The eyes of the world gazed upon Columbia in September when the University invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at the World Leaders Forum, the weeklong speakers series which Bollinger launched in his first year at Columbia to capitalize on the University’s access to the United Nations.
A year earlier, in fall 2006, similar plans for a speech by the noted Holocaust revisionist and reported suppressor of human rights had briefly arisen after Ahmadinejad accepted an invitation by the School of International and Public Affairs that was scuttled quickly thereafter due to security concerns. In the interceding year, Bollinger said he would have supported such an invitation if he could have assured it would be done in an academic context and that the event would be secure.
Suddenly, the media descended upon Columbia as people around the world wondered what Ahmadinejad would say in his first-ever public appearance at an American university. Pundits and politicians from across the country condemned the invitation as a case of Ivy League liberalism run amok, and many alumni voiced their opposition to the event. The area just outside the main University gates became a circus, as news organizations—barred from broadcasting on campus—set up their satellite trucks and demonstrators from outside the University marched with signs, looking for anybody with a microphone to voice their opinions.
Meanwhile, student leaders largely defended Bollinger, both in a meeting with him and to outside media, condemning Ahmadinejad’s views but embracing the University’s right to invite the man and its role as a place to confront ideas which might be considered harmful or destructive. They echoed a statement in which Bollinger stated,
“It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas.”
Over the Yom Kippur weekend, student groups—largely headed by Jewish organizations—quickly organized a forum for the day of the event in which students were invited to speak. The administration set up overflow rooms and a screening on South Lawn, and as the significance of the speech became clear, many professors called off classes for the day or allowed students to skip without penalty.
In the days leading up to the speech, as well as over the previous year when discussing a potential event in the context of the failed invitation from the year before, Bollinger promised that he would begin the event with a “series of sharp challenges,” confronting Ahmadinejad on many of his views and actions. On the day of the speech, he followed through on his promise, denouncing Ahmadinejad’s positions on Israel and human rights, saying that Ahmadinejad exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” and stating that his views of the Holocaust showed him to be “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”
For his part, Ahmadinejad took exception at the “political introduction,” which he called an “insult”—a view that would be echoed by many students and faculty in days that followed the event. After a wandering speech about the intersection of science and faith, Ahmadinejad responded to student questions put to him by School of Public Affairs Acting Dean John Coatsworth. In response to a question about the execution of gay Iranians, Ahmadinejad famously denied the existence of homosexuality in Iran, saying, “We do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.” He also denied that the nation was pursuing the development of nuclear weapons and defended his desire to conduct research into the Holocaust while generally evading questions about the treatment of women in Iran, the nation’s support of terrorism, and whether he desired the destruction of the state of Israel.
It was, in many ways, the quintessential Bollinger controversy, touching on many of the issues that had marked his first six years as University president.
A widely noted First Amendment scholar, many of the controversies that Bollinger has confronted during his time at Columbia have been phrased in terms of free speech, from the controversy regarding alleged intimidation in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department in his third year to Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist’s interrupted on-campus speech in his fifth, when Bollinger called on students to “confront bad words with better words.” The initial invitation to Ahmadinejad, and then Bollinger’s condemning introduction, brought these questions to a head.
Bollinger, like many Columbia administrators and faculty members, has at times been at the center of debates regarding Israel and the Middle East, notably during the MEALAC controversy and a handful of high-profile tenure cases during which alumni and others outside the University have launched campaigns against potential tenure grantees whose views on the Middle East were deemed offensive and objectionable. The invitation of Ahmadinejad reignited these debates on campus.
Under Bollinger’s leadership, Columbia has also been accused of being a bastion of liberalism and anti-Americanism, a charge which was renewed with vigor during the invitation.
But as it raised these questions, the event also cemented Bollinger’s position as the powerful head of an influential global institution.
josh.hirschland@columbiaspectator.com