Coulter speech KO’d over violence fear

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter said Wednesday that her planned speech at the University of California at Berkeley this week was canceled amid mounting concerns about potentially violent protests.

Coulter (inset) said in an e-mail that the Young America’s Foundation canceled her appearance scheduled for Thursday, ordering her not to go to the Berkeley campus. Coulter wrote that the university realized the group “wasn’t serious and dropped ongoing negotiations over a room,” she wrote. “Everyone who should be for free speech has turned tail and run.”

The university sent a message to the campus community Wednesday, in the midst of uncertainty over whether, or when, Coulter might come to campus. After the university originally canceled her speech for Thursday and instead invited her to speak there next week, Coulter had vowed to speak anyway; with the university not offering a venue, campus Republican groups had been discussing her possibly appearing on a public plaza, where security would have been challenging.

Though no arrangements could be worked out, Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks empha- sized that the university has two nonnegotiable commitments, to free speech and to campus safety.

“This is a University, not a battlefield,” Dirks told the university community. “We must make every effort to hold events at a time and location that maximizes the chances that First Amendment rights can be successfully exercised and that community members can be protected.”

The University of California at Berkeley was girding for potentially violent protests on campus Thursday, when Coulter was expected to give a speech, potentially on Sproul Plaza, a sprawling open area on campus known for gatherings and demonstrations.

The public university has been at the center of a bitter fight over free speech, pitting protesters from the far left and the far right galvanized by Donald Trump’s election in November. Some protesters are demanding that controversial speakers not be given a platform, while others insist that blocking them violates their right to free speech. While confrontations over speakers are nothing new on college campuses, the anger has spun into riots in some places, leaving universities and police trying to balance safety and First Amendment rights.