The three presidents

It has been an interesting two weeks to be president. From Columbia to Princeton, leaders of both the academic and political worlds have faced controversy and come out with varying degrees of success. President Tilghman, Columbia President Lee Bollinger and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad struggled with challenges to the hearts of their administrations and emerged neither victorious nor vanquished.

President Tilghman's test was the disorder and chaos that accompanied the opening of the four-year residential colleges. Simply put, the dining situation for underclassmen has been a minor fiasco since Community Hall and a remodeled Rocky-Mathey opened for business. Long lines, inadequate seating, mediocre and insufficient food, and general confusion have been the order of the day.

In May 2006, I wrote that the decision to remove the long "institutional" tables of Rocky's dining hall in favor of more "intimate" seating arrangements would be a major mistake. Though this idea was largely abandoned in Rocky-Mathey, it was implemented in Whitman and has been blamed for the paucity of seats at peak hours. As reported this week by The Daily Princetonian, students have blamed "how small each table is" for the problems and cried out for the institutional tables as a fix, saying "if they had long tables like those at any other dining hall, [ours] wouldn't be overcrowded."

The extremely long lines have also proved problematic, and the administration's response has so far been entirely inadequate. One sophomore friend from Rocky told me that she has taken to avoiding Rocky because it is "too stressful" to try and get food from the "incredibly inefficient" servery. "The food isn't really better, and it's much harder to actually get any," she told me. I just don't understand why we bothered to make the place look better but work worse. This is college — I don't care if it seems like a cafeteria!"

To its credit, however, the administration is making an effort to fix things. For that reason, I cannot be entirely critical of its response, despite the fact that the problem is of their making, was obvious even without hindsight and hasn't been fixed.

Bollinger faced a much trickier set of issues when dealing with Ahmadinejad's visit and appearance. Alumni threatened to stop giving if Ahmadinejad was permitted to speak, while furious city and state officials, always eager to grandstand, threatened to take away government funding and support for Columbia. Furthermore, his own dean had thrown down a rhetorical gauntlet to critics by saying even Adolf Hitler would have been to speak, making clear that a decision to cave to outside pressure and cancel the forum would lead to a full-on faculty revolt. Bollinger was caught between a rock and a hard place, with emotion and common sense pointing one way and principle pointing the other.

His decision was to leave neither the protestors nor the faculty ideologues entirely happy. He allowed Ahmadinejad to speak on the principle that academic freedom required an exchange of ideas and then ensured that this would not be a one-way street by aggressively challenging Ahmadinejad's more repulsive and insane beliefs. If Ahmadinejad was to speak, this was the only acceptable way to allow him a platform.

Bollinger's verbal shock-and-awe campaign was littered with memorable insults, such as the description of Ahmadinejad as "a petty and cruel dictator," "either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated" and "simply ridiculous." In a small way, he had repaired the damage done by giving Mahmoud a microphone.

This, of course, put Ahmadinejad in a tight spot of his own. His response was to decry the insult and then proceed as normal with his borderline insane rants about the "myth" that is the Holocaust and how there are no gays in Iran. Since the speech was designed more for Iranian consumption than American, the official Iranian propaganda based on the remarks would have to be massaged to give the perfect impression of the speech. Iran's official news agency walked a verbal tightrope, insisting both that Ahmadinejad had been badly disrespected so as to stir up nationalism while also saying he was well received to make him seem reasonable and respectable. The obvious impossibility of these mutually exclusive accounts coexisting was simply ignored. So while things did not go quite as well as Ahmadinejad might have hoped, he did come away relatively unscathed. Barry Caro is a history major from White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.