These are the minutes that from the Columbia University Senate meeting before the visit happpened. I found it a little interesting.
(FWIW, there is a short synopsis in today's Columbia Spectator on the Senate meeting afterwards, where Bollinger reacts to reactions to his introductory comments: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/27781 Not exciting or suprrising and makes more sense in the context of the minutes below, but I include for completeness sake.)
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SEPTEMBER 21, 2007
President Lee Bollinger, the chairman, was delayed in reaching the meeting, so Executive Committee chairman Paul Duby called the Senate to order at about 1:25 pm in 107 William and June Warren Hall. Sixty-four of 91 senators were present during the meeting.
<snip>
Ahmedinejad visit. On the invitation to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to speak at Columbia in three days, on September 24, the president began by affirming his commitment in this case, as in any other involving academic freedom and freedom of speech, to act according to principle. He said that he had also tried to base all other decisions in similar situations on principle, and not on accommodating other interests or outside pressures. He said it is critical to understand this choice and the principles involved.
The president said one key part of the academic freedom idea is that departments, schools, faculty, universities will not only conduct courses, lectures, and research, but also invite people into the institution to be part of the academic mission, to help the Columbia community understand the world in somewhat special ways. Decisions to have speakers are as important as decisions about courses to teach, and areas of research to pursue.
The same idea implies that there should be no exception to reject certain ideas as too offensive for academic discourse. Such an exception is very dangerous, like banning certain books or courses. A university must have a robust commitment to entertain and confront ideas, the president said, to consider the world in all its ugliness as well as its beauty.
The president summarized the history of the last invitation to Ahmedinejad to speak, in the fall of 2006. Lisa Anderson, then dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, called the president on a Wednesday to say an invitation had been extended to Ahmadinejad on SIPA's behalf to speak that Friday, and to ask if the president wanted to have the university sponsor the visit as part of the annual World Leaders Forum.
The request prompted the president to reflect on an important qualification of the principle of freedom of speech—that Columbia does not simply open its doors to anybody who wants to come and speak. That is, the university makes choices, according to academic and not partisan or political criteria. Its speaking invitations must be based upon the interests of students and faculty in their effort to understand the world. One consequence of this commitment is the need to assure dialogue and a question-and-answer session as part of the speaking engagement.
The university contacted the Iranian Mission to find out whether that condition could be met. By Thursday, there was no response, and the security and organizational issues were becoming too serious to make it possible to hold the event safely. He notified Dean Anderson of this decision, but said the university would support her decision to have Ahmadinejad speak. She decided SIPA would be unable to arrange the event in the time remaining, and canceled the invitation.
At the time, the president said, some people praised the university for withdrawing the invitation, thinking that it had deemed speaker's ideas were too offensive. He tried on every possible occasion to explain that this interpretation was incorrect, that the real reasons were his inability to satisfy himself that academic criteria could be met, along with the difficulty of the security and organizational issues. It was not that speakers with offensive views should not come to Columbia. The president said at the time that he would defend a decision to invite a person like Ahmadinejad to the university for academic purposes. He repeated this position many times, though it was not widely reported. His sense was that some people did not want to believe it.
A few weeks before the present meeting it became clear through faculty contacts that it might again be possible to invite Ahmadinejad, and SIPA's acting dean, John Coatsworth, decided to and to ask if the university could include Ahmadinejad in the World Leaders Forum. The president decided that the conditions could be met for a university-wide role this time, and an agreement was reached with the Iranian representatives early in the present week. The university then immediately announced the invitation.
The president said everyone was aware how much controversy this decision stirred. He said there have been many free speech and academic freedom controversies at Columbia, around the United States, and indeed around the world. But the level of vehemence about events at Columbia seems to take on a special order of magnitude, he said.
The president had issued statements about this visit, and he and the provost and the trustees are in complete agreement about the principles and about their application in this instance. The president expressed confidence that there wasn't a single person on campus who did not detest the views expressed by President Ahmadinejad, that there was a consensus across the campus that this was a very dangerous individual and that issues about Iran's leadership and the potential for a kind of global conflict were significant. He said the university was not facing a trivial matter. In many ways Iran was at the center of world politics at that moment.
The president said universities are places that must exist in a society to be able to consider beliefs and ideas, to confront the people who hold them, and the more important and critical they are to the world, for good or bad, the more important it is for universities to be places that really do confront them. He believed that mistakes this society makes are more likely to be based on ignorance than on bad judgments.
The president said the television show 60 Minutes would be broadcasting an interview with Ahmadinejad on Sunday evening, on the eve of the visit to Columbia. The press is engaged in the issue. He thought universities should be more engaged in issues like this.
At the same time, he said, the university must make clear that holding an event that confronts ideas does not mean in any sense that Columbia endorses the ideas, or that it is lacking in resolve to resist them. He said this effort is just part of the academic commitment -- the scholarly temperament -- to be courageously open to thinking through and confronting ideas and beliefs.
Sen. Michael Adler (Ten., Bus.) raised the technical problem of room capacity. Some on campus were objecting that not enough people could participate in the session. Sen. Adler asked for a solution to provide major buildings on campus with electronic connections to the room in which Ahmadinejad is speaking, so that questions can be asked by a wider corss-section of the university population.
The president said he had heard that Sen. Adler's idea might pose additional security problems. But he added that event organizers are trying to provide access to as many people as possible.
Provost Alan Brinkley understood that there were plans to use four remote locations.
Sen. John Johnson (Stu., Law) noted that the Rules of Conduct were applied last year to protests against the visit of Minuteman Project leader Jim Gilchrist. Sen. Johnson requested that the Rules be made clear and readily available on the day of Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia people who may want to protest.
The president said an important part of free speech is the right to protest, and Columbia wants to facilitate that right. But it must preserve the extremely important line between free speech and the need to prevent disruption. These two priorities must not cancel each other or trump each other. It is essential for people protesting to know what the limits are, and administrators are focused on this important problem.
Sen. Johnson raised the question of consistency in handling these events: Why not insist on including questions and answers and statements for other controversial guest speakers?
The president said this was an important question. He had made it clear, and would make it clear again, that he vehemently disagrees with many of the professed beliefs of Ahmadinejad and his actions. On other occasions the president has not expressed his beliefs about speakers whose views are offensive to some members of the Columbia community. When students raised this issue in a meeting with him the day before, he had answered that he and other senior administrators don't have enough time to comment on every speaker who comes to campus. But the more important answer is that he does not want to chill speech on campus by announcing from Low Library which ideas are good or bad. He added that students are free to invite guests to campus for purely political purposes; faculties and schools are not free to do this, because they can't use their power for political purposes. In this case, however, he thought there was consensus across the institution that Ahmadinejad has some really terrible ideas and beliefs and actions, and it's important to express those objections on behalf of the institution. He also thought such a statement in this case would be unlikely to have a chilling effect. These are the kinds of calculations he makes.
Sen. Katherine Franke (Ten., Law) expressed doubt that there was a consensus on this point. She said she would prefer for the president to be clear about when he was expressing his own views on Ahmadinejad's public positions and when he was speaking for the institution. She said Ahmadinejad is a complicated man, who has said many different things, and it concerned her a bit to hear the president identify an absolute consensus.
The president said when he spoke of a consensus he was thinking of positions like Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust. Sen. Franke said again that Ahmadinejad had made many different statements on that subject.
Sen. James Applegate (Ten., A&S/NS) expressed support for the president's principles and the way he had expressed them. He thought it was important to resist an idea he had heard on the floor of the senate, in Spectator, and in conversations, that university by its affiliations, by the speakers it invites, by the students and scholars that it accepts, somehow expresses political opinions, endorses various political ideas, or condemns them. He thought there is a dangerous slippery slope in deciding that the invitation of the president of Iran means Columbia endorses his ideas, for example,or that Columbia's acceptance of students from China means that it endorses the crackdown in Tienanmen Square.
The president agreed, adding that there are people who are actively trying to perpetrate a stereotype of academic institutions like Columbia as trying to pursue a political agenda.
Sen. David Rosner (Ten., Public Health) said on behalf of some faculty members who are often skeptical of administration actions that in this instance he wholeheartedly supported the president's position.
The president was thankful for this comment, though he admitted he didn't feel quite as good as he'd like to. There was laughter.
Sen. Paul Thompson (Alum.) was certain that he did not represent an alumni consensus in expressing support for everything the president had said.
Sen. Karen Green (Lib. Stf.) said she oversees the anonymous email alias for the Libraries. In the previous days she had seen an uptick in aggrieved and angry responses to the Ahmadinejad visit. She had forwarded some of these to the Libraries' director of outside services, who is the security liaison. She felt conflicted about whether she was doing the responsible thing or acting as part of some security force tracking people down. Is there a procedure for distinguishing harmless cranks from real threats?
The president said the security problems surrounding this event are not a small matter. Columbia security teams actively follow up on serious threats, and are plugged into the New York Police Department and to federal law enforcement agencies. He added that the Ahmadinejad visit would be a Secret Service event, which he assumed was the highest level of security oversight.
The president also said he did not think that Columbia is enabling a kind of monitoring that could be inhibiting speech and civil liberties.
Provost Brinkley said administrators are getting many emails, too many to read, let alone answer. His own custom is to respond only to people inside Columbia. He added that some of the emails are kind of scary. He did not think it was inappropriate for anyone in the university who might be getting such emails to forward them to Security.
The president added that this was an important point.
Sen. Adler questioned the mental health of an institution that obliges itself to listen to views it already knows and detests. He asked whether Columbia was going to hear anything new from Ahmadinejad.
Sen. Andrea Hauge (Stu., Bus.) replied that what is new about this encounter is that it affords Columbia people to ask questions that challenge his ideas, though he might not choose to answer. She said Columbia students feel the weight of that responsibility, remembering that their counterparts in Iran do not have the same opportunity.
Sen. Jane Khodarkovsky (Stu., Barn.) asked if there would be ways for students, faculty, and various groups on campus to engage in dailogue with each other during the event. The president said many people were working on event arrangements, and suggestions were welcome. He said Columbia is a big, complicated, diverse, decentralized place, and administrators hoped to foster some kinds of dialogue, but also hope that good things will happen just happen because of the nature of the place.
The president added that Columbia would be dedicating the whole year and maybe beyond to having speakers about Iran. He hoped to see representatives of different segments of Iranian society, including reformists. He supposed that many Americans, including people in higher education, are inadequately informed about Iran, as well as the Middle East, and much of the world for that matter. But given the centrality of Iran at the moment, it was particularly important to have a better understanding of the dynamics of that society and how a person like this could get into this kind of position. He said that an actual encounter with someone has a remarkable impact on one's interest in a subject and in pursuing other subjects as well.
Sen. Johnson said he thought the Ahmedinejad visit had already been an educational experience, obliging many students to articulate the grounds of their reactions and their ideas about the boundaries of free speech. But he added that not everyone accepts the principle that no ideas are too offensive for discussion on campus. How should that view be addressed? Also, what can be done about how the event is playing outside the university? It's not possible to review the issues for every outside inquiry.
The president said the reason he had to take a phone call was to address one of those inquiries. He said the Senate is an entirely appropriate body for thinking through the limits of free speech and academic freedom, and has already done that in various settings. He said other groups could also take this on.
The president said Columbia has principles that have been articulated over a long time, and there is a national sense of norms, but they are always open to debate, and if there is a feeling that such debate is needed, it can be facilitated.
Sen. Hauge asked if there has been outreach to Iranian students on campus, some of whom are worried about being identified when asking questions. The president said he wasn't aware of such an effort, but he was sure it was being considered.