Eat Crow And Chew Carefully

When a vast aggregation of your peers feel it is necessary to rebuke you for having embarked on a really, seriously stupid course for someone who is in the business of deep thinking, surely that is an indication of how egregiously wrong you've been...? It should be, if you're even moderately intelligent. But then, that pre-supposition wouldn't hold water if, as provost to an institute of higher learning you distinguished yourself by behaving boorishly and in the process embarrassed your institution by spurning that most basic of all freedoms now, would it?

Questions aside, it is heartening to see that the Canadian Association of University Teachers felt it incumbent upon themselves to attempt to restore a few units of sanity and creative intelligence to the debate raging around the University of Ottawa's failure to reign in a cadre of obstreperously rabid anti-free-speech advocates. Worse, that their provost, Francois Houle, gave encouragement to their antipathy toward free speech in their anticipation that a fairly well-known comic speaker scheduled to speak on free speech would upset their leftist applecart.

So there's the admonition to Provost Houle: "We feel you [Houle] owe an apology to Ms. [Ann] Coulter and, even more importantly, you owe the University of Ottawa community an assurance that the administration of the university strongly supports freedom of expression, academic freedom and views the role of the university as fostering and defending these values." That's the content of the letter made public, sent to Mr. Houle.

Presumably, a chastened Mr. Houle will now admit to rashly having exceeded his authority, much less a public sense of the fitness of stifling free speech through veiled reproach and a not-too subtle contempt for an invited guest's process of thought and right to expression. Through the absurd contretemps that resulted in Ann Coulter's cancellation due to the real possibility of violence from the overheated student crowd, the university has been made to appear truly ridiculous.

And Ms. Coulter, even for those who deplore her politics and her needling, disrespectful sarcasm directed at minorities to satisfy her own funnybone, she has become a figure whose right to speak is supported by everyone. How could it be otherwise? Regardless of how distasteful her pronouncements, they do not constitute hate speech, merely hateful speech. She does not agitate violence against others, she simply wants to marginalize them socially. No one need take her seriously.

Representing as she does, despite her ethical handicaps - a free-speech advocate who was exposed to hateful slander by those whom she herself slanders - an individual whose views could be debated and exposed to ridicule for their puny absurdities, she was instead, given the kind of publicity money couldn't buy, and those interested in seeing and hearing this now-notorious figure - whatever their reasons - have grown in number.

Provost Houle would do well to take the criticism of the Association of University Teachers seriously, and learn from his insensitivity. Without his having cautioned and insulted Ms. Coulter the student body within the university whose purpose it was to stifle free speech that emanates from a conservative mind, the issue and the resulting debacle would never have become as elevated and violent as it did.