Pick your poison -- and it's not just Ahmadinejad at Columbia University! Faculty at Stanford say the Hoover Institute has no business inviting former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld as a visitor.
The Board of Regents of the University of California rescinds a speaking invitation to former Harvard President Larry Summers in response to professors at U. Cal Davis who think Summers represents "gender and racial prejudice."
And of course when it comes to Iranian President Ahmadinajad, well, New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is threatening to withhold public funds from Columbia University in New York for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak during the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York, while. Senator Mitch McConnell says he cannot understand how a great institution like Columbia, dedicated to the "free exchange of ideas," can invite this 'dictator' [actually he was elected] to engage in, er, a free exchange of ideas!
What's up here? Is this what the shrinking freedom in whose name we supposedly wage the war on terrorism has come to? How high a price will we pay as we are bent by the fear inspired by this endless and winless war? Can it be that our civil society is so fractured that no one on the left or the right understands that the university is and must be the last bastion of open debate in our nation, and that censoring speakers we don't like injures not just free speech but the very meaning of liberal learning and the liberal arts?
The real scandal at Columbia is not the Iranian president's speech but the politicians' all too predictable calls for censorship. The real scandal is that we had to be reminded by the devious and mischievous Ahmadinejad himself that the "university is a center for freedom of speech" -- as he told a bemused Charlie Rose.
I don't much like any one of the three most recent candidates for censorship deemed to be pernicious to the minds of youth and beyond the pale of the free exchange of ideas. But I am appalled by the blinkered bigots on both the right and the left who blather about freedom even as they proclaim the right to determine who should and should not visit and speak on university campuses.
Freedom of speech actually means freedom of speech. It is not just about some one else's right to speak, but about our right to listen. Censorship does not just put a gag in a speaker's mouth, it puts a plug in the listener's ear. Give your enemies their day on campus, Rumsfeld and Ahmadinajad alike: it's not just that democracy will survive it, it's that democracy needs it to survive.