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Addict
Location: Where the music's loudest
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As events continue to unfold in the aftermath of this debacle, the Canadian Association of University Teachers has issued a sharp rebuke of Dr. Houle.( link)
Quote:
March 22, 2010
Dr. Francois Houle
Vice-President Academic and Provost
University of Ottawa
Room 217A Tabaret Hall
550 Cumberland
Ottawa, Ontario
K1N 6N5
Dear Dr. Houle:
We are deeply disturbed by your correspondence with Ann Coulter regarding her speaking engagement at the University of Ottawa tomorrow. Your admonishing her about speech rights in Canada raises serious questions about the University of Ottawa’s respect for freedom of expression and academic freedom.
The purpose of a university is aptly captured in the University of Toronto’s statement on the “Purpose of the University”:
Within the unique university context, the most crucial of all human rights are the rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.
Ms. Coulter certainly does raise disturbing questions and provocative challenges. While many of us profoundly disagree with her, a university should welcome controversial speakers and vigorous debate, not seek to restrict discourse or speakers.
We feel you owe an apology to Ms. 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.
Yours truly,
Penni Stewart James L. Turk
President Executive Director
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And the Ottawa citizen fires one off with a perfect summary in the last paragraph. ( link)
Quote:
The Ottawa Citizen - March 25, 2010
Ann Coulter's opinions can be obnoxious, offensive and just plain wrong. But she's spot-on about one thing: that the University of Ottawa has shown itself to be a "bush-league" school.
The thuggery of student activists is a growing problem at Canadian campuses, but the spectacle at the University of Ottawa was truly a colossal embarrassment, for both the university and the city. Ottawa is the capital of a G8 country, yet our premier research university is evidently so insecure and insular that a talk-TV pundit from the U.S. represented an intolerable intellectual threat.
We wish we could blame only the students for shaming the university. But the administration was complicit in the successful campaign to shut down Coulter's much publicized talk on campus.
It began when the university's vice-president academic and provost, François Houle, sent Coulter a bizarre e-mail, in which he made it perfectly clear that he detests her polemical style and that she should watch her back, lest she find herself facing "criminal" or "defamation" laws. He told Coulter -- in the most condescending of tones -- that the University of Ottawa has a tradition of "restraint, respect and consideration" and therefore that is why he feels it is necessary to invoke what "may, at first glance, seem like unnecessary restrictions to freedom of expression."
Can anyone imagine an academic leader from Princeton University writing to a TV personality and saying, essentially: "You know, our students are very sensitive, so please when you visit don't say anything that will make them uncomfortable"? Would the vice-president of Harvard do this? Of course not.
The principal effect of Houle's foolish letter was to empower, albeit unwittingly, the student mob who came out Tuesday night to chase Coulter from campus. After all, Houle in so many words called Coulter a hatemonger and made it plain that her kind was not welcome.
The humiliating episode is a giant gift for a publicity-hound like Coulter. In an interview with a U.S. newspaper that had got wind of the incident, Coulter noted that students at serious universities are too "intellectually proud" to shut down speakers they don't agree with. She visits liberal campuses all the time without fearing for her safety. But at the University of Ottawa, she quipped, "their IQ points-to-teeth ratio must be about 1-to-1."
That smarts, but the University of Ottawa deserves the rebuke.
The shutting down of Ann Coulter is only the latest example of totalitarianism on Canadian campuses. At Concordia University in Montreal, thugs famously prevented Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking. At many campuses, pro-life student groups are harassed and denied official club status. When pro-choice student leaders at Toronto's York University learned that other students had organized a debate over the ethics of abortion, they promptly cancelled it, even though the event had been booked and the flyers printed.
Notice that this ongoing, organized effort to eliminate speech deemed politically unacceptable comes exclusively from the campus left. No one hears of conservative student groups physically interfering with left-wing speakers. A lot of conservative-minded students (and others) were unhappy with the recent Israel Apartheid Week, for example, but no one threatened to assault the organizers or disrupt the event.
We have no love for a buffoonish provocateur like Ann Coulter. It says something about the maturity and calibre of some University of Ottawa students that Coulter is the dignified party in this dispute.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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I think it is interesting that you, silent_jay, are framing this conversation is such a way as to seem that Conservatives and conservatives are attempting to limit the free speech of leftists and statists, when it is quite clear in this instance that it is the left-wing students and administration who have run roughshod over Ms. Coulter's free speech.
We have seen in recent years an increasingly militant attitude from left-wing students and their puppet student organization such as the CFS. The canceling of debates, shutting down of opposing view points and a contempt for student self-governance is the norm for today's campus.
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Where there is doubt there is freedom.
Last edited by CandleInTheDark; 03-25-2010 at 03:09 PM..
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