified that alleged demonization.
But let's not forget that Columbia didn't have the courage to say honestly
that it wanted to dabble in foreign policy and controversy, not free
inquiry. Saying it was all about free speech doesn't make it so.