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Mansfield did not turn the other cheek. He wrote a scathing indictment of the decision for the Wall Street Journal. In it he mockingly parses Russell’s oleaginous cancellation letter, which told Mansfield that LAC had acted “precipitously” in inviting him, as “we were unable to reach consensus as to what we wanted to achieve with this event” and that LAC was “sorry for any inconvenience.” Thus, in Mansfield’s summation, “No disinvitation, no insult, hence no apology except for inconvenience. Also no broken promise, no suppression of free speech, and no violation of academic freedom. Mr. Russell and his college were guiltless and safe.”

He then moves on to decry “the notion that free speech is an expression of one’s power rather than a contribution to truth,” a view which “regards reason as nothing but an instrument of power with no power of its own.” In the 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy demanded that universities exclude Communist professors, Mansfield recalls, but “I little thought that I would now in my old age be qualified for exclusion from Concordia University in our free neighbour to the north, not as the member of a conspiratorial organization serving an enemy power, but simply for holding opinions shared by half the American — and perhaps the Canadian — population.”

LAC co-founder and guiding force, history professor Fred Krantz, who had vigorously and formally disassociated himself from Mansfield’s cancellation, told me that he had received a slew of mail from alumni, with opinions running “10 to one” against the cancellation. He told Inside Higher Ed that as LAC had been “a community of scholars, dedicated to objective analysis and free and open discussion and debate,” he’d believed it would remain “immune to the wave of politically correct ideology sweeping many North American campuses.”