Bollinger’s Academic Enablers

On her National Review Online blog, Candace de Russy discusses the articulate article of David Feith, student editor of The Columbia Current, who wrote a critique of Columbia President Bollinger’s dubious academic standards for free speech. Bolinger, a First Amendment scholar, stated that the standards for rejecting the invitation for Iranian President Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia were based upon the likelihood that the Iranian president wouldn’t take questions from the audience, and was thus unacceptable “in an academic setting.”

Feith purports that this is “a weak standard” and concludes that it amounts to a thinly veiled enabling role for would-be genocidal murderers and their ilk to gain legitimacy at the podium of a prestigious university. In other words if the condition was met that this Holocaust denying leader of an Islamic terrorist state would simply hold a Q & A session, it would prove acceptable to mount Columbia’s esteemed podium. Feith challenges us to be more vigilant in where to draw the line in forming academic policy to determine what degree of evil hate speech falls under the umbrella of free speech in an academic setting and argues that speech advocating murder is where we should draw the line. While our constitution upholds the freedom of speech for all, even from such purveyors of hate speech and murder as KKK and Neo-Nazi groups, universities have a unique responsibility to maintain definitive standards with respect to controversial speakers. This boundary of what is acceptable and what is not, should be drawn somewhere between the far reaches of repressive speech codes and reckless anything-goes free speech.

I have argued in Heil, Professor! that we should be particularly vigilant about what is emanating from the classrooms and podiums of our universities today. A professor’s classroom status is one of enormous authority and power in molding the minds of youth and harnessing their passions for good or evil. I cautioned that this power should be exercised wisely or tragic consequences might ensue. In my paper I argued that such catastrophic evil resulted from the antisemitic theories and racial nationalist ideologies brewing in the 19th century German universities which planted the seeds for Hilter’s later rise to power and Nazism to take hold. Notably, Yehuda Bauer the world’s foremost Holocaust scholar from Yad Vashem, Jerusalem concluded in Rethinking the Holocaust that “without the enthusiastic support of the intelligentsia, neither war nor Holocaust would have ensued,” and he lamented on today’s crisis in academia, “whether we have indeed learned anything, whether we do not still keep producing technically competent barbarians in our universities.”

When we see such apologists and enablers of Islamic terrorism such as Saudi funded Brandeis professor Natana DeLong-Bas, discussed in another Candace de Russy blog, we witness that we have yet a long way to go. DeLong-Bas specializes in Wahhabism, the Saudi fundamentalist ideology, which she trumpets as benevolent, democratic and feminist, while she blames the terrorism emanating from the Muslim world on Israel and the U.S. When her academic enablers argue that DeLong-Bas’ academic rights are to be protected under the statutes of free speech, what standards do they hold for such speakers as Nonie Darwish, David Horowitz, Jim Gilchrist and films such as “Obsession” that have been banned and bullied from campus podiums and the numerous professors who have been denied tenure and marginalized at Columbia because of their pro-Zionist viewpoint? Don’t be fooled by the free speech rhetoric spewed by the duplicitous academic enablers of the destruction of our civilization.

Feith has similarly argued for a responsible vigilance in the marketplace of ideas since an analogous “invisible hand” that governs free economic markets is not free of imperfections and therefore needs some responsible oversight from time to time. He said: “It is therefore irresponsible to promote ideas in the marketplace that would, if they gained even momentary ascendancy, destroy the freedom and openness that allowed them to appear in the first place.”