More Response to Rick

To supplement Tom and Rob's comments on Rick's excellent questions, I think the Archbishop Tutu situation raises some extremely complicated, and very important, additional questions about how we engage in dialogue with people of faith traditions other than our own.  His disagreement with the Church on issues such as abortion and contraception demands a different sort of engagement and response by a Catholic university than, for example, a Catholic politician speaking on peace and reconciliation.  I'm not saying the Catholic institution should NOT respond and engage on those issues, just that we have to acknowledge the additional delicacy of interfaith dialogue in this situation.

I also think we need to spend more time thinking about, figuring out, and practicing constructive dialogue about deeply divisive issues in general, especially as academics.  For example, on a purely emotional level, I absolutely loved Bollinger's courageous audacity in his introduction to Ahmadinejad.  But was that really the most constructive way to engage him intellectually in the way we are trying to assert a University is uniquely required (and positioned) to do?  In a recent conversation I had with a member of the Columbia faculty, he suggested a more intellectually responsible way to challenge someone like Ahmadinejad might have been to provide in his introduction a list of difficult questions that Bollinger hoped Ahmadinejad would be addressing in his remarks.  If those questions are NOT, in fact, addressed in the talk, Bollinger might then have an even stronger platform for criticism afterwards.   I'm not sure that would work in that particular context, but I do think we need to think about how we, as universities, can constructively foster dialogue and debate, rather than simply providing platforms for assertions of positions on divisive issues.