Columbia University gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad more of a pummeling Monday than the pulpit that objectors feared.

Too bad, in a way. How better to showcase Americans’ confidence in liberty than to let the inflammatory Iranian president air his repugnant views – unfettered and with vigor – to be judged on their own demerits by a discerning public?

Instead, Columbia President Lee Bollinger gave his best impression of Don Rickles at a Dean Martin roast, introducing Ahmadinejad with a deluge of bristling insults: “petty and cruel dictator,” “astonishingly undereducated,” “quite simply ridiculous.”

Welcome to Columbia.

Maybe Bollinger went on the attack to take the sting out of criticism directed at him for inviting Ahmadinejad in the first place. Maybe the grilling was part of his plan all along. Or maybe he was merely spoiling for a debate out of agreement with Thomas Jefferson’s belief that “error may be safely tolerated when truth is free to combat it.”

In any case, when Bollinger and Columbia offered the Iranian visitor a soapbox, they were acting in the spirit of academic freedom and open inquiry. And they got the predictable reaction. Throngs protested, saying sure, they believe in freedom of expression, but not for someone like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, on the country’s other coast, the appointment of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to a one-year term as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution had provoked a petition-drive protest (3,278 signatures and counting) on the Stanford University campus where the conservative think tank is based.

Sure, Rumsfeld’s critics were saying, an organization like Hoover should welcome long-term public officials whose influence on national policies has been far-reaching – but not one who was an architect of an unpopular war.

Neither Columbia’s nor Stanford’s protest was surprising. Rumsfeld is, well, Rumsfeld, and Ahmadinejad is known for a litany of objectionable stands, including his country’s potential nuclear threat, his sympathy for terrorists and his outrageous pronouncements denying the Holocaust and calling for the eradication of Israel. He’s not a nice guy.

Still, one quality that sets America apart from countries ruled by “petty and cruel” dictators like Ahmadinejad is the freedom to believe and say what you think, loudly at times. And to hear others do the same, even when it’s wildly unpopular.

Certainly, that right extends to Bollinger as much as to Ahmadinejad, as well as to the throngs of protestors in New York, Palo Alto and in between. But the best strategy – the American strategy – should be to challenge disreputable ideas, not to silence them. To expose their flaws, not weaken the fundamental freedoms that allow all views to compete.

Ultimately, as the late economist Milton Friedman, also a Hoover fellow, once put it:

“The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions.”