Stanley, I only disagree with your assessment that the Columbia event was a “huge success” because I found the WFB speech Noah excerpted on Sunday to be so persuasive. The whole thing can be found here [PDF], and I agree with Noah that it deserves to be read in full. Buckley delivered the speech in 1962, urging the Yale Political Union to disinvite a Communist from speaking at the university. This is how he closed:

The servants of these ideologies are dislodged from the human situation, and yet – And yet they are human beings themselves… And it is over their plight as human beings that we must, it strikes me, pause, for that is the problem supremely that you face, above all others — certainly above the political problem, it being conceded that you are immune to seductive passes at your intellectual and moral integrity and that the words, the wooden words, are words you knew before. That problem is human. What will you do when Gus Hall, the human being, comes here to defend the cause of what you know ahead of time to be the cause of organized inhumanity? Will you show that “shudder of polite disgust”? Is this a new social skill we need to cultivate, in our time…? Did your son learn at his college how to give off a shudder of polite disgust? Or will you applaud him when he is introduced? Yes, there will be applause — in recognition of his courage in facing a hostile audience. But the applause will be confused — will it not? — because you know very well that objective courage is not necessarily admirable… Is it not likely that among those of you who applaud there will be those who are in fact applauding their own courage in applauding a real live apologist for human atrocity? […] Some of you may feel the obligation to externalize your knowledge that you know he is here to defend the indefensible. You may jeer him…; some of you may treat him with that terrible coldness that is the sign of the intellectual foreknowledge that you cannot, at your level of attainment, take seriously the man who speaks and works for a kingdom which it is the very purpose of your education to know to despise. Why then bring him here, if no purpose can be served and if it can only result that you will humiliate yourselves and him? Because you are willing to humiliate yourselves in order to humiliate him? Fight him, fight the tyrants everywhere; but do not ask them to your quarters, merely to spit on them, and do not ask them to your quarters if you cannot spit on them. To do the one is to ambush a human being as one might a rabid dog; to do the other is to ambush oneself, to force oneself, in disregard of those who have died trying to make the point, to break faith with humanity.

Buckley’s speech persuaded the Yale Political Union to withdraw the Communist’s invitation. Now that Columbia has demonstrated poorer judgment, we see how prescient Buckley’s words were.