An uncommonly sad day for America dawned several hours ago.
Academia once again appears to be out of control.
At the naïve invitation of Erwin Chemerinsky-like professors, the Dictator of Iran not only is scheduled to speak at the prestigious Columbia University this afternoon, roses will be strewn in his path.
The free speech-spouting flower pitchers are the overjoyed Columbia professors, tingling with goosebumps the way normal people do when they land a long-elusive date with their dream girl or boy.
Free One-Way Speech
Especially in the five years since President Lee Bollinger moved over from the University of Michigan, Columbia’s conduct has been one of the reasons liberals are difficult for normal persons to embrace. (Republicans and other conservatives have not been welcome in Columbia classrooms or forums. You may recall last winter’s assault on the leader of the Minutemen.) )
Since Mario Savio’s days in Berkeley in 1963, at the birth of the Free Speech movement, Columbia has been an international model for the most restricted version of said political principle.
It stings the mind to believe that, as the noble scholar Victor Davis Hansen pointed out last week, the Dictator of Iran — who denies the Holocaust and seriously proposes a second one by vowing to destroy Israel — would be invited to speak on an American college campus.
A Detail: Conditions Apply
The flaw in this favorite of all arguments by liberals is that the American principle of free speech is based on civility and truth-telling, among other requirements. Conditions apply. You may not shout in your church. You may not use profanity in your church or your classroom.
In a duel of one-upsmanship among Columbia profs to see who can make the balmiest statement, John H. Coatsworth, the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, said over the weekend that if Hitler were visiting America, he would be vigorously and warmly invited to address Columbia students. The Dean chose Hitler because Nazi analogies are a direct path into the liberal media. The Dean learned that lesson from the Dictator of Iran. Dean Coatsworth, deliberately ramping up the hype, was the key person behind the invitation to the Dictator.
Killer Lessons?
In Culver City, this would be the equivalent resident dialing Police Chief Don Pedersen and asking him to send the two alleged killers in recent Culver City homicide over to address the monthly meeting of the Ladies Aid Society.
Several aspects of the Dictator’s appearance today are galling:
First, that he was enthusiastically, proudly invited when he should not be allowed into this country; second, that there is scant outcry across America, except from the usual suspects on the right; third, and most damning of all, the Dictator will be presented to the gullible, lefty-softened students at a q-and-a session as one of the two or three most famous, not notorious, government leaders on earth.
One Kind of Dictator
Dictators, you know, come from the right and the left, and those on the left routinely are cast as ordinary fellows just this side of sainthood. Or haven’t you noticed the reconstruction of Castro as a decent chap over the last four or five years?
Look closely at the words Dean Coatsworth used to justify the Dictator’s heroic welcome today at Columbia. How regal Dean Coatsworth sounds when he invokes the sacredness of free speech.
“Opportunities to hear, challenge and learn from controversial speakers of different views are central to the education and training of students for citizenship in a shrinking and still dangerous world.”
Only at a glance does this statement seem to be a valiant defense of the notion of a traditional American liberal education.
No Courage Required
Dean Coatsworth looks brave until you realize how far left of center President Bollinger and at least 97 percent of the Columbia faculty are. When everybody who counts agrees with you, there is no risk in making such a foolish, morally unsupportable statement.
Free speech — even if your political interests do not stray beyond the Culver City border — is a gun-guarded, dare-you, one-way street at Columbia and many other college campuses. You are guaranteed free speech — as long as you largely concur with me.
Relative to their liberal colleagues, conservative academics are treated similarly to the way FDR handled America’s West Coast Japanese population during World War II.
The Team of Erwin and Britney
Take the Britney Spears of law professors. The academically martyred Erwin Chemerinsky, now America’s best known law prof, has been shopping himself to law schools for months, desperately trying to escape from Duke, where last year he embarrassed himself by helping to prosecute the innocent lacrosse team players. But because the professor’s far left philosophy is in sync with most American newspapers and all but one television network, through his flap with far left U.C. Irvine, he became the new Dreyfus.
On the Right, the Sound of Silence
Please follow me across the aisle, to the right side. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been appointed a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on another campus that is a bastion of one-way free speech, Stanford University. Twenty-one hundred faculty members and assorted other boobs and boobettes last week protested Mr. Rumsfeld’s appointment— I presume because they thought their campus was for liberals only.
If you hear anything about this flap, I guarantee the tone will not be close to the waves of sympathy that washed out of America’s newsrooms for Mr. Chemerisnky….
The New Movie Critic
Finally:
When it comes to entertainment, you will be depriving yourself if you don’t catch the film “In the Valley of Elah,” which just opened…
