An anniversary is upon us this week. It was October 4, last year, that Columbia University students disrupted a speech by Jim Gilchrist, head of the Minutemen. This blot on the history of free and open debate on college campuses has earned a place in the history of the decline of core academic values in American higher education. Partly that’s because it happened at all, partly because it happened a major university, and partly because of the weak-kneed response of the University’s president, Lee Bollinger. President Bollinger is a man of inspiring words—and practically nothing else. But let’s spare a thought too for how this event is being logged into history by the mainstream media. It can’t quite be forgotten, so how is it handled?

In a report by Staff writer Robin Shulman, The Washington Post today (Sunday) reviews Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s travails as a principled defender of campus free speech. The tone of Shulman’s report is highly sympathetic. Bollinger is quoted:

“Most everything I’ve written about in free speech has been about a national mentality in wartime and how it plays out in issues of free-speech liberties,” Bollinger said. “The country has been very, very divided in its political culture and very confrontational in its political dialogue. And that doesn’t mesh well with an academic environment that is supposed to have a norm of suspending one’s beliefs and trying for understanding.”

It’s been a hard road, standing up for intellectual freedom in these circumstances, but as Shulman sees it, President Bollinger has risen to the challenge.

I appreciate Shulman’s willingness to say some nice things about a public figure who has had a rough couple of weeks, but Shulman’s account of the President Bollinger’s handling of the Minuteman affair seems generous to a fault. Schulman writes: “In fall 2006, student protesters stormed a stage and shut down a speech by Jim Gilchrist, head of the Minuteman Project, a group that opposes illegal immigration. Bollinger disciplined the students.”

Yes, technically, Bollinger “disciplined” the students. (For a reminder of what they did, check out the video of the October 4 event still posted on Powerline, with the students chanting, “Racist Nazis go away,” after they had seized the stage.) Two days following the incident, Bollinger issued a statement saying the University would investigate and declaring, “We must speak out to deplore a disruption that threatens the central principle to which we are institutionally dedicated, namely to respect the rights of others to express their views. This is not complicated: Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.”

The “sacrosanct and inviolable principle,” however, turned out to be coupled with a lethargic investigation and an indulgent wrist slap for the malefactors. Months went by, and after the fall semester final exams, Bollinger issued another statement declaring that “As a result of the investigation, the University has notified a number of Columbia students that they will be subject to discipline for having violated the Rules of University Conduct.” That vague explanation was all that Columbia intended to make public.

Eventually it leaked out that five of the students involved had received “disciplinary warnings,” mildest action the University could have taken short of outright exoneration. In March, the University seemed to respond to the tide of criticism for taking so lenient approach to multiple violations of a “sacrosanct and inviolable principle,” that it then increased the sanction to “censure” for three of the students—one step up from a “disciplinary warning.” Bollinger again issued a statement defending the University’s handling of the matter: “If the rule of law is to mean anything, it is vital that we respect the results of the system of rules we live under.”

Why was Columbia University so lenient with these folks who publicly trashed a “sacrosanct and inviolable principle?” We may never know for sure, but Columbia’s actions have convinced a fair number of people that the University has no real interest in enforcing its protections of free speech if that means taking serious action against some student radicals who are playing up their ethnicity. The “inviolable principle” gives way in that situation to the voluble propitiator.

Back to the Washington Post article. Is it accurate to say, as Robin Schulman says, “Bollinger disciplined the students”? Yes. And deeply misleading.