The Other Presidents People Should Hate

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” always figured that politicians were pound for pound the most obnoxious folks on the planet. After all, they’re rich buffoons who tell half-truths for a living.

But events of the last year or so have led us to rethink our previously stated position. Perhaps it’s not the politicians who so rankle, it’s the fancy-pants types in the world of university administration. That is to say, the presidents of the United States may be bad, but the presidents of your local colleges are far, far worse.

Just take the higher education headlines of the last few months as a guide. Few men, of course, are more self-righteously obnoxious than Duke University president Richard (“Dick”) Brodhead. After all, this is the man who, when not whitewashing a Palestinian terrorist powwow he allowed on his campus, is busy making the Duke lacrosse non-rape case into an utter fiasco.

It’s hard to imagine, in fact, that a college president could be more incapable of leadership than Dick Brodhead. The guy’s a master of equivocation and self-exonerating nonsense. He’s a jellyfish with a moustache. (And it ain’t that nice a moustache, either.)

Ah, but of course another president of a world-class university could give Mr. Brodhead a proverbial run for his money. We mean, naturally, Lee Bollinger, the head of Columbia University.

Other “webloggers” have already spilled much e-ink over the recent visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the hallowed halls of Columbia. So you likely know of Mr. Bollinger’s hypocrisy in all it’s glorious splendor: This is a fellow who’ll let a Holocaust-denying, genocidal, terrorist-supporter on his campus, but won’t countenance ROTC. Some things, we guess, are just beyond the pale.

And then there’s the matter of Mr. Bollinger’s rather toothless punishment for those students who stormed a speech at Columbia from a leader of the Minutemen. They broke up the event, destroying this fellow’s free speech rights—but Mr. Bollinger didn’t seem terribly exercised about it. This was the case even though Mr. Bollinger played the free-speech card as his way of excusing his invitation to the odious terrorist from Iran.

We could go on all day. It’s pretty clear that the nutter from Iran was an acceptable speaker for Mr. Bollinger because his racist commentary pertains to the Jews. If Ahmadinejad made some appalling remarks about, say, African Americans, you can bet no fancy-pants college president would come anywhere near the guy. For such administrators, free speech only goes so far.

The list of college president nonsense must be endless. So, if everyone hates politicians and lawyers so heartily, why do these obnoxious, self-important twits seem to get a break? If you ask us, John Edwards isn’t half as annoying as Dick Brodhead.