Mount Royal hat flap shows students should talk to each other

Differences needn’t preclude respectful discussion on campus

A few days ago, the American election campaign sloshed across the border and washed up on the campus of Mount Royal University.

The occasion was a confrontation between a female student who strongly disapproved of a male student sporting a baseball cap with a Donald Trump slogan: Make America Great Again.

A friend of the hat wearer videotaped the event and it’s now available online. A friend of the hat objector snatched away the offending cap and made off with it. The video does not record whether it was returned. Replacements, however, are available for $4.69 US with free shipping from China.

The confrontation has been cast in the media as a regrettable example of political correctness. To the hat objector, the slogan represented “racism, bigotry and exclusion of sexual and cultural diversity.”

It “could make some people afraid,” she said, and that was wrong: “a university should be a safe space.”

For this reason, she told the hat wearer, “you have to take the hat off. You’re not allowed to cheer hate language.”

If the hat didn’t come off, she said she would report him to university president David Docherty.

For the hat wearer, a political science student who said he had been following the U.S. election campaign and was a Trump supporter, the slogan referred to economics “and was not hateful at all.”

This was, literally, a teachable moment. In my introductory course on political ideologies, we began this year looking at and discussing political correctness. Students at the University of Calgary, no less than at Mount Royal, understand full well that a central element in Trump’s campaign has been to embrace political incorrectness.

For Trump, the election is not about policies at all, but the more basic theme of whether the Americans want to be great (again). Rhetorical tactics aside, his framing of the issue may be entirely bogus, but it is also brilliantly effective.

My students understood that. They also understood the obvious problem: the objector never attempted to engage the hat wearer in conversation about what the slogan meant to him. As Docherty later said, “students can express differing opinions in a respectful way to increase understanding of each other’s views.”

Before the event faded away, the consequences, which did not surprise my students, were equally apparent: the objector was criticized and disrespected on social media. As one of my students said, “what did she expect?”

The U of C has had its own problems with political correctness over the years, but mostly because of over-sensitive administrators rather than students. More recently, in fact, there have been some good-news stories involving students.

A case in point is the U of C firearms association.

Now in its third year, the firearms club has more than 200 members.

They are an ethnically diverse lot, with members from rural and urban backgrounds and a wide range of faculties. About a third of the members are women.

The purpose of the club is to introduce new members to shooting sports and train them in the safe use of guns, to help them acquire a possession and acquisition licence, colloquially known as a PAL, and provide a “safe space” for hunters, target shooters, shotgunners and other enthusiasts to meet, socialize and discuss their interests.

The club arranges discounts at shooting events and subsidies for members to take courses given by the Alberta Hunter Education and Instructors’ Association, arguably the best gun and hunter-training outfit on the continent.

Interestingly enough, the club is not controversial. They have even proposed an outreach program to their fellow students at Mount Royal University.

Let’s wish them luck.