Ann Coulter vs. the Jesuits at Fordham: A college invite is rescinded

9:11 am November 10, 2012, by Maureen Downey

Pundit Ann Coulter

I have written this blog now for several years, and only mentioned acidic pundit Ann Coulter once. Three weeks later, I am bringing her up again because this incident demonstrates a sensible way to handle controversies over college speakers.

Coulter was invited to Fordham University in New York to speak on Nov. 29 by the College Republicans.

The planned appearance triggered protests and a student petition  A group of students argued that tuition should not be used to underwrite speakers at the private college who are “not compatible with the values the Fordham community professes – particularly the Jesuit tenet of ‘Men and Women for and With Others’.”

See what you think of Fordham President Joseph M. McShane’s response and of the decision Friday night by the Fordham College Republicans to cancel Coulter’s appearance.

First, Father McShane’s statement:

The College Republicans, a student club at Fordham University, has invited Ann Coulter to speak on campus on November 29. The event is funded through student activity fees and is not open to the public nor the media. Student groups are allowed, and encouraged, to invite speakers who represent diverse, and sometimes unpopular, points of view, in keeping with the canons of academic freedom. Accordingly, the University will not block the College Republicans from hosting their speaker of choice on campus.

To say that I am disappointed with the judgment and maturity of the College Republicans, however, would be a tremendous understatement. There are many people who can speak to the conservative point of view with integrity and conviction, but Ms. Coulter is not among them. Her rhetoric is often hateful and needlessly provocative — more heat than light — and her message is aimed squarely at the darker side of our nature.

As members of a Jesuit institution, we are called upon to deal with one another with civility and compassion, not to sling mud and impugn the motives of those with whom we disagree or to engage in racial or social stereotyping. In the wake of several bias incidents last spring, I told the University community that I hold out great contempt for anyone who would intentionally inflict pain on another human being because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed.

“Disgust” was the word I used to sum up my feelings about those incidents. Hate speech, name-calling, and incivility are completely at odds with the Jesuit ideals that have always guided and animated Fordham.

Still, to prohibit Ms. Coulter from speaking at Fordham would be to do greater violence to the academy, and to the Jesuit tradition of fearless and robust engagement. Preventing Ms. Coulter from speaking would counter one wrong with another. The old saw goes that the answer to bad speech is more speech. This is especially true at a university, and I fully expect our students, faculty, alumni, parents, and staff to voice their opposition, civilly and respectfully, and forcefully.

The College Republicans have unwittingly provided Fordham with a test of its character: do we abandon our ideals in the face of repugnant speech and seek to stifle Ms. Coulter’s (and the student organizers’) opinions, or do we use her appearance as an opportunity to prove that our ideas are better and our faith in the academy — and one another — stronger? We have chosen the latter course, confident in our community and in the power of decency and reason to overcome hatred and prejudice.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., President

From the College Republicans late Friday:

The College Republicans regret the controversy surrounding our planned lecture featuring Ann Coulter. The size and severity of opposition to this event have caught us by surprise and caused us to question our decision to welcome her to Rose Hill. Looking at the concerns raised about Ms. Coulter, many of them reasonable, we have determined that some of her comments do not represent the ideals of the College Republicans and are inconsistent with both our organization’s mission and the University’s. We regret that we failed to thoroughly research her before announcing; that is our error and we do not excuse ourselves for it. Consistent with our strong disagreement with certain comments by Ms. Coulter, we have chosen to cancel the event and rescind Ms. Coulter’s invitation to speak at Fordham.

We made this choice freely before Father McShane’s email was sent out and we became aware of his feelings – had the President simply reached out to us before releasing his statement, he would have learned that the event was being cancelled. We hope the University community will forgive the College Republicans for our error and continue to allow us to serve as its main voice of the sensible, compassionate, and conservative political movement that we strive to be. We fell short of that standard this time, and we offer our sincere apologies.

–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog

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The Coulter visit: What would St. Ignatius say?

Richard Handler
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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