DID PROFESSOR ALEMAYEHU G. MARIAM GET IT WRONG?

Professor Alemayehu Gebre Mariam (aka Al Mariam) seems to have provoked some reactions by his last weekly column “Meles Zenawi Goes to College” in which he defends (!) Columbia University’s invitation of the tyrant Meles Zenawi to address students. Here below are some comments.

Kirubeal Bekele
to almariam

Selam Professor Al and all,

This is the only time I can remember disagreeing with you. Can you teach a wild animal like a lion not to kill? No, you can’t. Such a wild animal kills for a living. If it does not, it dies.

After twenty years, what can you teach Zenawi? The only way he knows how to survive is by killing. You can’t teach him not to survive. Have you ever wondered if Zenawi is teachable or not? Or are you trying to apply to him ‘teachable moments’ that may work for other human beings despite what you know about him? Are you serous Zenawi is teachable?

I don’t think so. I think you may have stepped into academic fantasy which is all too common among the elites in the Universities. It is a reflection of too much subjectivity in the face of an overwhelming cruel reality surrounding this killer.

I know you know more about his killing records than I do. But still you want to teach him. This time may be you are influenced more by your profession and the academic environment you are in rather than the naked reality Serkalem Fasil is subjected to in Ethiopia. May be that is why it is easier for you to grant this killer a teachable moment. Again you know all of these more than I do. And still you think Zenawi is teachable and you gave him the opportunity.

Well, think again. I know you don’t like this ruthless killer. You are writing about him practically every week. Working hard to teach him all these years. And you know what happened. He can’t learn.

Professor Al, you said some thing against your own experience with Zenawi. Your own experience and your conscience are witnesses against you.  This time you are wrong. Sincerely wrong.

Thanks,
K.Bekele

Dictators on Campus: A Free Speech Issue?
Armin Rosen | September 15, 2010

Whoever signed off on inviting Meles Zenawi to speak at Columbia University’s World Leaders Forum probably figured that the Ethiopian dictator’s obscurity would protect the school from any criticism. Let me be the first to prove that person wrong: Zenawi is like a watered-down Robert Mugabe meets a watered-down Omar al-Bashir; a strongman who has impoverished his own people in order to maintain his stranglehold on power, and who has exploited his country’s strategic significance in order to gain the backing of the United States. I suppose he could offer Columbians a hell of a seminar on dictatorial self-preservation—on how to install puppet governments in neighboring nations with the military and diplomatic blessing of the most powerful country on earth; on how to violently steal elections while provoking minimal global outcry; on how to run a country that’s 171st on the UN’s Human Development Index. One wonders, however, whether such a master class in the infliction of widespread human misery is really worth both the aggrandizement of one of the world’s worst tyrants—and the potential hit to Columbia’s reputation that could come as a result. Like what could possibly justify this?

The first answer, which is heavily implied in the World Leaders Forum’s webpage for the event, is that Zenawi is a figure worth honoring:
Under the seasoned governmental leadership of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, now in his fourth term, and vision of the Tigrai Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) and Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), Ethiopia has made and continues to make progresses in many areas including in education, transportation, health and energy.

Note also that the talk is taking place in the Low Library Rotunda, the location of the University President’s office and the school’s semesterly University Lecture, and upon whose steps the University’s annual commencement exercises take place. It is a venue that confers honor upon the people who speak there—unlike the less stately Roone Arledge Auditorium, where I, as a slightly enraged Columbia sophomore, sat four rows away from Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinejad in 2007.

Which brings to mind the second possible justification for inviting tinpots to speak at major American universities, a justification voiced by Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger during his now-infamous introduction of Ahmadinejad:

Second, to those who believe that this event never should have happened, that it is inappropriate for the University to conduct such an event, I want to say that I understand your perspective and respect it as reasonable.  The scope of free speech and academic freedom should itself always be open to further debate.  As one of the more famous quotations about free speech goes, it is “an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”  I want to say, however, as forcefully as I can, that this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself.

Third, to those among us who experience hurt and pain as a result of this day, I say on behalf of all of us we are sorry and wish to do what we can to alleviate it.
Fourth, to be clear on another matter – this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak.  We do it for ourselves.

We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now.  We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers.  It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament.  In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear.  In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

For Bollinger, “free speech” has less to do with the right to speak freely than with the responsibility to tolerate other people’s speech. Free speech manifests itself in our paradoxical ability to tolerate the intolerable, and it is justified through our “intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil” and, nevertheless, “act with the right temperament.” When we tolerate the presence of murderous dictators on college campuses—when we act with that “right temperament”—we prove that we’re up to the challenge of living in a free society whose limits of tolerance must be constantly tested.

But in the case of Ahmadinejad—and especially in the case of Zenawi—the whole “we do this for ourselves” justification is deeply selfish.  There was just an election in Ethiopia. Zenawi’s party won 99% of the vote amidst widespread allegations of fraud. In the case of Zenawi’s speaking invitation, any expansion of our own understanding of free speech (which is a dubiously self-reflexive justification for free-speech, if you haven’t noticed) will come at the expense of the actual free speech of Ethiopia’s opposition, whose oppressor will soon be feted at one of the top universities on earth. The irony, of course, is that those whose free speech is curtailed on a daily basis likely understand that the concept is more than just an abstract exercise in achieving the “right temperament”—and that free speech is hardly protected by honoring those who have absolutely no respect for it.

By Armin Rosen
reason.com

Over at the Huffington Post, Political Science professor Alemayehu G. Mariam argues that Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi’s upcoming talk at Columbia University is in fact a free speech issue, a notion that I tried to debunk last week. Mariam is no Zenawi supporter—he’s a passionate and extremely well-versed opponent of Ethiopia’s apparent president-for life, and his description of the country’s ruination under Zenawi is pretty enraging (especially when you consider how much the United States has done to prop up his regime).
Yet Mariam defends Columbia’s invitation, arguing that free speech should be treated as a kind of categorical imperative, existing outside the messy real world of politics and human rights:

But as a university professor and constitutional lawyer steadfastly dedicated to free speech, I have adopted one yardstick for all issues concerning free speech, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” I underscore the words “everyone” and “regardless of frontiers.”

No one’s arguing that the United States government—a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—has jeopardized Meles Zenawi’s right to free speech. Neither has anyone argued that it should. The applicable free speech issue here is instead whether American universities, which should be society’s vanguards of free speech, are actually advancing free speech by valorizing those who have made a political career out of taking it away from others.

I think the answer is no, but my notion of free speech is different from Mariam’s. He believes that free speech is a universal right, but also a pretext for teaching people things:

I want the event to be a teachable moment for him. Perhaps this opportunity will afford him a glimpse of the clash of ideas that routinely take place in American universities. He may begin to appreciate the simple truth that ideas are accepted and rejected and arguments won and lost in the cauldron of critical analysis oxygenated by the bellows of free speech, not in prison dungeons where journalists and dissidents are bludgeoned and left to rot.

By this logic, the more oppressive a dictator is, the more urgent it is for us to use the powers of “free speech” to educate or perhaps even pacify him. Dictators, however, realize that free speech is, in fact, a civil liberty essential to any free society, which is probably why they’re none too fond of the concept.