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Ahmadinejad's treatment divides opinion in the US

Columbia University president Lee Bollinger teaches a class on free speech issues in New York on Oct. 21 last year. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Before Iran's president took the stage at Columbia University on Monday, the university's president, Lee Bollinger, sent out an early-morning e-mail message, calling on students and faculty "to live up to the best of Columbia's traditions."

On Tuesday, many critics questioned whether Bollinger had met that test himself.

On campus and in editorials across the nation, on political blogs and throughout academia, there was a sharp division of opinion about Bollinger's pointed introduction of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a man who exhibited "all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator" and whose denial of the Holocaust was "either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."

Some said Bollinger's remarks were just the rebuke that Ahmadinejad deserved. Others said they were embarrassing and offensive. And there were still questions about whether Ahmadinejad should have been afforded a public platform at a prestigious university at all.

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia, said: "The tone from the host of an event was uncivil and uncalled for. The president of the university had every right to state his differences. That was more than acceptable. But I believe it was embarrassing to the university, frankly, that they should decide to invite him and then treat him in this manner."

But Emily Steinberger, a sophomore who is a spokeswoman for LionPAC, a pro-Israel group at Columbia that had vehemently opposed Ahmadinejad's invitation, applauded Bollinger.

"President Bollinger was caustic in his criticism of Ahmadinejad, but anything else would have been inappropriate and troubling," Steinberger said. "Bollinger repeatedly said that his invitation in no way represented a condoning of Ahmadinejad's worldviews and policies, and yesterday he proved that."

A number of Iranian-born scholars -- experts about the Middle East who now live in the US -- said they were shocked by Bollinger.

"If I as a faculty member had done this in front of my president, I would have been out the next day," said Ali Akbar Mahdi, a professor of sociology at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Mahdai, who is a critic of Ahmadinejad's, said: "I was taken aback."

So was Hamid Zangeneh, a professor of economics at Widener University in Pennsylvania.

"I was disgusted by the uncivilized behavior by president Bollinger," he said. "I don't think it is becoming for the president of a university to engage in such behavior. It wasn't academic."
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