Patrick Fitzgerald, your article is deeply misleading and does not tell the whole story. There is a huge double standard on many college campuses with regard to accepting/welcoming "liberal" vs. "conservative" speech. Even the most fringe left-wing and anti-American elements (including counter-military recruitment activists, avowed communists and socialists, instructors [like Lynne Stewart at Hofstra] with previous ties to Islamic terrorists, professors with long records of anti-US rhetoric, non-Christian/Jew religious extremists and terrorist apologists, etc.) are routinely welcomed on many major campuses. However, none of this speech receives the kind of unhinged negative campus reaction that we regularly see upon the announcement of campus events involving figures who are viewed in some way, rightly or wrongly, as representing "conservative" ideas. For example, consider the reactions to representatives of the military, Larry Summers (Harvard's former President who made the mistake of posing valid questions that some people found objectionable) at UC Davis, the American flag in Berkeley after 9/11, the Minutemen who were threatened and shouted down at Columbia, Rumsfeld and President Bush. Daily writer Fitzgerald ignores and almost denies the obvious (that "conservative" speech is far less welcome on major college campuses) and instead directs the article's narrative toward the valid idea that free speech of any stripe should be tolerated/not feared/challenged on campuses. (By the way, I don't believe that English prof Robert Polhemus, who is quoted in the article and who, based on those quotes, appears to be an ineffective spokesman for the anti-Rumsfeld crusade, would have been a-okay with the idea of Rumsfeld even speaking on campus. What was his reaction to last year's embarrassing effort by large numbers of Stanford students to deny President Bush access to campus?) Instead, to show that free speech across the spectrum is threatened on campuses, Fitzgerald offers the example of UC Irvine hiring and then quickly firing and then rehiring a liberal-minded academic for what seemed to be political reasons. What Fitzgerald leaves out is that conservative academics widely denounced the UC Irvine firing (something that cannot be said for most liberal academics in similar situations) and that the whole UC Irvine situation appeared to be related to the perceived effect that having a liberal dean would have on conservative Orange County billionaire Donald Bren's willingness to donate millions to the school in the future. UC Irvine is clearly the exception, not the rule. The issues of free speech, intellectual diversity and academic freedom on college campuses are all hugely important issues. I hope Patrick Fitzgerald and The Stanford Daily cover these issues with more courage and honesty in the future.

“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.”
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The distinguished fellows at the Hoover Institute do not comprehend the fact that war is a dictatorship. This American dictatorship has killed in Iraq some 700,000 Iraqi civilians since God told George W Bush that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and George W Bush decided to listen to Jehovah rather than the chief weapons inspector of the U.N., whom these estimates of civilians deaths in Iraq came from.

Just because the distinguished fellows of the Hoover Institute live in their Happytown homes with their Happytown families and read the Happytown newspapers about a war that is far removed from their American realities, does not make them the saints of the world if their psychotic Jehovah started an unconstitutional war against Islam in the Middle East, for no reason, except to suck up to the atomic warmongers in Israel.

I a surprised that the "clueless, tenured" professors at Stanford University did not all jump on board this forum and give Victor Davis Hansen a lashing with their atomic bomb wit.

Leave it to Alec Baldwin to get the job done for you: is that it?

jeff- are you an on campus weirdo?

I am on campus. I'm in Suites, so you can come see if I'm a weirdo.

Stanford has always had purely symbolic conservative talking heads on their payroll even if they don't contribute to any academic dialog, so I'm not sure why this move is surprising or newsworthy to faculty and students. What kind of university did you think you belong to exactly? Stanford's past political legacy is as balanced politically as Fox News. I mean, Jesus tapdancing Christ... you named your tower after one of the most corrupt, disturbed conservatives our country has ever seen. Just deal with it... it's part of your past, and it will constantly be part of your future.