Columbia, the Germ of the Ivies

The Wall Street Journal lays it on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's U.S. host, Columbia University:

[H]is regime also executes homosexuals for the crime of being themselves. Maybe if Columbia University President Lee Bollinger were aware of the latter fact he would reconsider his invitation to the Iranian president to speak on his campus next Monday.

Mr. Bollinger, notoriously, voted in 2005 not to readmit an ROTC program to Columbia (absent from the university since 1969), ostensibly on the grounds of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gay service members. Never mind that other upper-tier schools, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania all have ROTC programs. Never mind, too, that in 2003 the Columbia student body voted in favor of readmission by a 2-1 margin. In Mr. Bollinger's view, "the university has an obligation, deeply rooted in the core values of an academic institution and in First Amendment principles, to protect its students from improper discrimination and humiliation."

Mr. Bollinger's position might at least be coherent were he not now invoking the same principles to justify his invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose offenses to gay rights and any other form of human dignity considerably exceed the Pentagon's….

More here, but only for WSJ subscribers, alas.

I'm not sure I follow the full implications of this argument–so the WSJ would be OK with the visit if ROTC were on campus?–but there is almost always something bizarre about university policies regarding campus speakers, organizations, etc. After having gone through grad school in the late '80s and early '90s, the only thing I know for sure is that there are very few people–in academia and in the press, too–who really are consistently in favor of free speech, especially if it means giving time to something you oppose.