You can read a passel of editorials on Ahmadinejad above, and if you’re enterprising, you can easily find another, oh, thirty of so op-eds on the topic of his appearance. None of these, except for one, address any substantive findings from Ahmadinejad’s speech, because there weren’t any.
That one exception, The Columbia Spectator now urges that “students, professors and administrators must think critically about what we have learned from him – particularly his provocative thoughts on the plight of the Palestinians, Iran’s nuclear program, and how Western imperialism has helped shape the Middle East.” Provocative thoughts? Is there a single person who wasn’t aware of his precise views on these topics?
Bollinger’s bromides against Ahmadinejad made clear that there was no real exchange or debate, or honesty expected, from the start, and that was exactly the case. Did we learn anything from him that we didn’t know already – aside from the fact that Iran doesn’t have homosexuals like this country? Bollinger’s new rhetoric of boundless free speech clouded another important scale; that of academic worth. Columbia provided a spectacle to the public, and a jolt to op-ed pages, but it’s still not clear what academic benefit it provided its students.
