You can have lots of free speech if you're President of Iran, and you can have lots of free speech if you're a protester physically attacking members of the Minutemen on stage at a speech. If you are a Minuteman, forget it. John Leo has a column on it here:
No Free Speech, Please - This is Columbia September 28, 2007 Mindingthecampus.comPosted by John Leo
Ann Coulter seems to be the first writer to guffaw over Lee Bollinger's statement that Columbia University has a "long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate..." There is no such tradition, and very little debate at Columbia, particularly if one of the proposed debaters or speakers happens to be conservative.
Last October, Columbia radicals stormed a campus stage, knocking over furniture, creating pandemonium and preventing speeches by Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and a colleague. Nobody seemed very upset about this, least of all Lee Bollinger, who issued a tiny bleat about free speech before referring the issue to a committee where it languished for three months. Awakening briefly on Christmas weekend, the committee administered an undescribed slap on the wrist to an unknown number of unidentified members of the censoring rabble and there the matter ended.
