In his grand confrontation with the Iranian president, President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University did his best to satisfy his American critics. He was tough, not soft; he avoided euphemisms, called the man whom he was addressing a "petty and cruel dictator." President Ahmadinejad had been invited to the Columbia World Leaders Forum, but in the event the neutral term leader was denied him, and he became the first invitee to Columbia's World Dictators Forum. Bollinger further declared that he was meeting with the "mind of evil." Sounds like President Bush! No liberal relativism here.
But Bollinger's critics should not be satisfied, nor should he. Bollinger did not do so well with his toughness as he believes, and he showed a very confused understanding of free speech.
He did not seem to see why President Ahmadinejad came to Columbia. He came there to impress a world audience with a moderate but telling criticism of the United States for trying to "manage the world." He wants to get nuclear weapons for Iran, and for this he needs to disarm and mollify doubtful or neutral powers who might oppose him.
A man who denies the Holocaust and calls for wiping Israel off the map did not need to show that he was tough. He could be moderate in Machiavellian style just by taking the edge off his toughness, just by explaining that in the spirit of inquiry one should always question conventional wisdom and that Israel would be wiped off the map by a
free referendum of all Palestinians ("Jewish Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians and Christian Palestinians"). This might be enough to dissuade those many leaders and countries from acting against Iran's nuclear ambitions who rather agree that the United States is trying to manage the world and who in any event are not eager to act. Bollinger's invitation gave him the opportunity to complain in fairly polite terms that the United States, not Iran, is the bully. Ahmadinejad rather adeptly used Bollinger's toughness to align him with American bullying. In a visit to Iran, Bollinger would not be subjected to such abuse, one would suppose.
In his introduction Bollinger hinted openly that Iran might be subject to a "velvet revolution" of the kind that displaced Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. He even suggested that Columbia might facilitate this event by harboring Iranian dissenters. (By doing so, Bollinger did not say, Columbia might begin to make up for all the harm it has done by honoring, and glorifying, Edward Said and other anti-Western professors.) He added that the arrest of possible dissenters by the Iranian government was "unjustified." A dictatorship has no right of self-preservation by dictatorial means, implying that all regimes should be democratic--again a point of contact between President Bollinger and President Bush.
How true! But this suggests that free speech has political consequences in which Columbia as a university is involved. It is not simply a matter of free inquiry but of velvet revolution, at present focused on Iran but in principle worldwide. Columbia, like the United States, seems to want to manage the world.
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