Cozy Corner

Alan Dershowitz has an op-ed on Khatami's visit to Harvard:

THE KENNEDY SCHOOL of Government at Harvard University should not cancel the scheduled speech by former president Mohammad Khatami of Iran. Universities must never submit to censorial pressures by individuals or groups that disagree with, or are deeply offended by, a speaker's ideas.

This does not mean that those who invited Khatami to deliver a lecture on the ``Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence" -- a subject on which, based on his lifetime of intolerance, he has nothing to contribute -- made a wise decision. Would they have invited David Duke to lecture on racial harmony or the late Meir Kahane to educate our students on the proper way to protest? I doubt it.
...
Derek Bok, acting president of Harvard, is right when he says that ``a wide exchange of views" is essential to a university. But there are only two tenable positions a university may take in this regard: the first is that they have no substantive standards for who should be invited -- in other words any speaker who wishes to engage in ``a wide exchange of views," and who is invited by any student or faculty group, must be entitled to stand on the Harvard podium. Under this ``taxi cab" approach -- a cab driver must accept any rider who can pay the fare -- Duke and Kahane would have to be invited to speak if there were students or teachers who wanted to hear them, regardless of who might be offended. The second alternative is to have substantive standards -- such as academic achievement or political prominence -- that are applied rigorously and equally, without regard to whether the speaker is left or right, offensive to Jews or to Arabs, etc.

Sadly, Harvard is selective. I recall ROTC cadets having to fight simply to allow their commissioning to take place on campus, simply because any serving military officer was offensive to some groups.

I think Khatami chose the perfect spot to speak from - an intolerant institution.

Update: I see Betsy has much the same thought.