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The president of Wilfrid Laurier University recently published a statement on free speech at Laurier and in the academy generally. It was a sad effort.

She built a Giza-sized pyramid of clichés and virtue-speak about something she was pleased to call “better speech” — as opposed to that decayed old concept, hustled by the likes of John Stuart Mill, Voltaire, and the framers of the American Constitution, known as “free speech.”

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Amid the vast waste of anodynes, platitudes and non-sequiturs, it was difficult to pick out a winner — the most tired, numb and vacant verbalism. But I struggled and chose, from her opening sentence, her claim that Laurier “has been at the centre of the campus free-speech conversation during the past year.”

Photo by Dave Abel/Toronto Sun/Postmedia

I see. Laurier’s been having a “conversation,” has it? Or has been at the centre of some fictive “conversation?” People have conversations. Usually no more than two of them. Conversations are informal usually. Social lubricants. Conversations are about hockey, or the weather, or in brutal lost moments, about the Housewives of Toronto. Conversation, however, doesn’t quite cover the typhoon of public comment, editorials and protests that whipped over Laurier following its acknowledgement of its treatment of a young teaching assistant, Lindsay Shepherd. Public relations nightmare might work. Painful public scrutiny of Laurier’s understanding of education and free speech could work, too.