O'Connor claims that “Wyoming should have thought about the inevitable controversy before inviting Ayers--and should have decided either not to bring him in at all, or to weather the objections with ringing endorsements of free inquiry and open debate.” Really? A public college disinvites a speaker, and your reaction is that preemptively banning controversial speakers is the moral equal of defending free speech? Not wise, not fair, not useful, not good.

Tilt?! John, by your logic anyone a campus decides not to invite has been banned. That grossly misdescribes the standard vetting and decision-making process for inviting speakers, which always involves considering a range of candidates and deciding who would be the best one. The best one gets the invitation, and the others don't. No banning in sight.

But, as has been discussed many times on this blog and on countless others, schools could do with a lot more thoughtfulness when it comes to deciding which speakers to bring in and which to pass over. They should invite a range of speakers, who represent a range of views, and they should always prioritize lively debate and the free exchange of ideas at every point. And they should be prepared to weather the controversy that predictably arises when the Bill Ayerses and Ward Churchills and David Horowitzes of the world get invited. All of which I know you know.

Wyoming had buyer's remorse in a big, ugly, very public way. That should never have happened.

Tilt?! John, by your logic anyone a campus decides not to invite has been banned.

OUCH!

Erin's retort is clever but unfair. John is clearly saying that when, in Erin's words, "it comes to deciding which speakers to bring in and which to pass over," the potential for controversy should not be a criterion. Nowhere does John say there should be no such criterion. His comment doesn't justify Erin's caricature (that "anyone a campus decides not to invite has been banned").

Erin, by contrast, said that UW's decision-making process should have considered precisely the thing it should not have considered, namely, the "inevitable controversy":

Wyoming should have thought about the inevitable controversy before inviting Ayers--and should have decided either not to bring him in at all, or to weather the objections with ringing endorsements of free inquiry and open debate.

I disagree. Wyoming should have considered the potential for controversy only after deciding whether or not to invite. Before making that decision, the potential for controversy should have been bracketed. The university should have framed the decision itself in terms of its mission (as Erin correctly writes) to "invite a range of speakers, who represent a range of views, and [to] prioritize lively debate and the free exchange of ideas at every point." The potential for controversy should have been taken up not before but after the decision to invite--and then not to reconsider the decision, but only to provide adequate security and perhaps prepare a response (such as Bollinger's re Ahmadinejad).

David, you miss the wider context of my exchange with John, which is that he's clearly stewing about a comment I left on his site that I felt mischaracterized me and the position I took recently on federal control of student loans. The last sentence of his comment here is actually a sentence that I wrote to him--but you wouldn't know that, since John hasn't attributed it, just as he hasn't addressed me directly, and instead talks about me in the third person, as if we don't know each other, which we do.

So ... not that it changes the issues, but it is relevant that John's comment is less about the issues than it is about an evident wish to needle me. This wish, in turn, is something John rolls out periodically on this blog, when he thinks he can play "gotcha" with me. He doesn't typically comment unless that's his aim. That may mean this is an exchange that is beneath your consideration. I question whether it's worthy of mine, and I'm substantially more implicated in it than you. At any rate, I don't think it serves anything for you to function as John's translator here.

That said, let's all take a little time out and get real. Schools don't just invite speakers in a vacuum. They cost money, and time, and resources. They can also affect reputation in good and bad ways, and, when controversy is involved, can involve substantial security risks and costs. Now you two should both know that I have devoted this blog since its founding in 2002 to advocating a *very* broad definition of free speech on campus. I have defended numerous campus invitations to Bill Ayers and other controversial speakers, left and right. I have written many times about how schools should not allow heckler's vetoes to decide whether a speaker is invited or disinvited.

I don't think a school should ever be deterred from inviting a speaker because of concerns about controversy per se. But I do think that resources are scarce, and that schools need to be smart about deciding ahead of time whether they are willing to back a controversial speaker to the hilt--be they Bill Ayers OR Anne Coulter. Not every speaker is worth it--and who is and isn't is a decision that has to be made with pragmatic concerns in mind as well as idealist ones. Schools should not be making those decisions at the stage that Wyoming did. I can say that and be right even as I say, too, that I think Wyoming is wrong and that they are behaving like a pack of cowards.

FWIW, David, your Bollinger example doesn't really work as an example of how things ought to be done. Bollinger was clearly nonplussed to learn, once the controversy broke, that Columbia had invited Ahmadinejad, was horrified that this was where the school's resources had been put, and spent his opening remarks talking out of two sides of his mouth, defending free speech while also ambushing and attacking the invited speaker in order to do damage control for a situation that arguably ought never to have arisen. Unless you think part of the work of inviting controversial speakers is to surprise presidents by creating public relations nightmares for them, this was not an ideal scenario.