Ciolli: Fordham welcomes Ann Coulter, teaching a lesson about the First Amendment

In the midst of the Watergate furor in the early 1970's, a  Fordham University newspaper learned that President Richard Nixon was invited to speak at the Fordham Preparatory school, located on the University's Bronx campus.

One of Nixon's closest friends, Robert Abplanalp, had attended the prep, and with his wealth from inventing a better aerosol valve, saved the boys' high school from insolvency. Nixon was coming to an event to honor Abplanalp. The response was outrage. One of the newspaper's opinion writers wrote a column telling students to protest by laying their bodies down on the school's accessory road so the motorcade couldn't arrive.

As editor of "the paper," I splashed the column across the front page. Nixon never did come, but any satisfaction in that was short-lived when one of my Jesuit professors took me aside, and in the order's inimitable fashion, began a dialogue about what harm would have come from hearing Nixon speak? It was a question that was never forgotten, a lesson compounded by a Jesuit legal education, that is most likely at the root of my absolutist view of the First Amendment.

This all came back in a flash today, as I read the response by Fordham President Joseph McShane to the demand that he cancel the College Republican Club's invitation to Ann Coulter, the controversial political commentator. McShane, in refusing to block the visit, reaffirmed the ideal that speech is not to be feared. That doesn't mean that he thinks that Coulter's visit, funded in part by university money, is a good idea.

And so, another Jesuit and another generation, my daughter's generation at Fordham, are having the same, essential dialogue. Ideas are not to be silenced but refuted.