2008 Woodie Awards
Students deserve to hear both sides
Shabnam Mahmoudkhan
Issue date: 10/8/07 Section: National Voice
What are the limits of academic freedom? This is the question posed by a spate of recent controversies over speaker invitations and faculty appointments at some of the nation's most prestigious universities.
At Stanford, protestors took to the streets and a petition was circulated objecting to former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's fellowship appointment to the Hoover Institution. At Columbia, tempers flared over university president Lee Bollinger's decision to invite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak in front of the university's students and staff.
One Columbia alum, Alizia Davidovit, was so agitated by the invitation that she tore her Columbia degree in half, claiming to take a stand for moral integrity. Davidovit, a journalist, published a story on the day Ahmadinejad spoke titled "The Day Freedom Died."
The truth is that Bollinger's invitation to Ahmadinejad represented a step towards freedom, not away from it. Academic freedom is critical for the intellectual development of students. Without it, colleges wouldn't have the means to provide their students with opportunities to foster independent thinking. These means often include books and movies with debatable content, and yes, even speeches by controversial figures at university forums.
As students, we are encouraged to think critically and independently, to establish our own personal vision of right and wrong, good and bad.
To underestimate our ability to think critically is fallacious, and it is absurd to believe that Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia will turn us into terrorists, or that Rumsfeld's tenure at the Hoover will cause us to start chasing Arabs.
To say that students are incapable of differentiating between fraud and truth, and that we only should be provided with pre-approved information, is to demolish the entire educational system. Students are the future of our country. Limiting our study material is not going to benefit us, and in the long run, it will not benefit America.
At Stanford, protestors took to the streets and a petition was circulated objecting to former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's fellowship appointment to the Hoover Institution. At Columbia, tempers flared over university president Lee Bollinger's decision to invite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak in front of the university's students and staff.
One Columbia alum, Alizia Davidovit, was so agitated by the invitation that she tore her Columbia degree in half, claiming to take a stand for moral integrity. Davidovit, a journalist, published a story on the day Ahmadinejad spoke titled "The Day Freedom Died."
The truth is that Bollinger's invitation to Ahmadinejad represented a step towards freedom, not away from it. Academic freedom is critical for the intellectual development of students. Without it, colleges wouldn't have the means to provide their students with opportunities to foster independent thinking. These means often include books and movies with debatable content, and yes, even speeches by controversial figures at university forums.
As students, we are encouraged to think critically and independently, to establish our own personal vision of right and wrong, good and bad.
To underestimate our ability to think critically is fallacious, and it is absurd to believe that Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia will turn us into terrorists, or that Rumsfeld's tenure at the Hoover will cause us to start chasing Arabs.
To say that students are incapable of differentiating between fraud and truth, and that we only should be provided with pre-approved information, is to demolish the entire educational system. Students are the future of our country. Limiting our study material is not going to benefit us, and in the long run, it will not benefit America.
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