Ivy League Lunacy

I’d thought I’d seen it all. Just when parents thought that Ivy League schools couldn’t break away from mainstream thought anymore, Columbia University pushes the envelope even more. It was announced earlier this week that Columbia plans to go ahead with plans to host Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a speech. Ahmadinejad and Iran are said to be the chief sponsor of terrorism in the world; both in Iraq and with their funding of Hezbollah last year in its war against Israel. Ahmadinejad has also angered Jewish groups by calling the Holocaust a “myth” and saying that Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

I suppose that it’s about time Columbia joined its Ivy League counterparts by allowing more of this so-called “free speech.”

First, Princeton University promoted Bioethicist Peter Singer to the head of its department. For those who aren’t aware, Singer is an ethicist whose views have been compared to eugenicists. WORLD Magazine has him on the record supporting bestiality (“…not inherently wrong in a moral sense”), necrophilia (“…no moral problem with that”), and infanticide. When asked if there is something wrong with a society that breeds children for spare parts on a massive scale, Singer answered, “No.” WORLD also reports that he “reaffirmed it would be ethically OK to kill 1-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities…” Oh wait, he did say that ideally the question of infanticide would be "raised as soon as possible after birth.” Thanks.

Next, we have Yale. To go along with rejecting the ROTC, Yale decided to accept and help enroll a former terrorist. Former "ambassador-at-large" of the Taliban regime, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is now a student at Yale. First brought to New Haven in 2001, Hashemi spoke as an apologist for his government. Not too worry…Hashemi applied and was accepted in 2004. Yale Dean Richard Shaw reportedly came away from the interview, “with a sense: Whoa! This is a person to be reckoned with and who could educate us about the world.”

The examples of Ivy League disconnection with the rest of the country goes on and on. All of these examples are defended by these college administrations and they all boil down to the same thing: Free speech! Diversity!

Interesting.

In January of 2001, the president of Harvard University, Larry Summers, did something outrageous. He put forth a hypothesis (backed up by decades of scientific data) that men and women are inherently different. Unfortunately, Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was in attendance. Hopkins said later that if she hadn’t left, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” Because of his shocking view, the Harvard faculty voted that they had lost faith in him as a president and soon after he was asked to resign. Free speech?

The New York Times published a piece titled, “Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find.” The piece is based on two studies done on professors at the collegiate level based on their voting records. The study found that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 7 to 1 (9 to 1 at Berkeley and Stanford). At Harvard, $19 was given to John Kerry in 2004 for every $1 given to George W. Bush. The field in which the political leanings was closest was economics (still 3 to 1), furthest was anthropologists with a 30 to 1 difference. Diversity?

Getting back to Columbia, my problem with this is the stupidity of it all. Let me see if I get this straight: ROTC (which has been banned from Columbia since 1969 despite student approval of it) isn’t allowed to set up stands and recruit students…but the president of a country that state sponsors terrorism is allowed to come and share his views? And elite academia is wondering why they’re being called anti-American?

President Ahmadinejad has cited Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite reads. Columbia University should treat the Iranian terrorist the same way Hitler would be treated if he had asked to come speak at one of our nation’s top universities in the midst of WWII.