A year ago Stephen Walt was invited by University of Montana History Chairman Richard Drake to deliver the school’s annual Presidential lecture in Helena. Drake writes that he experienced a fusillade of angry mail — from other professors. "I have invited more than two hundred speakers to the campus. Walt was the
first one to be welcomed with a preemptive barrage of defamatory
invective from faculty members."
One of my critics told me before startled witnesses that he would
not rest until I had been stripped of my position of power, which
manifestly had corrupted me. Someone as insensitive to Jewish issues as
I was could no longer be entrusted to coordinate a university lecture
series. He initiated a campaign to bring about my dismissal.The charge that Walt was the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier
seemed little less than grotesque, but there it was in black and white
on University of Montana stationery in one of the many bitter letters
that this affair inspired: “It is much as if the university had brought
a Holocaust denier to campus and accorded him the honors of a respected
guest.”
Of course, another charge was that unless Drake invited someone to balance Walt–say Alan Dershowitz–he would “leave a dark stain on the President’s Lecture Series and the university itself.” Drake answers that one by referring eloquently, not to the lobby, but to American government:
The government possesses ample resources for celebrating its
policies, dominating as it does a wide range of institutions and
offices that condition the public debate, and it hardly requires the
services of a university lecture series… In a democratic society, all government policies must stand for
public inspection. With both of our political
parties and the media sharing the same basic ideas about foreign
policy, especially in the Middle East, we need a place where the
assumptions of the status quo encounter a stern testing, not a
happy-faced tribute. The university should be that place.
