As the world recovers from the spectacle of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University--the centerpiece of which was Lee Bollinger's compensatory and probably historic tongue-lashing of said statesman--it's worth recalling that the event is not an isolated one and that Columbia is not alone. In recent years, Columbia has been a center of controversy regarding its failure to prevent controversial Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist from being shouted down and attacked, for its refusal to allow ROTC to return to campus because the faculty dislikes the military, for its problematically politicized Middle East Studies department, and for being home to Nicholas DeGenova, the professor who, as war broke out in Iraq in 2003, famously called for "a million Magadishus." Likewise, Columbia is just a typical American campus, where free speech struggles to stay afloat and where ideology dictates far too many decisions that should be made from a content neutral stance.
It's also worth remembering that there's a movie now that tells the story of the politicized campus, Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate U, and that this film premieres this Friday in Washington, D.C., at the American Film Renaissance Film Festival.
In a recent article, Maloney describes how he was treated when he tried to speak with college administrators about the ideological double standards on their campuses, with special emphasis on how dangerous his search for the truth was deemed at schools such as Bucknell. There, as at other schools, Maloney was threatened with arrest for the dire crime of coming on campus and asking people questions. Columbia was one of them. Which just goes to show that by Columbia's calculations, Maloney is more dangerous than Ahmadinejad.