Ahmadinejad has more rights than a U.S. college student

MAJID/Getty Images News

Something is seriously wrong with this picture: An American student enrolled at the University of Florida is denied his constitutionally-protected right to question an elected leader in a nonviolent way. He's tackled by a half dozen police officers, tasered, and thrown in jail. Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be given free reign to hold court before a group of students and faculty — and hordes of television cameras — at Columbia University next week.

So let me get this straight. Ahmadinejad, who is rumored to have taken Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and whose country is a leading state sponsor of terrorism, has more rights than an American college student. Friends, all is not well in American academia.

Some pundits are lamely attacking Columbia for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak. But of all people, these neocon types ought to understand that freedom means giving the microphone to someone who makes your blood boil. More convincing are folks like Matt Cooper, who is pointing out the hypocrisy in Columbia's eagerness to welcome Ahmadinejad even as they ban the U.S. military's Reserve Officers Training Corps from campus. Cooper asks, "If discrimination [is] the standard for banishment from campus why not Catholic groups? After all, the church bans women from becoming priests."

What's more worrisome, however, is the realization that, while Ahmadinejad will enjoy and test the very limits of the freedoms Americans are supposed to enjoy, a U.S. citizen was denied this priviledge earlier this week. American universities, one is left to assume, value the insights of a man like Ahmadinejad more than they do those of their own students.