Ahmadinemania Revisited

“This is about freedom of speech. You can’t just let someone like that go and speak freely.”

I was ambling along Amsterdam Avenue when I happened to overhear a young woman uttering the preceding statement. Puzzled, I turned to the friend with whom I was walking, and inquired, “What is this ‘Freedom of Speechification’ I hear so much talk about today?” He laughed. It was not a stupid question. In fact, there are no stupid questions. Or small parts. Only small, stupid actors who ask questions. But I digress.

I arrived at Columbia expecting it to be an incomparable center of intellectual discourse and interchange. So far, the interchange has been decent. Apart from being lambasted by a livid Romanian international student about my American imperialist attitudes, I’ve found the intellectual community at Columbia to be considerably fulfilling. For the record, if you are reading this, Romanian international student-who-will-remain-nameless-except-to-note-that-you-yelled-at-me-really-fucking-loudly-and-possibly-damaged-my-hearing-for-good, I don’t hold it against you.

But then we get Ahmadinemania. (By the way, if Ahmadinemania has not been legally copyrighted yet, I’m going on the record to claim it as my own.) The comment made by the anonymous woman is illustrative. In America, and specifically in academe, we put a premium on freedom of speech. There are exceptions. You cannot scream “fire” in a crowded theater, even if the theater is actually on fire. That’s the law. You cannot advocate for “Bong Hits for Jesus,” because bong hits are illegal. The Supreme Court said so. But in general, both academic communities and the American community at large tend to err on the side of freer speech.

Now, it is fair to note that Columbia is a private university. It makes its own rules, and as such, students—certainly integral members of the University community—should have a voice in determining the direction of that community. But this is above all else an academic institution built around the discussion and disputation of ideas.

And at such an institution, the burden of proof is on those who oppose free speech. The question we ask should not be, “What will we gain from supporting freer speech at Columbia?” but rather, “What will we lose from not supporting it?”

By allowing a whack job to speak here, we did not (as has been iterated and reiterated ad infinitum) necessarily legitimize what he was saying. If speaking invitations were contingent on acceptance of the view of the invited parties, the University would have to rein in all speakers whose opinions do not perfectly align with the express beliefs and policies of this institution.

Had we invited the President of Iran to speak at Convocation, we would have been endorsing his ideas and policies, because Convocation speakers represent Columbia to matriculated first years and their parents. That’s not the purpose of the World Leaders Forum. According to its Web site, the Forum “is an annual University-wide initiative that helps realize Columbia’s commitment to serving as a center for public discussion and debate on the large economic, political, social, and cultural questions of our time that cut across both traditional academic and international boundaries.” Based on these criteria, the invitation was a rousing success. For the past two weeks, the campus has been abuzz with chatter about the political implications of the speech and the underlying questions of freedom of expression it has raised.

Repugnant as he may be, Ahmadinejad is a world leader. He is also, according to some, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, virulently anti-America, a sponsor of terrorism, a demagogue, and the leader of a repressive and regressive state. As a Jew, an American, a terror-hater, a disliker-of-demogoguery, a liberal, and a progressive, do not misunderstand me—there is virtually nothing I like about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Except his fashion-sense: the man rocks the no-tie like no one else).

But on the day of Ahmadinejad’s speech, I read an opinion piece in this very paper in which the writer suggested not only that the invitation of Ahmadinejad represented an affront to the morality of this community, but also that it could offer no possible educational benefit to students.

This line of thinking is, simply put, wrong-headed. Our education should never be measured by the lectures or speeches we hear. Lectures and speeches may inform or inspire, but they are merely the foundation of education. Our education must be measured in late-night arguments over milk shakes, in newspaper editorials, in the din of dissonant and assonant opinions across our campus.
Perhaps Immortal Technique said it best: “Freedom of speech, motherfucker.”

The author is a first-year in Columbia College.