The Coulter visit: What would St. Ignatius say?
Last Updated: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 2:50 PM ET
By Richard Handler CBC News
With a toss of her long blond hair, Ann Coulter, the American mistress of bombast, came to Canada and departed.
She certainly attracted much attention, indeed, much more than she gets in her own country these days, as more than one commentator observed.
It's a nice, small country, she told the CBC's Evan Solomon, standing outside in the Calgary sunshine in her dark sunglasses.
"It isn't so small." Solomon said. Oh well, how would she know?
Coulter had just flown in from Ottawa, where she had been booked to give a speech she never gave, above the heads apparently of the "whiny" liberals and the "crybabies" who lived down below.
As Neil Macdonald so correctly pointed out, Coulter is not so much a pundit as an entertainer. She's part of what conservative commentator David Frum calls America's right-wing entertainment industry.
Though perhaps entertainment complex is a better term because it works on so many levels.
As Frum told Peter Mansbridge on The National, this industry is fueled by anger. Talk jocks like Coulter or Rush Limbaugh realize that anger sells, so they do what they can to keep the fires burning.
No safe place
The truckloads of commentary surrounding Coulter's visit and her cancelled speech at the University of Ottawa centered on the role of free speech in Canada and in universities in particular.
Protestors outside the Calgar venue where Ann Coulter gave a talk on political correctness, media bias and freedom of speech in March 2010. (Larry MacDougal/Canadian Press)
The upshot was all the usual talk about how there's not enough here, at least when compared to the U.S., where they seem to make a fetish of saying nasty things about each other.
The headlines in the National Post last Thursday blared "Mob rule 1, free speech 0." While the Globe and Mail's lead editorial proclaimed "a university fails in its mission."
This was followed with a commentary by Ian Hunter, a professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, proclaiming: "Universities are bastions of free speech? Not in Canada."
You can imagine the whole country nodding their heads in agreement. Even Coulter's "whiny" liberals would probably agree with these sentiments.
But in the midst of all this happy piling on, one comment by an anti-Coulter protester, which was noted in the Globe editorial, caught my attention.
She was a second-year student of sociology and women's studies at the University of Ottawa and reportedly said she was worried that what Coulter might say "would make students feel unsafe and very uncomfortable."
"We promise our students here at the university of Ottawa a safe, positive place," this young woman said. To which the Globe noted sarcastically that this was "a new standard" for Canadian universities.
In fact, this standard has been in place for some time, with speech codes at universities insisting on nothing hurtful reaching the ears of their students. Queen's University even tried to put minders in the dorms at one point to gently correct untoward comments by students.
But notice the "we" in the quote above.
Our young woman uses "we" not as a faculty member or an administrator, but as a student who is part of a shared collective and appears to be expecting from her university a degree of protection and security, even, you might say, consolation.
Consolation prize
The notion that universities should be "safe places" — emotional cocoons, if you will — never seems to make it into the polemics of free-speech punditry.
Maybe that's because, as a society, "we" ourselves are divided.
We say we want free speech. But as good, tolerant people, we also want a good, tolerant environment for our not quite grown-up children.
For some time now, we have let universities become the places for lifestyle experiments, where students can inhabit the grey zone between childhood and full-blown maturity.
One small example: We parents, for the most part, pay their bills but we are not allowed to see their grades for reasons of privacy. So all of us, parents and students are tossed into an arena of dependence and confusing adult role models.
Yes, we want our university-bound children to learn the right things, like critical inquiry, but we also want them to learn to be co-operative.
In most cases, it seems as if teamwork is more important than needless intellectuality. Team workers, after all, are more employable.
Besides learning stuff they'll hardly ever need, students go to university to learn to play the angles, which is a viable political skill, perhaps the most important they'll ever learn.
And if we promise them emotional and even intellectual comfort, they seem to be holding us to that promise.
Why should they have to hear a woman like Coulter say unpleasant things about angry Muslims, whiny liberals and people who may be their friends?
Church of the safe haven
Some time ago, when I was a producer on a CBC Radio arts show, we interviewed a poet who was known to have said a few contentious things in her time.
But when she was asked about them, she was offended. She had wanted the interview to be a safe place and was astonished by these tough questions.
She didn't want free speech. She was someone else who wanted to be affirmed in her stance and who was seeking consolation from the institution that she was dealing with.
You can see the role of consolation in many institutions. Indeed, it probably comes out of a religious, missionary spirit.
For the Jesuits, for example, the role of consolation was crucial, particularly in terms of personal struggle.
Consolation brings you closer to God where "we feel more alive and connected to others," according to the order's founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola.
On the other hand, desolation, the spiritual opposite, is said to be an experience of the soul in heavy darkness and turmoil, banished from the sight of God.
So why do I smuggle in St. Ignatius in a column about Ann Coulter?
Because when you replay his spiritual exercises in an updated, non-religious light, you end up with the modern feel-good university as a kind of secular church — a place where only goodness should shine while evil is banished. Including, apparently Ann Coulter.
Is it possible that we don't think our children resilient enough to suffer the slings and arrows of rough talk? If so, whose fault is that? Not the university's.
Isn't this what the Ottawa university provost thought when he wrote his warning to Coulter before her visit?
Wasn't he telling her that we guardians of the academy must keep our children safe from physical and emotional trauma? Better we spare them the desolation of critical inquiry and offensive speech than to hurt their feelings.
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Source: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/03/30/f-vp-handler.html
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