Columbia law student Ruven Ellberger — the guy who started the “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is NOT WELCOME at Columbia University!” Facebook page that now has over 800 members — talked to National Review Online afternoon. He offered this concise and cogent rebuttal to Columbia president Lee Bollinger’s “free speech” defense of the decision to invite Ahmadinejad to participate in the school’s World Leaders Forum on Monday:

I think there’s four things to say about that. The first is that when Americans talk about free-speech rights, we’re talking about a constitutional right that all U.S. citizens have. Ahmadinejad is not a U.S. citizen. He’s a U.S. enemy. So he doesn’t have anything close to a free-speech right.
The second thing is that only the government has to give people free speech. The government cannot restrict free speech. Columbia University doesn’t have to give a soapbox to every lunatic in the world.
The third thing is that even if we want to hear minority opinions, dissenting opinions, things like that, I can understand giving it to somebody who just doesn’t have the access to the media. Ahmadinejad is probably one of the most publicized people in the world today. He has a microphone wherever he goes. He can conduct his own press conferences. He is routinely interviewed on ABC and CBS. He will be speaking at the U.N. He has the media to convey his messages. We don’t need to be the ones giving it to him.
And the fourth thing is that it just lowers the standards of Columbia University. Even if after all of this, you make the case that [Ahmadinejad] has a free-speech right, you shouldn’t just go around giving a platform to everybody. You’re supposed to exercise judgment. Basically, Columbia University wouldn’t find anything wrong with giving Stalin or Hitler a platform to speak, based on that rationale. I think Columbia owes it to itself and its students to exercise a little more judgment.

Ellberger also says he thinks Bollinger has good intentions, but that he ”might be caught up in an institutional conflict here. The best proof of that is that we had the exact same situation last year and he opposed it. Now, this year, he supports it, so either he had a weird dream or something in the middle of the year or he is being disingenuous.

“That’s just the way Columbia moves,” Ellberger says. “It’s controlled, or at least influenced a lot, by radical opinions. I don’t mean radical like extremist, I mean radical like they are not afraid to do something that is unpopular and a little bit crazy. It’s almost like Columbia has a penchant for going as sensational as possible. I know that’s sometimes what Columbia and other Ivy League universities are known for, but a lot of the students don’t support that kind of behavior.”