In a station of a metro

There is a sort of intellectual tradition that one might charitably call the chamber pot of history, in which all sorts of slimy loud things are congealed. I'm not talking about the ubiquitously irritating girl who puts an unfashionable Susan Sontag spin on the politics of photography in art class or the sebaceous grad student who wears flimsy wine-red polka-dotted shirts to precept. Such things cause great mental distress and the occasional epileptic fit, but nothing particularly existential. I am talking about what has been defended as the right to free speech in universities — or academic freedom, as some have called it. The divide is quite simple — there are those who believe that certain views are so loathsome as to merit exclusion from being expressed at universities, while others see this as censorship and a violation of free speech.

These, at least, are the terms in which the debate is couched. So the same endless argument is, like the Marseillaise, being heard again and again here in Oxford, where the decision of a student body to invite David Irving — a Holocaust denier — to speak at the university is arousing great controversy. In a Nietzschean example of eternal recurrence, the same war of words surrounding Iranian President Mahmond Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia are being pushed around — the university as a marketplace of ideas, the need for open debate and so on. Well and good. It is genuinely hard to see, however, why such ideas need to be given credence by having universities allow them to speak. Universities — particularly famous ones — are not just marketplaces of ideas, any more than Prada is just a homely cornershop of shoes. An invitation to speak is, to the world outside the academic community, perceived as a sign of laudation. Here's an example.

In Singapore, there has been a movement to abolish antiquated sodomy laws inherited from the British that outlaw consensual sex between men. These days, apart from a motley crew of Islamic and fascist states, such laws do not exist anywhere else in the world. Not in China. Not in South Africa. Yet a group of law professors have used their position as professors with degrees from Oxbridge and Michigan to argue, from a purely academic and legal standpoint, that it is untenable to get rid of such laws and that there is still an ongoing debate in the civilized world about whether homosexuality should be illegal. Together with ridiculous allegations that society in the West has collapsed due to social liberalization, such comments from supposedly distinguished professors carry a lot of weight in society, even though they are fraught with deception and vested interests.

My friends and I have written letters to Oxford, Cambridge and Michigan, urging them to, at the very least, renounce these views publicly; the gross misuse of one's credentials as an academic and a lawyer is quite unacceptable. It was obvious that they had not learned a thing as law students; now they were merely parading around with their feather boa of a degree in order to increase oppression and misery and hinder progress in the world. Yet the response was lukewarm, if there was one at all: "We do not condone their views," responded varying faculties, "but we believe in academic freedom."

Academic freedom, or academic irresponsibility? The world is unfortunately not a marketplace of ideas; people with degrees, who are professors, who hold talks at universities and such things are generally listened to more than others. It would be well and good if everyone in the world were steeped in the philosophical tradition of distinguishing good ideas from bad ones. This is not the case, even in universities — I once really had an aneurysm in class when a student kept quoting the biblical Paul in a philosophy of religion class. This is most certainly not the case with most people, who do things like join cults and take homeopathic remedies and appear on "America's Got Talent." This is not the case in developing countries.

So, what happens after a talk by a Holocaust denier or a bigot or a fascist? Presumably the students and faculty who attended the talk laugh it off — they knew what to expect, anyway. And then, another line is added to a resume that looks more distinguished by the day. Somewhere, the faceless crowd begins to listen. Johann Loh is a philosophy major from Singapore. Loh is studying abroad at Oxford this fall. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.