Too controversial for comfort

A university's decision to invite a controversial speaker to campus involves a delicate calculus. The benefits to academic discourse from airing the speaker's views, and allowing students to question the guest must be balanced against the cost of offering that speaker the tacit endorsement of a prestigious institution — for an invitation, no matter what, is always an endorsement to some degree, a university's way of saying that the speaker's views are justifiable enough to be edifying and challenging to its students.

Today, Columbia hosts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But Columbia got its math wrong. The value of hearing Ahmadinejad's views directly from him is slim; serious students of international affairs will already have read his vitriolic writings and voluble speeches, watched him on "60 Minutes" and will hear him speak to the United Nations. Columbia is not offering a platform to ideas that cannot enter the public discourse without help. In addition, Ahmadinejad is adept at dodging questions from distinguished scholars, as he demonstrated at the Council on Foreign Relations; even if grilled by Columbia students and professors, he is unlikely to change his position on the Holocaust. This is not to say that students do not have much to gain from speakers, even if they are invited merely because they are powerful, but the cost of the symbolic act of invitation must be weighed as well.

In this case, it is the cost to a divided country and a warring world of honoring Ahmadinejad. It is not that he holds anti-American views, but that he actively uses the military apparatus of his state to attack American soldiers; not that he has a flawed historical memory, but that he imprisons genuine scholars; not that he denies the Holocaust, but that he calls for the destruction of other states. Numerous writers and thinkers could present arguments similar to Ahmadinejad's with greater academic value and eloquence. Ahmadinejad's own views can and should be studied — without a prestigious American university's tacit endorsement of an adversary of the United States and human rights.

Academic discourse is about the pursuit of knowledge; it is, often, about engagement with disagreeable ideas. But Columbia's decision to invite Ahmadinejad has little to do with academic discourse. If it did, the calculus would have been clear: The academic returns of giving Ahmadinejad a platform are small — though not nonexistent —yet the costs are significant. Perhaps the equation changed when Columbia's administration factored in a few days of 24-hour news coverage.