At the end of a busy day, everyone at Columbia University seemed to be pretty pleased by the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As he probably planned, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger presented himself as someone who "dealt a blow to the bad guy from Tehran" in his aggressive introductory words and by so doing managed to make people forget the fact that he invited Ahmadinejad in the first place. He would probably rather forget the principles I heard him defend in a closed forum last year arguing against inviting Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia after a previous attempt to have him speak at the institution without Bollinger's knowledge fell through.

As he probably calculated, Columbia's Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), John H. Coatsworth, emerged as a defender of liberalism and academic free speech, and received a large amount of media attention ?including three appearances on national television networks that most professors are never given.