What is a University’s purpose if not to encourage free thinking? If Columbia were to limit its lectures to only the speakers it considered to be friends of the U.S. State Department, what would happen to the university’s 253-year history of academic freedom?
It’s important to remember that these categories of “friends” and “enemies” of Washington are ever-changing. During the Iraq-Iran war, Washington considered Saddam Hussein a friend. If he had gone to the United Nations at the time, he probably would have been welcomed into official circles there. Attitudes change.
The controversy over Ahmedinejad’s visit is overshadowing a more important issue at the U.N. General Assembly, the meeting that he’s in New York to attend: for the first time, climate change is on the Assembly’s official agenda. This issue has been gaining momentum globally, not because it is the hot news topic of the day, but because Earth has been showing signals that we are endangering our survival by stressing, beyond all limits, the Earth’s capacity to renew itself. The real news is the U.N.’s decision to include the issue in the General Assembly agenda, not Ahmedinejad´s visit to Columbia.
It’s not the first time the climate change issue hasn’t gotten the diplomatic attention it deserves. Some here at PostGlobal have argued that President Bush’s failure at the APEC Summit was due to China’s aggressive diplomatic initiatives. But I would argue that his actual mistake was to dismiss climate change and the need for prompt action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – the main items on the agenda. That’s a failure he shares with many other heads of state who attended the APEC summit in Australia, a country that has been suffering extreme, record, four-year drought. Bush made his usual series of diplomatic mistakes: he called Australians, Austrians; he called APEC, OPEC; he left the meeting before its concluding session. It could all be an effect of jet lag...
President Ahmedinejad should be heard not so we can follow his authoritarian ideas, but because intelligent dialogue requires exposure to different and opposing ways of thinking. A university is the ideal place for that dialogue to develop. It must not hold any prejudice; it ought to place itself beyond political circumstance and stand up against intolerance. It should be a temple for creative thinking. Columbia is a superb example of upholding that human ideal. It did the right thing.
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