Former New York City Mayor and GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani thinks that Columbia University made a mistake when it invited President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to speak on campus. His opinion is shared by many, but is he right? I guess my answer is, why does it matter?




Ahmadinejad is an enigma - a dark, obscure, or inexplicable riddle of a person. Jay Leno makes fun of his name (that's easier than trying to understand him). He gets demonized in the Western press. And he would perhaps be almost irrelevant to Western thought and culture if it were not for the power of his position.

Iran's president asked permission to lay a wreath at the site of World Trade Center attack and was told (quite literally, I think) to go to Hell. I wasn't particularly fond of the idea of him tramping the ground at a site that has become almost holy to Americans.

But a university podium seems different to me...

One of my biggest concerns about the future of education (and of America, for that matter) is that we seem to have become less tolerant. Pluralism has not died, but it seems to be going out of fashion.

It's not as though anyone at Columbia endorsed Ahmadinejad or his ideas on behalf of the university. According to the Associated Press, President Lee C. Bollinger told Ahmadinejad on Monday he exhibited "all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," called him "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated" for his denials of the Holocaust and said he doubted he had the "intellectual courage" to answer questions openly. That's not the warmest of welcomes (which is not to say that I think he should have gotten a warm welcome).

I suppose I agree somewhat with Thom Hartmann when he says, "Ahmadinejad is the president of a major nation in a vital part of the world, and we should have enough self-assurance and belief in our own system of government, and in the intelligence of our college students, that we can let them (and our larger public) evaluate his words, whatever they may be."

It's not like ignoring Ahmadinejad will make him go away. What better forum for him to speak than a university podium...?