Mayor Bloomberg, Shut Up
Not too long ago, Michael Bloomberg weighed in in defense of Larry Summers, as if he had any idea of what was actually happening at Harvard.
Now he's done the same with Columbia, where
Bloomberg has warned President Lee Bollinger that "he's got to get his hands around this," referring to the incident at a recent speech there by an anti-immigration advocate. Bloomberg added that the incident was an "outrage."
“Freedom of speech is freedom of speech and I think it’s an outrage that somebody that was invited didn’t get a chance to speak,” the mayor said on his weekly radio show. “I don’t care whether you’re from the hard left, the hard right... if you get invited, whoever invites you should have the courtesy to let you speak and provide the protection so that you can do it.”
Two things. Lee Bollinger does not need Michael Bloomberg to instruct him on the First Amendment, and Michael Bloomberg should stop injecting himself in collegiate affairs for political gain.
More important, Bloomberg is the
mayor who once called protest a "privilege" that could be taken away...and who in fact did take away people's right to protest, during the 2004 GOP convention in New York, when people who tried to demonstrate were arrested en masse and held unconstitutionally without charges being filed against them.
Interestingly,
the group that conducted the protest now says that
they were the ones who were attacked....
