The Tough-Guy Liberal

...It's no doubt a good experience for students at Columbia and their innocent professors to spend an hour listening to a man who they have to know is lying to them through his teeth...

...He was tough, not soft...

...Here is his chance to show up the "mind of evil," but he has nothing to say...

...he gave the impression that insults are speech at its freest and finest...

...Bollinger did not do so well with his toughness as he believes, and he showed a very confused understanding of free speech...

...In Iran, he said, we respect women as mothers, and accordingly we believe in talk, not guns...

...By inviting Mahmoud Ahma-dinejad to speak at Columbia, President Bollinger got himself confused between the business of politics and the virtue of a university...

...Bollinger's invitation gave him the opportunity to complain in fairly polite terms that the United States, not Iran, is the bully...

...Well, here it is: what is the basis of Bollinger's revulsion...

...Free speech is "robust debate" over ideas...

...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...

...These are matters the Secretary of State or anyone commenting on foreign policy might raise, but one would expect the president of a university, speaking for the university, and claiming that a university stands for ideas, to add something to the debate that is the peculiar contribution of a university...

...No liberal relativism here...

...Ahmadinejad rather adeptly used Bollinger's toughness to align him with American bullying...

...But you cannot pretend that no tuition is being paid for what you learn...

...But insults harm free speech by drawing attention away from the ideas of speakers, and expressing revulsion harms inquiry by discouraging or preventing cool, dispassionate analysis...

...He, the man of science in the expanded sense, could see better than we, who lack a sense of history—the wrong done to the Palestinians is 60 years old!—and are overcome by partiality...

...This will help them learn about politics...

...Science arises from piety and is not opposed to religion...

...A man who denies the Holocaust and calls for wiping Israel off the map did not need to show that he was tough...

...Yet, strange to say, Bollinger does not restrain his own impulses of this kind...

...But can you do that...

...The latter is the hope of universities ever since the late sixties...

...Bollinger the velvet revolutionary thinks you cannot, but Bollinger the apostle of inquiry thinks you can...

...he avoided euphemisms, called the man whom he was addressing a "petty and cruel dictator...

...Ahmadinejad made another instructive point...

...He also believes that freedom of inquiry can go together with the desire to "express revulsion...

...His reproaches to Ahmadinejad concern his deeds— arrests, executions, denial of the Holocaust, demanding the destruction of Israel, promoting terrorism, advancing a nuclear weapons program...

...Bollinger further declared that he was meeting with the "mind of evil...

...Imitating Bollinger, the questioners at the speech also avoided ideas...

...Bollinger had said to Ahmadine-jad that he wanted to express his revulsion "at what you stand for...

...Instead, Bollinger dismissed Ahmadinejad's ideas before he heard them, saying that they will reveal a "fanatical mind-set"—which in fact they did not...

...He did not seem to see why President Ahmadinejad came to Columbia...

...Ahmadinejad chose to present Iran as one country like all the others, not endowed with fanatical purpose and also not inspired with wrongful ambition like the government of a certain other country he could name...

...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...

...In a visit to Iran, Bollinger would not be subjected to such abuse, one would suppose...

...Appropriating the language of American liberals, he maintained it was necessary to look to the "root causes" of the disputes Bollinger complained of...

...He added that the arrest of possible dissenters by the Iranian government was "unjustified...

...He even suggested that Columbia might facilitate this event by harboring Iranian dissenters...

...He came there to impress a world audience with a moderate but telling criticism of the United States for trying to "manage the world...

...But you cannot help honoring him if you invite him to speak at a place where ideas are taken seriously for their truth...

...But Bollinger's critics should not be satisfied, nor should he...

...It was Ahmadinejad who spoke of ideas...

...He said to Bollinger that in Iran, people don't introduce speakers by insulting them, but rather give them respect...

...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...

...Columbia, like the United States, seems to want to manage the world...

...Bollinger, however, presented his invitation to Ahmadinejad as the occasion for free speech, the particular business of a university...

...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...

...We must always, he says, restrain our impulses against "engagement with ideas we dislike or fear...

...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 has nothing to say about Ahmadinejad's ideas or about any ideas...

...He began with the invocation of Almighty God and later said that piety was the only guide to life...

...dent Bush...

...Ahmadinejad had a better understanding of the conditions of free speech than did Bollinger, who thought it was possible to invite and listen to an enemy without honoring him...

...You can refrain from honoring Ahmadinejad while still engaging his ideas by reading his speeches and writings and by listening to him...

...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...

...But this suggests that free speech has political consequences in which Columbia as a university is involved...

...by Harvey Mansfield In his grand confrontation with the Iranian president, President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University did his best to satisfy his American critics...

...So Columbia at this time was not guilty of honoring what should be dishonored...

...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...

...Sounds like PresiHarvey Mansfield is professor of government at Harvard and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...He tried to bring his university into the political arena, and he meant well to our country, but instead of embarrassing our common enemy he embarrassed himself...

...Science means "illumination" rather than control or command over nature, and so science includes but surpasses the experimental sciences of the West...

...Bollinger, however, seems to think that free speech is quite compatible with offering insults...

...It is not simply a matter of free inquiry but of velvet revolution, at present focused on Iran but in principle worldwide...

...Well, yes, if you separate ideas from deeds...