Bollinger's Columbia: An Absurd Double Standard

Citing the need to promote free speech and the unfettered exchange of conflicting ideas, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger hosted Iranian presidential figurehead Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week. Though the appearance of the most glorified press secretary in modern history brought much ballyhooed fanfare to the University’s Morningside campus, the event itself underscored the hypocrisy of Bollinger’s leadership at Columbia since he took the reigns in 2002.

As president of a private institution of higher education, Bollinger should be seeking to encourage free speech and the exchange of differing ideas, even those of an offensive and odious nature like Ahmadinejad’s. But as the head of Columbia, “PrezBo” must also remember that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Dinesh D’Souza of the Hoover Institute note that Columbia, under Bollinger’s stewardship, has not always been true to these stated mores.

In 2003, a majority of Columbia students said they wanted the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), which had been banished in 1969, reinstated on campus. Two years later, the Columbia faculty took up the issue. Citing the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and contrary to the wishes of its student body, the faculty rejected returning ROTC to campus. Now here is the kicker; Bollinger cast the deciding vote in this matter.

For those who are inclined to think that the ROTC incident was Bollinger’s only philosophical slip as president, think again. As Alison Aldrich of the Collegiate Times notes, Bollinger also failed to provide a safe forum for Jim Gilchrist, president of the Minuteman Project.

In 2006, Mr. Gilchrist was invited to take part in an on campus discussion concerning immigration. During the event, several students stormed the stage thereby putting an end to Mr. Gilchrist’s speech. Event organizers moved to bring Mr. Gilchrist back for another speaking engagement this year, but that invitation has since been rescinded. The reason: an open and honest discussion on immigration has since been deemed “not appropriate” for Columbia.

Given Bollinger’s duplicitous actions as president, Columbia’s Board of Trustees should be calling for his resignation - not because Bollinger knowingly provided a forum for a propagandist whose country is killing American soldiers in Iraq and who is bent on ridding the world of homosexuals and Jews, but because Bollinger’s actions, taken as a whole, have forever disgraced a once proud institution of higher learning. An institution of higher learning that is today, and because of Bollinger, more sympathetic to a genocidal despot than it is to the U.S. military and those who wish to secure this country’s borders. Apparently, “free speech” is valuable to Columbia only when it is high profile and contrarian.