Conservative speakers have traditionally had a more difficult time at the country’s colleges, which tend to be overwhelmingly liberal.
The type and extent of disrespect varies from school to school. It seems as though the more academically focused universities try to “beat” the conservatives with intellect while the lower-tier schools appear to act in a less mature way.
“I can usually tell after a speech what the average SAT scores are, because contrary to my prejudice, at the good colleges they do not heckle, they do not throw food, they usually do not have stupid signs outside; they want to beat you in question and answer,” Coulter said.
These “prejudices” rose from experiences at other colleges. The attacks Coulter and other conservatives face on some college campuses are not generally physical, but include chants and disrespectful behavior at speeches. And it is at the lesser schools that these behaviors are generally exhibited, Coulter has realized.
“I think its kind of fascinating,” Coulter said of the variance in dynamics at colleges with different academic reputations.
“It is at the third-tier bush-league schools where you really need double body guard duty. Weirdly, the Jesuit schools – very bad, very, very, very, bad.
“My bodyguard is now the bodyguard for all the conservatives on college campuses. Though I must say, I don’t think I need one at Harvard,” Coulter said.
In one particular instance at the Jesuit, Loyola University Chicago, students were chanting about “Linda Blair and the exorcist and … about what she is shouting in that movie.” Coulter found the chants to be so shockingly vulgar that she would not even tell her friends what was said.
“I wish there had been cameras there for them. I think Loyola would be closed right now,” Coulter said.
Coulter recently decided that she likes to have cameras in the audience at her college speeches, “not because I don’t like them acting up and behaving like animals, but because I want it on camera.”
At the “good” colleges, they “wait for question and answer and they’re often very good questions; they’re actually listening to the speech, they’ve read what you’ve written.”
Coulter does like answering questions from liberals, “because its fun to see them try to formulate a question.
“The guy with the mic is always thinking I want to take friendly questions and I keep telling him to go back, back, go to the liberals. [At one event where a group] turned their backs to me … he goes up to one guy who has his back to me and I almost said ‘no, you get no questions from the ones with their back,’ but I thought no, let’s see what he has to say. And he actually comes up with a serious question. Why are you sitting there with your back to me?” said Coulter.
Coulter also cites other conservative political figures who have been attacked on college campuses. When Pat Buchannan was at Michigan State, it wasn’t an MSU student who threw dressing on the writer – it was a community college student.
In 2006, when Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project spoke at Columbia University, students drove the speakers from the stage, the tables were turned over and mics grabbed from the speaker’s hands. “I think if they were Columbia students, they were probably affirmative action students.
“Because that really is unusual behavior at an Ivy League school or its equivalents. You can tell the SAT scores from how the kids behave in an audience and it’s the dumb ones who are the most susceptible to being jimmied up by other morons like Ward Churchill,” said Coulter.
Even though Coulter’s reception is acceptable at some colleges, she is used to the poor treatment at many, and finally decided to break her silence.
“I thought, you know, screw it, I have been covering for them too long. I’m going to put a few of those chants in the book,” Coulter said. Her newest book, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America,” was released Tuesday.