Don't insult a guest when introducing him as a speaker

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, was invited to give an address at Columbia University, he expected to get some hard-hitting questions put to him but what he didn’t expect was to be insulted by the Bollinger, the president of the university who was his host and who introduced him to the students of that university. In his opening remarks, Bollinger said, “You exhibit all the signs of a petty, cruel dictator.” He later said, “I am only a professor who is also a university president, and today I feel the weight of all the civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for.” Then he denounced Ahmadinejad’s government’s expanding crackdown on dissent, its perscution of the Bahai religious minority and homosexuals, its support for the destruction of Israel and its pursuit of a ‘proxy war’ against forces in Iraq. He even said that Ahmadinejad was either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

There is no doubt that how he described the president of Iran and his government is probably quite acurate but he should not have said those things in his introduction of a president of a foreign country who is a guest of his university. I think he said these things so that the general public could say to themselves, “What a clever man Bollinger is. He described Ahmadinejad and his thoughts are mine also.”

Unquestionably, his guest speaker Ahmadinejad is a stupid man when you consider all the stupid things he said at the University especially when in response to a question put to him by a student, the president of Iran said, “In Iran, we don’t have any homosexuals.” unquote. The students laughed at such a ridiculous statement. When he was addressing the U.N General Assembly the following day, he rambled on about the world’s problems when what he should have been telling the delegates what Iran’s role in the future was going to be in the community of nations.

Ahmadinejad was entitled to better treatment by the man who invited him to be a guest speaker at his University than what he got.

What Bollinger should have done is first, state who the guest was and second, ask his guest to answer the questions that his students would be asking and then let his students ask the questions.Instead, he infuriated his guest which then resulted in the president of Iran being on the defensive right from the get-go.

I remember back in 1947 when I was living in Nelson, British Columbia, being invited to spend a Saturday night at a friend’s home. While we were having supper, his sister, who was a classmate of mine, began telling his family how I screwed up after trying to answer a question put to me by our teacher. Her mother immediately chastised her and said, and I quote. “Dahn is a guest of your brother and while he is in our home, you will treat him as a guest and that means, you don’t insult him or try to make him look foolish.”

I have had many guests in my home over the years and I have always treated them with respect. I have been a guest speaker in many conferences around the world and I have never heard anyone insult me or any of the other speakers at those conferences when we were introduced. That is because the role of the person who introduces the speaker is in effect, merely giving the other conferees some idea as to the speaker’s background. When I was the host of a TV talk show in the 1970s and 1980s, I had on my show, hundreds of guests including, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan, a former bank robber and a former terrorist. When I introduced them, I did not insult them at all. I let my other guests do that but these people knew that might happen when they agreed to be guests of my show.

Good manners are based on consideration for other people and include using tact, diplomacy and offering hospitality to guests. Bollinger had the tact, the diplomacy and the offer of hospitality of that of Chicago hitman.