At Newsday, Cathy Young recounts a recent incident at a Canadian college which is becoming all too familiar.

My brush with campus intolerance

Last week, I had a firsthand experience with campus intolerance when some Canadian college students decided they didn’t want me speaking at their school.

The Canadian Association for Equality, a group that champions a balanced approach to gender issues, including those affecting men, invited me to give a talk on gender and victimhood at the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa.

Shortly before the first event, a comment urging violence against feminists at the University of Toronto was posted on an online forum. Amid an intense reaction to the threat, university administrators felt it was inadvisable to hold my event on campus; the venue was moved to a nearby hotel. One student activist wrote on a Tumblr blog that “chasing these misogynists off campus is a victory.”

In Ottawa, where the talk went forward at St. Paul University, things were a bit more eventful. About a dozen protesters in red scarf masks gathered outside the building to chant slogans denouncing “rape apologist scum” (a slur hurled at people who talk such heresy as presumption of innocence). An organizer’s invitation to the protesters to come in and attend the talk as long they promised to behave was scornfully rebuffed.

As the event was about to start, the fire alarm went off — presumably pulled by a demonstrator — which forced a brief evacuation. In the end, the police made the protesters move across the street and I was able to give my talk without further trouble. I fared better than some previous CAFE speakers, who were effectively shut down by students using a variety of methods — fire alarms, loud music and chants just outside auditoriums, verbal harassment of attendees — to fight what they regard as “hate speech.”