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• Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:55 AM

  Response to Techman

  "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.

  —D Holt Read D Holt's other letters
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