"Ahaaa....reverting to the old rhetorical trick of mis-characterizng your opponent and then attacking the mis-characterization. Bollinger is being critisized not because he failed to repect free speech, but because of his cowardice in making the audience listen to what was basically his fifteen minute apologia to Fox News, etc."

I have read over the letters in this post and I don't think I have mischaracterized the arguments here at all. Most people have complained that Bollinger was a bully and made a mockery of free speech. And I understand where they are coming from in principle. If you are attacking him for an "apologia to Fox News," I find that even less persuasive as a reason to attack Bollinger.

I think there is a disagreement here over what the goal of this event was. People would like the university to be apolitical and wished that this event was a free-exchange of ideas. Like you, they probably resent that Bollinger tried to innoculate himself with a strong stance against Ahmadenijad. But the university is not free from politics, Whether we like it or notand it is often in the interest of left politics. Bollinger had more eyes on him that only the students there. Above all, it is wrong to reject what he did as pandering only to the Fox News fringe. He likely acquited himself very well in the eyes of more mainstream Americans. The NY Times editorial page is more representative of what this event meant than the letter writers here on Salon.

Not Bollinger's speech, but the response here by Salon letter writers. I opened the news today and was happy to hear about Bollinger's performance and turned to the internet today to see how others would praise him and retract all of the criticism that he had faced leading up to the event. Instead, his performance is criticized here as "pandering." What kind of a debate would you want Bollinger to have had with Ahmadinejad? Do you think the Iranian president would be worth engaging on the evidence? He is a political performer above all and the only worry I have is that being spoken to like this might give him sympathy back home. But I won't for a second condemn Bollinger for saying to his face what the American people think.

I am in the academic world, and apparently we can never win. Invite Ahmadinejad and be skewered by the right for giving him a forum and a sense of legitimacy; immediately reject that legitimacy at the event and get pilloried by the left for not respecting true free speech. I truly hope that the Democratic nominees continue not to cave in to the portion of the left represented by all the Bollinger-bashing here, because there is no way that nominee will be elected when his supporters criticize talking tough to a dictator on our soil. And we wonder why the left is continually marginalized in a country where the ruling party has the lowest approval ratings in history.