In the matter of the Holocaust-denying, terrorism-sponsoring, nuke-seeking, wipe-Israel-off-the-map-threatening, we-got-no-gays-in-Iran-spouting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his September 24 showcase speech at Columbia University: It would be easier to stomach the free-speech grandstanding of Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president and Ahmadinejad’s histrionically hostile host, and others of Bollinger’s ilk if they were a bit less selective in their devotion to the First Amendment. When a student group recently canceled an event featuring an anti-illegal-immigration speaker for fear of a hecklers’ veto by leftist students, for example, Bollinger had nothing to say.
Looking to the other coast, it would be easier to admire the indignation of certain academics and journalists at the temporarily shabby treatment of crusading liberal constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky by the University of California (Irvine) if those same people had also spoken out against the far more widespread campus censorship of less liberal figures.
Those most recently censored include former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a mainstream Democrat whose invitation to speak to the University of California Board of Regents was derailed by the same sort of politically correct faculty mob that drove him from Harvard University’s presidency in February 2006.
As to Bollinger, let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was wise to provide Ahmadinejad with one of the very few forums in which he could score propaganda points around the world by winning televised applause from an American audience while being hectored by an American big shot.
The assumption is ably refuted, however, by David Bernstein, a professor at George Mason University Law School, on the blog The Volokh Conspiracy: "Ahmadinejad is the head of state of an enemy state, whose armed forces are killing American soldiers with equipment they provide to Iraqi insurgents…. American universities should [not give] a respectful forum to our enemies."
Let’s further assume that it was clever of Bollinger to pelt Ahmadinejad with insults before the Iranian president spoke. Clever, at least, in somewhat shielding Bollinger’s backside from criticisms such as Bernstein’s. Of course, Bollinger’s self-serving stratagem also gave the tyrant a golden opportunity to come off as a victim of rank discourtesy and to voice the pious lie that in Iran, "we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment."
But can the Columbia president who posed as such a champion of open and robust discourse in the matter of Ahmadinejad be the same Bollinger who has been so quiet in the face of a student group’s September 18 decision to rescind an invitation to an anti-illegal-immigration speaker, for fear that he would be silenced (a second time) by protesters?
The canceled speaker, Jim Gilchrist, heads the Minuteman Project, which has mounted civilian border patrols. The Columbia Political Union rescinded his invitation to speak, apparently because of threats of a repeat performance by leftist students who cut short the remarks of Gilchrist and another Minuteman leader last October. The protesters precipitated a brawl by storming the stage with banners and shouting that Gilchrist and his cohort had "no right to speak."
Bollinger denounced the rushing-the-stage tactic at the time. But Columbia’s reaction was so tepid that one of the stage-stormers, David Judd, then president of the International Socialist Organization, told a reporter, "I view the fact that I got the lightest possible punishment as a small victory."
And now the cancellation of Gilchrist’s planned speech, with Bollinger’s quiet acquiescence, shows at best a lack of backbone to stand up to raw mob intimidation.
Bollinger has never made a serious effort to use such episodes to reverse the censorial drift of Columbia’s campus politics. Other examples range from the suspension last fall (later revoked) of the men’s hockey club for posting recruiting flyers that said "Stop being a pussy" — a less-than-tasteful play on Columbia’s athletic "Lions" — to the ideological litmus tests used by Columbia’s Teachers College to evaluate student performance. Among these tests: "respect for diversity and commitment to social justice." That terminology is a standing invitation for professors to penalize any student who criticizes racial preferences, openly votes Republican, or defends Larry Summers.
This is also the same Bollinger who joined a vote of the university’s Senate in 2005 to continue a 36-year ban of ROTC programs from Columbia because of the military’s discrimination (which I, too, deplore) against service members who admit to being gay. Did anyone tell him that Ahmadinejad’s government executes people who admit to being gay?
It took a unanimous Supreme Court to teach Bollinger — a prominent First Amendment scholar — that his argument (in an amicus brief that he joined) in a major 2006 case was so far-fetched as to be an embarrassment. The argument, also endorsed by hundreds of other legal academics, was that universities might well have a First Amendment right to keep collecting millions of federal tax dollars despite a law cutting off those that do not give military recruiters the same access to students as they give other potential employers.
Now to the West Coast. Perhaps you haven’t read about how UC’s Board of Regents rescinded Larry Summers’s invitation to speak at a September 19 dinner in Sacramento. The decision was a cave-in to pressure from 300 professors at UC Davis who protested that Summers "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia."
The silencing of Summers was easy to miss. The Washington Post did not report it. The New York Times gave it three sentences. The Los Angeles Times ignored it, except for one nonstaff op-ed.
By contrast, the briefly martyred Chemerinsky — who was hired, fired (based on conservative complaints about his political views), and rehired (thanks in part to free-speech conservative support) as founding dean of a new law school at UC Irvine — inspired 17 articles and editorials in the Los Angeles Times, two articles and an outraged editorial in The New York Times, and one article in The Washington Post.
The notion that Summers stands for "gender" — let alone "racial" — prejudice is a fantasy espoused by loopy radicals and people ignorant of what he actually said about women and certain sciences. (For more, see my 2/5/05 and 2/26/05 NJ columns.) But loopy radicals dominate political discourse on many a campus, and they despise intellectual diversity.
These episodes, and enough others to fill volumes, expose the double standard that many academics and journalists apply to free-speech controversies. Such people passionately champion the freedoms of liberals such as Chemerinsky and "dialogue" with America-haters such as Ahmadinejad. But they downplay, ignore, and in some cases support censorship of conservative and even centrist speakers.
Universities across America have thinly veiled speech codes, misleadingly called anti-"harassment" policies. These make it dangerous for students to say anything that might offend minorities, women, and gays.
The respected Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based champion of civil liberties on campus, found in a recent survey that 68 percent of more than 330 top universities and other schools explicitly ban speech that the First Amendment would protect if uttered off campus. Meanwhile, left-leaning students, following their elders’ example, have disrupted multiple speeches by people whom they deem to be too conservative and have gleefully pulled off multiple mass thefts of "offensive" (meaning conservative) student publications.
Indeed, the same UC Irvine that will soon have Erwin Chemerinsky as its law dean is among the many schools that have squashed so-called affirmative-action bake sales, which charge white male customers more than women and minorities to satirize the racial preferences that pervade selective college admissions.
Where were the liberal champions of free speech then? And where were they when faculty members and journalists were clamoring for Duke University to censor members of its women’s lacrosse team for taking the field in May 2006 wearing signs of their (subsequently vindicated) belief that their friends on the men’s team were innocent of rape?
Where, for that matter, was Chemerinsky? Then and now a Duke Law School professor, he has long championed civil liberties. But he was very, very quiet — as were all of his colleagues, save one — while some of the worst prosecutorial conduct in memory unfolded under his nose. This amid a mob assault by scores of other Duke professors and journalists against innocent Duke students and the presumption of innocence itself.
In the words of George Mason’s Bernstein, "The Chemerinsky episode, disturbing though it was, should not distract us from the primary challenge facing academic freedom in American universities: the rise of an academic far-left establishment that seeks to use universities as a base for political activism and is perfectly willing to violate accepted standards of academic freedom to achieve that goal."