In the incoherent world of today's college campus, the former can disqualify someone from speaking to an audience; the latter apparently cannot. Conservatives have been noting the rather odd standards for being invited to the campus of Columbia University. The Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) has been banned from Columbia's campus since 1969. The original ban was no doubt an act of protest against the Vietnam war, but when Columbia President Lee Bollinger helped defeat the ROTC's return in 2003, the chief reason offered was the military's unfriendly policy toward homosexuals.
Strange then that Bollinger defends the invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The policy of Iran toward homosexuals is not exactly "don't ask, don't tell." The Washington Post has the story:
Not since they confronted snapshots of a slightly built young man named Matthew Shepard and the fence where he was left for dead in 1998 by two drug-addled no-hopers in Laramie, Wyo., have gay people been so agitated by a set of photographic images. Protesters brought black-and-white reproductions of the pictures -- which show the public execution last year of two teenage boys in Iran -- to a rally in Dupont Circle yesterday afternoon...
Here is how The Nation put it:
On July 19 in the northeastern city of Mashhad, Iran, two teenagers, Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari, were put to death for a crime involving homosexual intercourse. Asgari, at least, was underage at the time of the offense. Before the execution Marhoni and Asgari were detained for approximately fourteen months and received 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft.
President Bollinger justified the invitation by appeal to Columbia's "tradition of robust debate." Maybe robust debate with murderous barbarians is good idea. But when you invite a Holocaust denier who represents a government that has strangled to death countless young men and women for sexual immorality, not to mention the many women stoned to death, and you reject the ROTC because the military isn't sufficiently welcoming to gay people, one has to wonder if being an enemy of the United States is not the virtue that wipes away all sins.
President Bollinger heroically resisted those who called for him to cancel President Ahmadinejad's invitation. Which raises the question: what exactly does it take to have one's invitation to speak canceled? Fortunately for us, Professor Schaff has already answered that question.
The latest news from the world of academia is the dis-invitation to Lawrence Summers at UC Davis due to the protests of several faculty. Summers, you might remember, was forced out as president of Harvard because he made some politically incorrect remarks attempting to explain the dearth of women in the hard sciences.
Lawrence Summers lost his position at Harvard because he dared to say something for which there is ample scientific support: that men and women think differently by nature, and that this psychological dimorphism has something to do with the distribution of the sexes among the scientific disciplines. He was not excusing the latter. In fact, his point was that if we want to change the latter, we need to be aware of the biological influences. But because he dared to challenge the leftist/feminist orthodoxy, he is so tainted he cannot even be allowed to speak in public. See my post here for the original story.
This is the world of today's academic left. A respected academic who says something unfashionable is silenced. A man whose government actually murders homosexuals, he is allowed to speak.
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