@smokey That clash, yes, but there's also something else. It's the same kind of mixed feelings I have about what to do when an institution invites someone to give a commencement speech and significant portions of the student body and/or faculty object on moral, political, what-have-you grounds, and do their best to get the institution to disinvite that person. There is a qualitative difference between a commencement speech and a talk given at the invitation of, say, a student club or faculty group or individual department. The latter is part of the academic discourse at the institution. There is, in other words, both the assumption of, and (often) the opportunity for, give and take, critique, disagreement, further discussion, and so on. The former is, in some ways, a statement by the institution about the meaning and significance of the degrees with which people will be graduating, and so it is, in some ways, an at least tacit endorsement by the institution of whatever the invited person has stood for. (And this leaves aside the whole question of how and by whom the commencement speech is financed.)

Because of this difference, disinviting the person from giving the commencement speech does not feel to me like a violation of academic freedom--and I emphasize the word feel because I am not entirely sure that I think this feeling is accurate.

I have a similar sense of unease not so much about whether or not Kanazawa should be banned from conducting research at Northwestern--I think he should not be, as long as his appointment as a visiting scholar followed the proper protocols--but, in general, about whether or not the committees that invite visiting scholars should consider things like Kanazawa's patently racist views in deciding whether or not invite him.

It's true, as the author of the blog post I linked to points out, that a visiting scholar has not real authority on the campus he or she is visiting, but I am uneasy about the extent to which the appointment--which is usually phrased as a Visiting Scholar at (fill in the institution's name)--implies an endorsement of the scholar's views. From this perspective, in other words, and to the extent that it is an appointment made by the institution, is being a visiting scholar more like the person who's invited to give the commencement address than like the person who's been invited to give a talk to a student or faculty group?

I am still figuring out what my answer to that question is.