How Free is "Free Speech?"

My university, that is, the university that has employed and sheltered me since 1969 (more than 40 years, so help me!) has been in the news in a not altogether welcome way in the last few days. There is a woman called Ann Coulter, variously described as a pundit, a right-wing political commentator, an entertainer, and a crazy person, and doubtless called other things too. She is American, apparently has newspaper columns and a place in the far-right Fox "News" Network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, my infamous fellow citizen of Adelaide South Australia. The Fox network carries very little actual factual news, but a great deal of far right political opinion and some inflammatory and often distorted reports that purport to be news but are really just opinions. She was "invited" to speak at three Canadian universities by one of Canada's leading far-right libertarian crazies. At her first talk, in London, Ontario, she said that Moslems shouldn't be allowed to fly on commercial aircraft because all terrorists are Moslems (and, she implied, all Moslems are potential terrorists; she's apparently not heard of the IRA, ETA, or the Tamil Tigers). A woman, either a faculty member or a student at the University of Western Ontario who was wearing a head-scarf, asked how she could get to a conference in New York or Los Angeles without flying, whereupon the Coulter creature replied that she could use her magic carpet - or if she didn't have a magic carpet, ride a camel. The provost at the University of Ottawa where she was next scheduled to speak wrote to her, to remind her that we have a "Hate Law" in Canada and warned her not to indulge in her well-known inflammatory language that might be interpreted as aimed to generate hate against a particular group of people. When she showed up to speak at Ottawa U, there were some 1500 people seeking entry to a hall holding 400. Her security staff, not the University of Ottawa security staff, cancelled her talk on the grounds of safety, i.e. her safety. Now she is saying that she wasn't allowed to speak in Canada's national capital, and implying it was Canadian authorities who "muzzled" her. She is threatening to sue the University of Ottawa, and to lodge a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Exactly who said what, to whom and when has been lost or mislaid in some of the fou-farah about this entire fiasco. The one certainty in it all is that the provost of the U of O would have been wiser never to have written his letter to her. She immediately released the letter to the media and made a great fuss about attempts to influence her remarks, to turn her Free Speech into a distorted version of what she might have said if the provost had not tried to influence her remarks. All the resulting publicity no doubt led to the huge crowd that turned out to hear her - many with placards denouncing her and what she stood for, or in one or two cases, supporting her. It all gave her security staff an opportunity, or an excuse, to cancel her talk, and to generate a great deal of publicity that cast her as victim of a heinous offence against liberty and freedom of speech. She seems to have been a far more successful manipulator of events than the hapless provost of the U of O. The one good outcome has been some serious and enlightened discussion in responsible media, print and radio anyway, about the definition of and the limits of free speech. Some of this has been earnest and humourless, but some of it also has been light-hearted, witty and penetrating. This probably makes the whole episode worth while, but only just. On the whole, I don't think my university has emerged from the fiasco looking good.