Last week’s visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia University brought the debate over campus politics and academic freedom — a debate already brewing at Stanford since the Hoover Institution announced the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as a distinguished visiting fellow in mid-September — to the national spotlight.

Giving Ahmadinejad a platform to make his views heard and get the attention he craves — without facing constructive debate — put Columbia in a lose-lose situation, said Abbas Milani, Hoover fellow and director of the Iranian Studies Program. What best defines academic freedom is an engaging discussion and a serious give-and-take with scholars, he said, adding that such a format was missing at Columbia last week.

In his introductory remarks, Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger defended the address as an exercise in free speech. He then disparaged his guest as “a petty and cruel dictator” and said his denial of the Holocaust was “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

“It could have been handled much better,” Milani said in an interview with The Daily. “When [Ahmadinejad] makes an absurd statement, like ‘there are no homosexuals in Iran,’ someone could have called him on it. Instead it was comic relief.”

Asked whether he would welcome the Iranian president to Stanford, the Hoover fellow said he would, on the condition that Ahmadinejad submit to a debate with a panel of scholars, Iranian opposition leaders and Jewish community leaders.

“I have no doubt that he would not have accepted [those conditions],” Milani said. “He only wants a free ride.”

Academic freedom and free speech issues at college campuses have also made headlines in California. UC-Irvine fired and then rehired liberal scholar Edwin Chemerinsky as founding dean of its fledgling law school, while petitions of protest from several hundred faculty members statewide caused the University of California to rescind an offer to former Harvard president Larry Summers to speak at a UC Regents dinner.

Critics have denounced the campuses in question as hypocritical and out-of-touch with the rest of the country. While unique, the episodes display “a degree of weak nerves, close-mindedness and herd thinking that are the opposite of academic inquiry and basic freedoms,” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Editorial Board wrote in an editorial published last week. “It’s a mistake to give in to these protests. Free speech is not just for the ‘right’ views of history, science, war or culture. It must be celebrated, not suppressed, on our college campuses.”

At Stanford, Rumsfeld’s defenders have seized on similar sentiments. As a two-time former secretary of defense, they argue, his experience is tantamount to the mission of the Hoover task force on national security, terrorism and ideology.

“The general public has had to remind these universities that their campuses should welcome thinkers who have distinguished themselves in their fields, regardless of politics and ideology,” Hoover fellow Victor Davis Hansen wrote in an op-ed published last week in The San Jose Mercury News. “Here’s a simple tip to the clueless tenured class about why a Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld should be welcome to speak, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shunned: former Cabinet secretaries — yes; homicidal dictators killing Americans — no.”

“Something is wrong with our elite universities when the visit of the most influential actor in international terrorism in the world today [Ahmadinejad] to Columbia receives less of a protest than the appointment of one of the most decorated public servants of this generation [Rumsfeld] to the Hoover Institution,” added Calley Means ‘08, in a letter to the editor published in The Daily last week.

Those opposed to the Rumsfeld appointment, however, said there is a difference between speaking on campus and receiving a fellowship at a prominent university think-tank.

“There’s no comparison here because it’s not an issue of speaking or talking on campus, but of being appointed a distinguished fellow at an institute linked indelibly in the public mind with Stanford,” said English professor Robert Polhemus. “Professors would be happy to have Rumsfeld speak here, if he would engage in discussion and debate and answer questions like any other speaker. How this thing got screwed around as an issue of free speech amazes me — a kind of the right-wing, ‘Rove’ narrative I suppose.”

According to Polhemus, faculty members intend to invite Rumsfeld to an open debate whenever the former defense secretary is on campus, which reports have predicted will be only four or five times during his fellowship.