The Berkeley students are still "trying frantically" to find an indoor venue for Coulter, but she
is coming to grandstand -- not have a conversation -- so she's going to give a speech outdoors, in an open plaza on an open campus with scores of unguarded entrances and exists.
It sounds like the students just goofed up when they invited her without having an indoor venue already approved, and she's grabbing as much publicity out of this as she can. Meanwhile, the students are disappointed because they wanted to have a "conversation" with her, and now it's just going to be a big scream fest.
I don't blame the administration at all. They were still reeling from the $100K of damage from the last protest, and trying to figure out the best way to protect both their students and their facilities on their open campus. In the midst of that, the students signed a contract with Coulter without getting the University to sign off on their plans. Berkeley found out through a newspaper.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/04/25/uc-berkeley-readies-police-as-ann-coulter-plans-to-speak-in-public-plaza-on-campus/?utm_term=.a7b5e47ddb73
The state flagship university has become ground zero for an intense confrontation between the far left and the far right since Donald Trump’s election in November, with some protesters trying to stop controversial speakers from appearing on campus and others objecting that such actions violate their right to free speech. Some of the clashes have devolved into riots, leaving the school and city to struggle with how best to balance the free exchange of ideas with community safety.
In February — and twice more since then — masked protesters turned demonstrations over the boundary between free speech and hate speech into violent confrontations, setting fires, causing injuries and leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars of property damage in their wake.
“The character of that attack on campus was unprecedented,” UC-Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks said Tuesday.
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Coulter’s choice of Sproul Plaza, site of the iconic Free Speech Movement protests in the 1960s, is both symbolic and logistically challenging for the university because anyone can be there. Dirks said that for an inside event, the university would have metal detectors and other ways to search for weapons, but security will be much more difficult in a public outdoor space.
SNIP
Her outdoor speech at the plaza likely will make it difficult for any dialogue or interaction with students, he said, and his group is trying to have a separate event with her that would allow for conversation.
SNIP
SO EVEN THE STUDENTS AREN'T THRILLED WITH HER GIVING A SPEECH OUTSIDE, BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO HAVE A "CONVERSATION" WITH HER.
= new reply since forum marked as read
