The controversial visit of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia University last September continues to have international repercussions.

According to yesterday’s New York Sun, “the semi-official Iranian news agency, Mehr, claims that a delegation of professors from Columbia University are planning a trip to Tehran to apologize to President Ahmadinejad for critical remarks made by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, when Mr. Ahmadinejad visited Morningside Heights last year.”

The New York Times quotes a Columbia spokesman, David M. Stone, in its City Room blog as saying there are no plans for an official delegation from Columbia to visit Iran. “The university has no knowledge or information about the claims being made in the Iranian media,” Mr. Stone said in a statement.

Mr. Bollinger, a former president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is also a law professor at Columbia. His less-than-gracious introduction of Mr. Ahmadinejad, in which he told the Iranian leader that he exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” drew worldwide attention.

In subsequent remarks, Mr. Ahmadinejad invited Mr. Bollinger and other American academics to visit Iran and its universities — an invitation Mr. Bollinger has declined and one he has also reportedly refused to allow Columbia faculty members to accept on behalf of the university. —Aisha Labi