Right Wing Nation

Here’s what I emailed about Bollinger/Columbia inviting the Hitler Midget to speak.

The NY Sun hit the bullseye:

The real problem at Columbia is the group that is President Ahmadinejad’s real host — the 24 members of the university’s board of trustees. This is a group that has, throughout the long slog of anti-Israel agitation and occasional anti-Semitism on the campus, refused to take a public stand. We number several of them among our friends. We admire many of them. But as a group, they have let New York down and, were Columbia not a self-perpetuating board, would have lost the trust they were given. There is no difference between going to ground zero and going to Columbia, except that the governing body of the former has a deeper understanding of what it means for a country to be at war than the governing body of the other.

Absolutely. The trustees are ultimately responsible, and they chose to do nothing. The Dartmouth situation is the exception. Trustees (or regents) all over the US have abdicated their duties and become nothing more than rubberstamps for nutball faculty decisions.

If you want to see change on campus, howling at administrators will have minimal effect (closing ranks, collegiality, shared nuttiness, ivory tower isolationism, all kinds of reasons). Howl instead at the trustees, and get alumni to withhold donations.

I’m not excusing Bollinger. But it’s just more academic idiocy (a despicable example, certainly). The trustees chose not to exercise their duties, and the trustees should be primarily held accountable. After all, one cannot expect a moral idiot like Bollinger to make a moral decision. It’s rather like expecting your cat to bark.

Jules Crittenden points out that there’s a growing backlash against Bollinger. Now, being a reasonable, intelligent human being with ethics and morals, you assume that this backlash is from other reasonable, intelligent human beings with morals. But you’d be wrong.

You can’t make this stuff up.

A backlash against the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who on Monday delivered a harsh rebuke to President Ahmadinejad, is coming from faculty members and students who said he struck an “insulting tone” and that his remarks amounted to “schoolyard taunts.” The fierceness of Mr. Bollinger’s critique bought the Iranian some sympathy on campus that he didn’t deserve, the critics said, and amounted to a squandered opportunity to provide a lesson in diplomacy.

These people jump through hoops to outst00pid the last st00pid thing they said or did.