Last week President Ahmadinejad of Iran was invited to not only visit, but speak at Columbia University in New York City. The President suggested to thousands of listeners that the Holocaust was not fact, but theory. He further submitted that Iran, the entire country, contained no homosexuals.
His comments were at best offensive, besides completely inaccurate and irresponsible.
Most would denounce Ahmadinejad as ignorant or crazy. In fact, the president of Columbia University, Lee C. Bollinger said to Ahmadinejad’s stiff, smiling face that he was “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” But the fact that the Iranian leader is controversial in the most offensive, jaw-dropping way didn’t stop Bollinger from inviting Amadenijad to not only visit the university, but stand on his own soap box. It certainly wasn’t a decision that went without global criticism.
The students, whether they loved or hated Ahmadinejad, seemed to appreciate the opportunity to at least hear what he had to say.
One Columbia student summed up the situation well in a New York Times article the day after the event. “I’m proud of my university today,” Stina Reksten said. “I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom.”
USM had it’s own academic freedom concerns last September on the Portland campus. An art display by Thomas Manning, a convicted murderer of a New Jersey State Trooper, was abruptly and nervously pulled down from the walls of Portland’s Woodbury Campus Center due to controversy surrounding the display.
The protesters made noise when USM referred to Manning as a political prisoner, something Manning and his advocates maintain is true. USM later revised their description of him, putting quotation marks around the term, “political prisoner.”
It wasn’t the art itself that was problematic for protesters, which included the Maine Chiefs of Police Association. It was the fact that Manning was convicted of murder, and now had his art celebrated on campus. They felt he was a criminal whose contribution to society should be silenced because of his background.
When USM pulled the exhibit, then-USM President Richard Pattenaude said he was pulling it because Manning and his partner Raymond Luc Levasseur’s backgrounds “have impacted the exhibit to the point where the exhibit itself, and the purpose behind it, have become misunderstood and needlessly divisive.”
But an atmosphere in which controversial issues are exposed and debated is exactly what a university, an institute for higher learning, should welcome. We shouldn’t cower in fear at the first sign of dissent. A university that claims to be “a neutral forum for the expression and discussion of ideas,” as Pattenaude said, looks foolish when it’s only open to discussion when that discussion is easy-going and pleasant.
Last year, I wrote a lame column about the exhibit closing; that I wasn’t sure how I felt about it because maybe some wounds are better left untouched, and perhaps we do need to be concerned with the pain of those affected by Manning’s criminal acts. I felt bad for the slain state trooper’s family.
But surely there were Jews, homosexuals, and educated world-citizens everywhere who were pained by Ahmadinejad’s irresponsible and erroneous statements. Certainly members of the Jewish community-particularly those whose families were brutally and systematically murdered-felt a slap in the face when Ahmadinejad denied that it ever happened. But even Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak, if for no other reason than to provoke conversation amongst students.
I’m pretty sure that the president of Iran, currently pushing to develop its nuclear weapons program, has more power than Thomas Manning, who’s currently serving 133 years behind the bars of a Virginia federal prison.
Though our discussion and exploration of what academic freedom means in America was stifled last year through our administration’s embarrassed and scared reaction to a protest that paled in comparison to Columbia University’s last Tuesday, it’s encouraging to see the debate continue on this campus. Two letters to the editor this week continue that dialogue.
USM should follow Columbia’s example. Whether the university agreed or disagreed, hated or loved what Ahmadinejad was bound to-and did-amplify to a crowd of thousands, his words got people civically engaged in way that they weren’t 15 minutes before he took the podium.
Columbia’s students were allowed their academic freedoms. It’s unfortunate that USM students were not.