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In the usual modern discussion about universities and free speech, the common wisdom is that golly, they used to be the very places where freedom of expression really had its head and ran wild, but now, it’s all changed.

And maybe that was their experience, or as they say on campuses now, their lived experience. It sure as hell wasn’t mine.

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I was a journalism student at Ryerson University (this was before it had aspirations and was just Ryerson Polytechnical Institute) in the early 1970s, when the Toronto Sun first rose from the ashes of the Toronto Telegram. It was only the first brand-new major newspaper in the country in decades, nothing to get excited about, and on the school’s downtown campus, even in the journalism school, they surely didn’t.

Off and on from its launch, the Sun was banned from that campus and others, or banned from classrooms, and usually talked about with an knowing sneer: In those days, the paper had its quasi-naked Page 3 Sunshine Girl, it was unabashedly conservative, and it was a cop-and-sports tabloid to boot.