Coulter shut out, but not silenced
By MONTE SOLBERG, QMI Agency
Wow, that was close. We almost had some free speech break out last week at the University of Ottawa.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak there, but thankfully students were able to block her natural right to free expression by threatening violence. Don’t be concerned though, because it was the threat of violence in the name of tolerance!
Frankly a university is the last place you want people hearing other points of view. After all, parents pay a lot of money so that professors can tell their children how to think. We can’t have someone from the outside showing up with ideas that are different. You certainly don’t want some crazy American arguing that her ideas are better or her worldview is superior. That can only lead to critical thinking and to students formulating their own point of view. Then, before you know it, you’ll have students challenging their professors.
Thank goodness U of O students escaped the heavy burden of having to choose between competing ideas. University vice-president Francois Houle helped students dodge that anxiety when he made it clear to Coulter in an e-mail that she could speak, but if she was too provocative the police might haul her away.
Tolerance bricks
Other than that it was the red carpet treatment — well except for the aforementioned threat of having her head caved in with tolerance bricks and respect stones.
The thing is I’m not a big Ann Coulter fan. Sure, some of her stuff is funny and insightful, but some of it makes me cringe.
That’s why I’ve never read her books, but neither do I want to burn her books, which is apparently next on the agenda at the U of O. Comparatively, the charming sarcasm that you are now reading is hardly worth burning at all even if, by a miracle, it showed up in a book.
That said, Coulter is a gifted polemicist with a great business plan that counts on liberals to be themselves, and they never let her down. She argues that liberals oppose free speech, which they immediately set out to prove by blocking her from speaking at the University of Ottawa.
She then threatens to use the Canadian Human Rights Commission to launch a complaint against the university, which again allows her to make her point while drawing even bigger crowds at her next speech.
All of this reminds me of a passage from Allan Bloom’s great book, The Closing of the American Mind. In it, Bloom speaks of student protesters striking the “noble pose.” Unfortunately, as Bloom might point out, there is nothing to the pose but, well, posing.
The student protesters at the University of Ottawa aren’t the romantic revolutionaries they think they are.
Warts and all
They don’t realize that ultimately the judgment of history always sides with free speech, warts and all, with its ability to insult, provoke, challenge and inspire.
Or as John Milton said 350 years ago, “Whoever heard of the truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter”, which just might earn him a trip to the burning barrel, too.
Solberg is a consultant at Fleishman Hillard Canada and former Conservative MP.
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