President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran delivered a speech at Columbia University yesterday that attracted hoards of students and faculty and made headlines immediately. The nature of his talk - calling Palestine an "old wound," denying the existence of homosexuals in Iran and expressing a desire to visit the World Trade Center site - provoked anger, frustration and confusion.
But just as troubling were remarks made by Columbia's President Lee C. Bollinger in his introduction of Mr. Ahmadinejad.
According to the New York Times, Bollinger defended Columbia's right to host the president but then accused him of acting like a "petty and cruel dictator."
In his speech, Ahmadinejad described Bollinger's remarks as an "insult" and "incorrect, regretfully."
He implied that Bollinger tried to give faculty and students a "vaccination" by tainting their opinions of him before he could speak.
While the Daily does not endorse the Iranian president's opinions, his vaccination comment does have a point. While it's true that Ahmadinejad practices objectionable rule and has questionable morals, Bollinger had no right to hint at that before the man was about to speak.
If Columbia invited the President of Iran to come and share his viewpoints, it should have let him do so before throwing accusations at him and should have allowed him to set the talk's tone. Bollinger did that himself, however, by casting a negative shadow on the president and on the talk.
Universities are places for open discourse. At Tufts, we are well acquainted with this notion after the events of the past year.
The question and answer session that followed the Iranian president's speech was an attempt at encouraging communication between two very different countries and viewpoints. Communication happened yesterday, but it did so in a cloud of hostility reinforced by Bollinger's comments.
Bollinger's accusations would have been more appropriate after Ahmadinejad's speech, had it warranted them. But such accusations before the speech prevented the speech from launching fair communication between the Iranian president and the audience.
In introducing any speaker, the presenter should inform the audience of the speaker's background and accomplishments - but let the speaker do all the talking.
