REX MURPHY

Campus protests not so progressive after all.

The University of Waterloo’s “Vagina Man protest” made news all over North America. A headline from an American blog of considerable reach, “Giant Vagina Man shouts down pro-life speaker at University of Waterloo, ” was the rough template for stories everywhere. Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth was the object of this eerie display, which succeeded in disrupting his talk.

The association between a great university and private parts — either male of female, for what the distinction may be worth these days — is novel, and novelty is news. My own first thoughts on seeing the man, who constructed his own vagina and then inhabited it as a gesture of protest against Mr. Woodworth’s motion to study a legal definition of when life begins, was sustained relief he wasn’t studying engineering or science. I fear that even Waterloo’s superbly high global reputation as a centre of science and technology could not have survived such an association. He was, of course, an arts student.

And was not his — sculpture? puppet? tent? — a feeble thing? Those who’ve scorched their retinas with actually viewing it, either in person or in the news, unanimously agree it was, both architecturally and structurally, unpersuasive. One lady I spoke too confessed she first believed it was a large peanut, and kept checking to see where the “top hat” was.

Those of us who belong to the realist school of vagina impersonation, who believe private parts should be at all costs mute (and we are legion), were seriously nonplussed. A voluble vagina — and this one was chatty to the point of incontinence — was seen as a fanciful add-on, an app if you will, that seriously distorted the fidelity that should exist between art and its object. Not to mention that the implicit ventriloquism on display was feverish and amateur. Stay away from Yuk Yuks young man, unless they’re looking for a janitor.

However, while I’ll grant that infinite feebleness of design doesn’t entirely nullify the protest, I would argue that its pure inanity — it’s intellectual vacancy — does. It is not fitting that somebody who has earned the right to be in a place of higher learning, intellectual contest, and examination of the self should give such little evidence of benefitting from the experience.

How did the vagina man — and his accomplice, a woman whose own contribution to the seminar consisted of shouting “c--t” repeatedly and angrily barking slogans at the speaker — come to believe that raucous behaviour, vulgar shouting, disruption and insult amount to either discussion or meaningful protest? Especially within a university. Their behaviour was anti-intellectual, anti-dialogue, anti-exchange and debate.

It is not so much these two that concern me. It is the rash of similarly empty protests that now crowd the university calendars all over North America. How do these connect with any real university’s mission: The assertion of the primacy of intellect, the value of debate, the imperatives of challenging one’s biases, of dissent that does not exclude respect for a contending view.

The Waterloo episode, with its tawdry theatricality and the explosive self-righteousness (How dare this MP think he has the right to address the public), has cast a shadow on the university. And Waterloo, rather than issuing the usual boilerplate platitudes university PR departments now routinely issue, should have been much more direct. Ellen Rethore, associate vice-president of communications, stated that “police were at the event Wednesday to guard the safety of everyone, not enforce rules of academic debate.

Why is “safety” even a consideration for something as mundane as a visiting MP speaking to university students?

“Rules of academic debate” reach to the absolutely central idea of a university, and should be protected before all else. Such protection can begin by exposing the deplorable hollowness and vanity at the heart of so much progressive protest.

REX MURPHY