Nearly everyone condemns the scheduled appearance tomorrow by convicted terror bomber Raymond Luc Levasseur at UMass-Amherst. But the efforts by Gov. Deval Patrick and UMass President Jack Wilson to stop the scheduled speech were misplaced and ill-considered. Now that they have both backed away from that stand, the ire being directed at the two leaders is equally misguided.

Wilson has made clear his condemnation of the speech by Levasseur, a member of the radical United Freedom Front, whose members were responsible for the 1981 killing of a New Jersey state trooper and the 1976 bombing of the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston. His spokesman has made it clear that no university funds are being used to underwrite the event, but he pointed to the small matter of the Constitution’s First Amendment in explaining why Wilson could not unilaterally prevent the speech from taking place.

The paroled bomber — Levasseur spent 18 years in federal prison — is not a major leader of anything. But his views and actions are likely as repugnant to many Americans as those of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose speech two years at Columbia University set off similar controversy. Rather than distance himself from the event, however, Columbia President Lee Bollinger instead delivered remarks just before Ahmadinejad. In what the New York Times described as “a 10-minute verbal assault” with the Iranian leader seated 10 feet away, Bollinger called Ahmadinejad a “petty and cruel dictator,” and excoriated him for, among other things, his denial of the Holocaust and state sponsorship of terrorism.

There may be no better guard against the proliferation of ignorant and vile views than to thoroughly discredit and repudiate them using the power of facts and reason that are cornerstones of institutions of higher education.