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On the rights of speakers
The AAUP recently proposed a much-needed statement defending the practice of inviting controversial speakers to campus and warning colleges and universities against disinviting such speakers once invitations have been issued. But the AAUP sidestepped the problem of colleges and universities exercising poor and partisan judgement when deciding what speakers will and will not be invited. This is a more pressing and elemental problem--a controversial speaker must be invited before he or she can be disinvited, and in the current campus climate, some controversial speakers are more acceptable than others. It is also a much murkier one for the simple reason that the double standards and disingenuous rationales underwriting decisions about who will be invited to speak tend to be very deeply submerged.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has identified Harvard's invitation to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami as one such instance, and parses the politics surrounding Khatami's visit with consummate skill:
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.
Most universities fall into the uncomfortable middle. They have implicit standards, but they refuse to articulate them or apply them with what I call ``ism equity." The truth is that Duke is not getting invited to Harvard any time soon, but Khatami has been. Is the only reason for this difference that Duke is a failed politician who lost his bid for election in Louisiana, while Khatami was ``elected" (appointed? anointed?) in Iran? I don't think so. The difference may relate, at least in part, to the relative unacceptability in this university community of their substantive views. Duke would offend more members of the Harvard community than Khatami would. If this is even partly true, it is indefensible.
Dershowitz can't talk about the motives behind Harvard's speaking invitations without speculating, and his argument will be dismissed accordingly by those who are looking for reasons not to grapple with the issues he raises. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have a point, and it doesn't mean that Harvard--and many institutions like it across the country--have a lot of work to do when it comes to understanding its own motivations. Our colleges and universities must do this difficult and taxing work if they are to bring their actions in line with their stated commitments to free inquiry.
Khatami's talk proceeded as planned yesterday.
Posted by acta online at September 12, 2006 09:54 AM
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