Advisers talked Allan Rock out of another Coulter appearance
Allan Rock, the president of the University of Ottawa, consulted with a PR firm about whether to invite polarizing commentator Ann Coulter back to campus one day after protesters shut down her appearance. Mr. Rock said in an e-mail that he was considering the invite in order to demonstrate the school’s “unqualified commitment to freedom of expression.” The consultants cautioned against it, saying it would become an uncontrollable media circus. The controversy started when Coulter was warned by the university’s vice-president academic to review Canada’s hate speech law before speaking at the university in March. Rock is apparently not a fan of Coulter, having called her “a mean-spirited, small-minded, foul-mouthed poltroon,” in a recent e-mail. Coulter is known to stir the pot, having suggested that Muslim countries should be conquered and Christianized. On the day after the Ottawa speech was cancelled, she told a Muslim student at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. that if she didn’t have a magic carpet, she could “take a camel.”