THE COLUMBIA University dean who shared a stage Monday with Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and who defended the university’s highly controversial invitation to Ahmadinejad to speak, was himself once denied the chance to give a controversial speech.
It happened in Madison, decades ago, but as William Faulkner once wrote, the past is never dead — it’s not even past.
John C. Coatsworth, who ignited even more controversy over the weekend when he said Columbia would have invited Adolf Hitler to speak, was barred from giving a speech on Cuba at Madison Central High School in the fall of 1963.
Coatsworth today is the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. He moderated Monday’s discussion with Ahmadinejad. In 1963, (he) was a graduate student at UW-Madison.