So, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is speaking at my school on Monday as part of the annual World Leaders Forum. It was rather abruptly announced last Wednesday, and registration closed about 30 minutes after the announcement.

I was one of the few who happened to get a spot.

It was pretty much by chance; I refreshed Bwog and saw it posted, followed the link, and registered. I didn't even get it until afterward how hard it actually was to get a spot. Of course, the fact that he's speaking here has touched off the first campus scandal of the year. (Last year's biggie was the Jim Gilchrist event that got shut down by protesters, which started outlets like Fox News and NY Sun calling us "fascist liberal anarchists" and "University of Havana-North.") Fox News is lunging at Columbia again over this, to no one's surprise. A lot of other people from all sides of the political spectrum have also been critical.

Ahmadinejad is probably thought to be more abhorrent than the Minutemen to most people (if you'll temporarily excuse the moral relativism), and for that reason he himself is less controversial in the sense that damn near everyone on this campus is going to disagree with damn near everything he does and says. But having him as a speaker is obviously more controversial. Namely, by giving him a public stage at a generally respected university, are we legitimizing his beliefs and actions? I emphatically believe that that isn't the case. I find Ahmadinejad and his actions despicable; additionally, the fact that George W Bush opposes him does not make Admadinejad my friend, as some are insinuating about the "liberals" at Columbia. Lee Bollinger (the president of the university) made a statement that pretty much sums up how I feel about it. After explaining the format of the event (he's starting with a critique of Ahmadinejad with respect to denial of the Holocaust, destruction of Israel, terrorism, nuclear power, civil rights, and suppression and imprisonment of scholars and journalists; the time is split between Ahmadinejad talking and questions and answers), he wrote:

"I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life—and a civil society—prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation’s most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world."

It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I'm grateful that I got a spot. Should be interesting, to say the least.

(I also got a spot to hear Željko Komšić, Presidency Chairman of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on Thursday. That one hasn't filled up quite yet, though.)