When Columbia University hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak in September 2007, critics complained that the Iranian leader did not deserve the prestige of the podium. University President Lee Bollinger, though, insisted that "we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices." Important as this debate was, it went unresolved and ignored an important related matter: what about honoring the honorable? Especially in the year of the Ahmadinejad invitation, it would serve the University community to examine what messages it sends when it bestows explicit honors, such as by conferring honorary degrees at Commencement.

In recognizing accomplished academics, artists, philanthropists and statesmen, Columbia carries out a dual mission: it honors the recipients, and it calls students&rsquo attention to exemplary achievement and behavior. Literary scholars, chemists, medical researchers, architects, and Cabinet secretaries are certainly role models for graduates of Columbia’s various schools. So too are officials of the United Nations, whom Columbia has honored consistently for decades, surely due to the University’s commitment to global justice (and the UN’s cross-town headquarters). Largely absent from Commencements, though, has been a different class of exemplars of global justice: dissidents who risk their lives opposing the world’s cruelest regimes.

Mudawi Ibrahim Adam is an academic--or, rather, would be an academic. Instead, the professor of engineering leads the Sudan Social Development Organization (SUDO), a Sudanese group which monitors human rights abuses in Darfur; develops water, sanitation and health initiatives; and works to facilitate reconciliation among Darfur’s tribes. SUDO has been a major source of information for the wider humanitarian world, having begun as early as 2001 to sound alarms over devastation in Darfur.

This work has come at great personal cost to Mudawi. Sudanese authorities have arrested him three times, holding him for 18 months in prisons where, he has said, "they keep you up all night and cuff you to the door, forcing you to stand. Beating is the normal thing." Jailed in 2005 on charges that carry the death penalty--and barred from contact with doctors, lawyers or family--Mudawi went on a hunger strike. It earned him international attention that helped lead to his release. Of course, this makes Mudawi quite the unusual victim of Sudanese repression; almost all the others are nameless, faceless--and go without salvation.

When he received an award for his work in 2005, Mudawi said: "For me, this award has the protection of recognition. If I am arrested again, which in Sudan today is always a real possibility, this award can help protect me from being harmed in prison." Would that an honorary degree help serve the same purpose.

While in different circumstances Mudawi might be a professor at Columbia, Ashin Kovida might be a student. Age 24 and a user of Google’s Gmail, Ashin would in some ways fit right in. But for him, Gmail has been a tool of subversion and survival. For while Columbia students were settling into classes last September, Ashin was leading 100,000 fellow Buddhist monks in street protests against the kleptocratic, repressive military junta of his native Burma.

Ashin’s dissident career was brief. Just weeks after engaging in politics for the first time, by circulating pamphlets criticizing the junta for its brutality in crushing dissent, he was elected to lead the committee of monks that would oversee the protests as they grew in size and purpose. But the purpose--democratic reform and the release of political prisoners--was not achieved. By the end of September, the regime had overpowered the unarmed crowds, killing scores and arresting many more. Buddhist temples and monasteries were hit especially hard. Ashin fled, for three weeks hiding alone and traveling in disguise (with bleached blonde hair and a crucifix) before crossing into Thailand under a false identity. His adoptive mother had been arrested, and many of his fellow protest organizers met worse fates.

The so-called Saffron Revolution fell quickly out of the international press’s headlines. At Columbia, where many students had been discussing Burma and attending vigils, conversation on the subject fell off dramatically. While Burma is now all but ignored, political repression and fuel and food shortages are continuing, possibly worsening.

Ashin, though, has reportedly been granted political asylum in the United States. He now wants to improve his English in order to call attention to his cause. Columbia can help.

Iranian Akbar Ganji has not been as fortunate as Ashin to escape the clutches of repression. An investigative journalist, Ganji’s late-1990s reporting uncovered the role of high-ranking Iranian officials in the 1998 "Chain Murders" of liberal Iranian dissenters. This, coupled with Ganji’s public discussions of reform, earned him the ire of the clerics. They regard him as an anti-Islamic, anti-revolutionary propagandist whose writing threatens Iranian national security--and who therefore deserves imprisonment and torture. From April 2000 to May 2006, the Iranian government jailed Ganji for roughly six years, ignoring his 80-day hunger strike and international pleas to commute his sentence.

In speeches, published writings, and letters sent from hospital while on hunger strike, Ganji has passionately attacked the "tyranny and fascism" of Iran, calling for change from the system of clerical "personal rule" to a system of "free and fair elections."

Writing and speaking prolifically when not in prison, Ganji has spread his nonviolent vision widely, earning fame for himself and recognition for the Iranian reform movement. He even came to Columbia in March 2007 for a speech at the School of International and Public Affairs. But the event received scant attention on campus, and seemingly none from national or international media. By September 2007, Columbia became universally known for hosting Ahmadinejad. Giving a prominent honor to Ganji might send a better, more productive message about our University’s values.

Of course, Mudawi, Ashin, and Ganji are not the only ones. Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Iranian student activist Amir-Abbas Fakhravar also come to mind--and they are only the high-profile, still-living representatives of larger, imperiled, unglamorous movements for political freedom.

Columbia rightly values its ability to host important, controversial world leaders every year. Let’s remember its ability to also honor the dissidents whom some of those world leaders would rather we forget.

Nominations for honorary degrees can be submitted year-round to the University Secretary.