What Does Free Speech Mean to You?

Roger Kimball, writing at RealClearPolitics, quotes with disdain and outrage the following words from President Bollinger of Columbia justifying their decision to allow Ahmadinejad to speak:

I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas--to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life--and a civil society--prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation's most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

His reaction:

President Bollinger's sophomoric conception of free speech is precisely the sort of supine intellectualism that, if consistently embraced, would make free speech impossible...  It would be interesting to know where Columbia would draw the line. In a breathtaking interview on Fox News, Columbia Dean John Coatsworth cheerfully affirmed that, were Adolf Hitler in New York and willing to engage in "discussion" and "debate," Columbia "would certainly invite him." Who would doubt it?

It "would make free speech impossible?"  What a baffling claim!  How would this bizarre eventuality come about, pray tell?  If the US military were disbanded, maybe.  But how could Ahmadinejad be a threat to freedom on a podium.  Perhaps it's a propaganda coup for Iran, perhaps not; as Bollinger implies, Iranians might think, "Wow! And we would never allow Bush to give a speech here."  It seems rather a show of strength, actually: your ideology is so unconvincing that you can preach it as much as you want, right here in one of our leading university.  We're really not worried.  Bollinger is absolutely right: we can win an argument against our enemies any day of the week, and that's an important advantage, let's use it.  Funny, Bollinger sounds like Bush.

Comments

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Hitler? That's history.

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[Nato]

It was good to hear students laughing at some parts of his speech.

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If it's corruption you're worried about, wouldn't McCain be a better bet? Even if Ron Paul would do anything about it, he seems like a no-hoper.

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What are some quotes about freedom in the novel Brave new world to represent the World states freedom and John?
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