I spent about four months in Ottawa back in the year 2000.   It is a beautiful city.  The Ottawa River separates the Province of Ontario from the Province of Quebec and runs past the northern perimeter of the city.  Majestic buildings including the Canadian Supreme Court have their backs to the river and make Wellington Street a beautiful avenue.  I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Ottawa as I have in almost all the parts of Canada that I have visited during my career.  Overall I would say the Canadian people are friendly and appear to be culturally no different than Americans as to their views of the world.  Yes, there is a significant language problem in Canada that requires all things in government and all business communication to be in both English and French but my periodic visits to the Quebec Province did not find any tremendous differences at least in the way they treated me as a visitor in their country.

I say all this because tonight I am extremely disillusioned by what I saw in one of my favorite cities and I am disappointed in the University of Ottawa students who demonstrated on the evening of the 22^nd with the goal to prevent Ann Coulter from speaking on their campus.   It brought back memories of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when campus demonstrations were unmercifully hostile to points of view that differed from their own.   I recall for example a sit in demonstration at the Agriculture Building on the Colorado State University campus.  A hostile crowd of “peace loving” students disrupted department and academic affairs where the ROTC classes and units were housed.  It was a demonstration for peace and aimed primarily against the ROTC and not the Agriculture Department itself.  Tragically, in that demonstration those peace loving students took the opportunity to destroy.  Among the things they destroyed was a research project that a doctoral student had been working on for more than a year.  How did this further the anti-war effort and how did this communicate an image to the remainder of the campus that those in this rally were motivated by thoughts of peace?   Similarly, in 1970, in the name of peace and in reaction to both the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State, an arsonist burned down the oldest building on that campus, Old Main.  It was the image of the university itself as the 92 year old building had been the first building on the Colorado campus.  

Those persons in Fort Collins suffered the same delusion as we saw at Columbia University in 2006 because Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minutemen organization had come to the campus at the invitation of Republican students.   Similar to the Columbia incident was what happened on Tuesday night when Ann Coulter’s speech was cancelled for fears the university could not protect her safety. 

What did Ann Coulter have to say that threatened these students so?  And what did Jim Gilchrist have to say that threatened those students so?   Have universities become something other than institutions of higher learning?  Are students so weak in their cognitive abilities that they cannot tolerate a point of view other than their own?  Have they not the mental capacity to deal with anything that upsets their personal view of the world?  Are they so incapable of critical thought and analysis that they cannot find substantive arguments to defeat those with whom they disagree?  Is it then not a demonstration of cowardice that they band together on a pretext that the guest speaker professes hatred or intolerance?  When they do they use the very tactics which they tell us they disapprove to prevent an Ann Coulter or a Jim Gilchrist from speaking.  

No one was holding a gun to anyone’s head or forcing anyone to go to that lecture hall and listen to Ann Coulter any more than anyone was forcing students to go listen to the speech by Jim Gilchrist.   Yet radical students felt a need to not only maintain their virgin ears to a fertile opinion but they wanted to deny others that opportunity as well.  I would like to challenge those persons who would ban together and use mob violence to prevent the speech of someone with whom they disagree to examine their own attitudes and opinions.  Whether it is Ann Coulter, Jim Gilchrist, David Horowitz or some other controversial person that is invited to your campus, learn to treat these people as your guests.  Exhibit some maturity.  Demonstrate some manners.   Prove that you can critically review what they have to say by offering a substantive rebuttal.   Thus far all you have shown is that you are afraid of what they might have to say and that you haven’t the maturity to deal with critical thought and that you must be incapable of such critical thought yourself.  If this is the case, then it is you students who are unworthy of matriculating on a college campus.   After all, the critical thinker will listen to all points of view and develop their opinion from exposure to all arguments.  If you can’t develop substantive arguments that refute your opponent, perhaps you are on the wrong side of that argument.