Alumni, faculty and friends of Columbia University were heartened to receive the Fall 2007 edition of COLUMBIA: The Magazine of Columbia University.

At last, President Lee C. Bollinger sat for a penetrating, hard-probing interview to examine his motives for inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to campus, where Ahmadinejad was given a prestigious platform to spew his evil vile.  NOT!

If COLUMBIA magazine had any dignity before this pseudo interview, none remains that we can detect.

The cover story in the magazine is devoted to the Ahmadinejad-Bollinger speech, and it demonstrates the unabated power given to those who own their own press -- in this case, Columbia University.

For all the puffery and posturing that COLUMBIA allows Bollinger to get away with, we still found the article instructive for helping us -- the loyal opposition -- better understand who beyond Bollinger, himself, deserves our derision.

Let us start with Professor Richard Bulliet, a professor of Middle East History and Islamic Society.  It was he, Bollinger contends, who was the go-between with the Iranian mission to the United Nations and the university.  Bulliet, exercising HIS right to invite speakers to campus, next recruited John H. Coatsworth, acting dean of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) to the cause.

Bollinger tells COLUMBIA that he was only honoring the "long-standing principle that faculty, heads of schools or departments, and deans have the freedom to invite people to come speak."

Indeed, it was a principled decision to let the women-stoning, gay-hanging, anti-America, anti-Israel, fundamentalist terrorist, would-be mass murderer use Columbia like a sheet of toilet paper to wipe his foul views upon. 

The stench is not one that Columbia is likely to ever mask.

Bollinger, wrongly, equates giving Ahmadinejad a respected forum with the need for a University to foster a robust debate over the most pressing and most controversial issues of our time.  One need not invite the devil, himself, to speak in order to conduct a serious discourse on evil v. good.

(In order to discuss the pros and cons of capital punishment, should Columbia next host an execution on campus?  We'll ask Professor Bulliet if he is willing to propose it.  We are confident his friends at the Iranian mission can offer their expert assistance.)

Bollinger makes no apologies for any of his actions or the deep hurt they inflicted on many individuals both within and outside the Columbia community.  Nor does he address the issue of whether when weighed in hindsight, the Ahmadinejad speech benefited students and the University more than it cost students and the University in terms of a global loss of honor (and donations).

Bollinger acknowledges that Ahmadinejad never did address any of the issues that he and the students raised, but that doesn't undermine the whole purpose of the speech, he contends. 

"For me, his answers -- at times confusing, at others frustrating and abstract -- said a lot about the way he chooses to see the world.," Bolling told COLUMBIA.  The university president was referring to Ahmadinejad.  But perhaps, the quote is equally apropos to Bollinger's magazine interview.