Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

Hamiltonians might recall the plight of Richard I. “RD” Queen, Class of 1973 and member of ELS. After graduation from Hamilton “RD” applied to West Point. He wanted to serve. Those who knew him also knew his of his ambition to be a General. Ultimately, his poor eyesight disqualified him on medical grounds. He then went to graduate school and joined the Army Reserve. After graduate school he joined the Foreign Service and was assigned to the hotspot of Tehran where the Carter Administration knowingly and impotently hung the entire embassy out to dry. RD became one of Ahmadinejad‘s hostages in Tehran. After prolonged abuse they ultimately let RD go because they thought he was going to die, and they didn’t want a dead hostage in their custody. Ultimately, after some years of prolonged illness, he died.

And that takes us to Columbia’s invitation to Ahmadinejad, RD’s captor and torturer. Others have said it quite well.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/09/018510.php  (excerpted below)

Columbia and President Bollinger are a disgrace. They welcome to their campus a man who is a ringleader in the seizure of American hostages, a terrorist, the president of a terrorist regime, and the representative of a regime responsible at present for the deaths of American soldiers on the field of battle. Columbia’s prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.

http://newcriterion.com:81/weblog/armavirumque.html (excerpted below)

Universities are institutions dedicated to the pursuit and transmission of learning and the furtherance of civilization. They are not circuses for the exhibition of politically repugnant grandstanding. Free inquiry is not a license for moral irresponsibility. At a university, as at every other human institution, freedom can thrive only when it is limited by allegiance to certain positive values—the value of historical truth, for example, or the moral truth that human dignity is worth preserving.

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President Bollinger’s sophomoric conception of free speech is precisely the sort of supine intellectualism that, if consistently embraced, would make free speech impossible. President Bollinger primly lectures us that “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,” etc. But he is quite wrong about that. By providing a madman like Ahmadinejad with a platform at Columbia University, President Bollinger has in effect welcomed him into the community of candid reasoners. He has granted him a patent of legitimacy that no amount of “dialogue and reason” can dissipate. In this case, “listening” is indeed tantamount to an endorsement. It reduces free speech to a species of political capitulation and renders dialogue indistinguishable from a suicide pact.

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Where, if anywhere, would President Bollinger and his colleagues draw the line? The Regents of the University of California just rescinded an offer to Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, because his presence on campus was offensive to the delicate sensibilities of feminists. (I had more to say about the original Summers debacle here.) So we know where the Regents of the University of California are wont to draw their line. It excludes a former President of Harvard. Meanwhile, at Stanford, there is an uproar about offering former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a fellowship at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. So we know where Stanford would draw the line: in the name of “tolerance” it would exclude a lifelong public servant who was twice Secretary of Defense of the United States.

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And Columbia? Would they welcome Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld? I wonder. But a man who was likely involved in the 1979 Iranian Hostage crisis, and who was therefore directly implicated in fueling the growth of murderous Islamic fanaticism that has cost the world so dearly these last few decades, the man who has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and whose government is directly supporting the murder of American servicemen in Iraq—the man representing those possibly “offensive” ideas is just fine.

And Hamilton? The parallels to the episode with the Alexander Hamilton Center and Hamilton’s profile in courage with Susan Rosenberg & Ward Churchill are plain:

“There have been calls for me to rescind the Kirkland Project’s invitation to Ward Churchill and cancel the event. But there is a principle at stake, for once the invitation was extended by the Kirkland Project and accepted by Ward Churchill, it became a matter of free speech.” President Stewart on 1/30/2005 (Source: the revolutionary worker website http://revcom.us/a/1268/ward-churchill-witch-hunt.htm:)

Evidently, the contractual acceptance by the President & the Dean of Faculty of the Alexander Hamilton Center didn’t qualify for the same passionate defense. Thus, we teach the children.