Deconstruction: The Lindsay Shepherd Affair

of professors from wilford laurier to talk about the lindsay shepherd scandal and what happened with professor rambuchana and pimlott and administrator adria joel adria right adria joel who i think is the unsung what would you call it the unsung villain in this entire process because she seems to have escaped relatively unscathed even though i think her role is more reprehensible than anyone else's anyways why don't you guys introduce yourself and talk about what you've been doing at wilford laurie and also just let everybody know why we're meeting yeah well uh i'm dave haskell and uh i'm a prophet laurie i am in the faculty of liberal arts uh this is my colleague will will how did we come into this whole thing like this is this didn't just happen with the lindsay affair like well to background we support maximum freedom of expression and we've really found each other uh along with a few other professors who feel the same way that we do that free expression and free inquiry is the core value of a university and but sort of how do we run into each other business school uh so my exposure to faculty arts is minimal and i've been really sheltered from this professionally but watching what's happening in the u.s watching what was happening to you at u of t i'm a grad i did my phd here and um it was in january that uh our university leadership sent out an email um explaining to the faculty how to think about the trump travel ban and declaring uh its its commitment to diversity equity and uh inclusivity and i was really offended by that that they would uh see fit to pronounce on a political issue in another country uh offended why i i'm i've got a phd i'm able to reach my own conclusions about whether these things are good or bad i don't need my administration preaching to me about the right way to think about an issue a political issue particularly and so why do you think they did that and what do you think they were thinking when they did that because that sort of seems self-evident right it's not the administration's role to dictate a political stance to the faculty that's just clearly not their role so what do you think they were thinking it would it seemed like a manifestation of trump derangement syndrome it seemed like just the the same reaction that the the democrats in the us were having that they lost to this horrible person and they couldn't understand why and he was so reprehensible and here was yet another terrible thing that he was doing and we must all agree how bad it was well i mean even if the funny thing is even if you can make that case and say personally and even socially the idea that you could make that case and then be university administration and then tell your faculty to think that way i mean that's taking it in a whole different that's taking it to a whole whole different level of presump presumptuousness did that come from uh our administration from the diversity and equity from the administration from the leadership the university leadership is that right the cpam i remember the it's confusing because i remember we also got an email from the diversity and equity office when when trump won and they said that they've created a safe space and they were going to be open for extra hours in case anybody needed to go and find uh comfort right that happened a lot in the united states hey but you think at least the americans have some justification for it given that it's their country i mean we need safe spaces because a conservative was elected in the united states in the in not even in our country it does seem to be a little bit on the absurd side well it just to me you know they didn't send out an email when justin trudeau won and i have to imagine that there were some students who were offended like there's got to be conservative students at laurier but it's it's very much a one-sided conversation when we talk about administration when we talk about the diversity and equity office they talk about diversity but they really don't mean it because they do not want those students who are ideologically diverse they talk about inclusion but they purposely will exclude those students and an email like that is proof positive of that kind of exclusion but what we did so well that was that was the thing that just got me hopping mad and i was emailing back and forth with a colleague of queens uh and we were talking about the importance of free speech and this had outraged me and uh and he sent me a link to a star article that david had written this is now maybe a month later in february or march about uh this guest speaker oh daniel robitaille yeah yeah yeah and that she couldn't speak and was she was she uh gimeshi's lawyer yeah yeah yeah yeah so merely because she served as a defense lawyer for someone she was pilloried well this was another like when people look at the lindsay shepard affair this is not an isolated case at wilford laurier this is something that is it is a regular occurrence and now it isn't always as high profile but whether it's students in my office saying i can't speak whether it's my colleague sometimes saying to their students who believes that they're stifled and every hand goes up and there have been cases of that colleagues have come and told me but we've got these other examples like when daniel robitaille came to speak at the brantford campus of wilford laurier and some students agitated until she was forced not to do so and and my my president right we should provide some background so that was the ghameshi case right and so gimeshi was a cbc journalist who was accused of sexual assault and sexual misbehavior by a number of people who was immediately let go at cbc who was dragged viciously through the press i would say and then was um found innocent in the courts and and but and he had a defense lawyer and the defense lawyer had been invited to speak yes she was part of the defense team she was going to speak and she wasn't going to speak about the gomeshi trial in fact she was going to talk about what it's like to be a high power powerful lawyer um in in the big city in toronto and i mean that would have been really valuable for the criminology students but the students who were agitating against her really with the support of several professors uh they were saying well no if she comes on it will trigger students it will um it will mentally harm students and so that was used as justification for the interesting too to me to see that these claims of harm and so forth are generally put forth by people who have no clinical expertise whatsoever and their idea is that the way that you first of all that the way to aid people's mental health is to protect them and there's no evidence for that whatsoever and the second is that in your attempts to protect them the best thing to do is to shelter them from exposure to ideas that would be challenging or frightening which is precisely the opposite of what a clinician does when he's trying to or she is trying to deal with someone who has excess anxiety what you do in a case where someone who has excess anxiety even as a consequence of a trauma let's say is you get them to voluntarily expose themselves to increasingly larger doses of exactly what frightens them that's the curative route so not only is it advice that's being disseminated say by people who aren't clinicians it's actually advice that's being disseminated who are promoting the opposite of what an informed clinician would do and it isn't that isn't my opinion that's that that's as close to a consensus as anything you could reach among clinical practitioners right one the rules for clinical improvement is get your story straight something like that talk about your past sort out and expose yourself to the things that you're afraid of that you're inclined to avoid that's the pathway to to resilience and more robust mental health okay so tell us the story a bit you guys have an inside view of what's happened on the wilford laurier campus since the the lindsay shepherd affair broke i should just say that you know after this rubber tie event i read david's piece and immediately emailed him and just said and that's how we kindred and uh we met and we had lunch uh and uh and and just talked about the you know free speech and the chicago statement and how can we get it implemented at the university but we just couldn't see any way forward and really right so that's another thing we want to discuss you guys have rewritten the chicago statement right so that it's more appropriate in a canadian context right we call the laurier free laurier statement for freedom of expression okay okay and you've been trying to convince or or you're trying to be true you've been trying to communicate with the university authorities to have that ratified essentially adopted as a statement of principles and have you had any success with that or what's the consequence they deferred to a task force that's that's uh going to be held uh and we can certainly okay is that in the aftermath of the shepherd affair is that going to be part of it really do anything over the summer just because it it just seemed too big a mountain uh and there seemed to be no way to introduce the idea right catalyst for it now you've got your catalyst and lindsay shepherd becomes the catalyst and and you know what what uh object lesson in what goes on at laurier but also what an object lesson and how you handle these free speech opponents uh she's really given a model that other students i hope will follow but it was it was through this robotic thing that we got to know each other and a few others yeah there's a couple more of you that's right yeah and and so about five i think you told me that's right so so the robitaille incident really brought us out of the woodwork we started to chat and say you know we see this problem on our university we don't know what to do and then when the lindsay shepherd scandal broke we all immediately were emailing us it's happened again is essentially what we were saying we said we've got to do something about this uh i'd already the i was out on a on a trip and i came home and i said to my wife where are the newspapers this was uh november 12th when the story broke christie blatchford's story and i said hey honey where the newspaper she said i can't let you see him i said why not she said you cannot read the papers and of course it was because christy blatchford's article was in there so as soon as i read it i i was beside myself i thought it's happened again and this time this is really terrible they've attacked a ta is what they've done so i contacted with the full force of the administration right and and claims that she had done mental harm broken two laws two laws federal and provincial was sincerely worried that they were going to railroad this young lady oh they could have easily taken her to the ontario human rights commission they would have had it what was going to happen uh i contacted christie blattford i said can you put me in touch with her she was kind enough to do so i got in touch with lindsay and i said i know that this is a terrible time but you've got a professor who supports you i knew that these gentlemen also would uh and then quickly i as quickly as i could i wrote an op-ed for the toronto star that week just again saying this is happening the world needs to be aware of it but it was really after that uh that monday after the story broke on the saturday we started to talk and and how can we how can we assist lindsay and and how can we well the op-ed helped you and the fact that the star ran it was quite remarkable as well so hooray to the star the star really does want to do its best to champion free expression yeah well you'd think journalists would actually be concerned about that to some degree well and i think they are like one of the things that's happened to me in the last year is that although the press coverage of what i did and just to remind people so last year i made a video about bill c-16 which was the bill whose provisions lindsay shepard theoretically transgressed against just to be clear about that and when i first made the video i was accused by all sorts of people including journalists of um well first of all making unnecessary noise and being unnecessarily alarmist which were the minor accusations and then the more major accusations were that you know i was all the things that you'd expect a far-right agitator to be a bigot and a transphobia and a racist and all of these things and so but what was interesting was that the journalists by and large especially the main journalists turned around on that issue really quickly it was probably within three weeks because what happened was a couple of them actually went and read the policy documents that i had referred to on the ontario human rights commission website which are still there and which are still appalling and have led exactly to this situation with lindsay and as soon as they read what i had been uh what what outing let's say in my video then they started to understand that this what that i wasn't just ringing a bell for no reason at all it was actually reasonable i think of people to go after me to begin with because canada is such a safe and peaceful place and our political situation and economic situation has been so stable that when someone comes out and says look we're in danger of making a major error the logical first response should be no there's something wrong with you it's like we're fine there's something wrong with you right exactly well and and so it's reasonable i think it was reasonable for me to be hit hard in the aftermath of doing that because well generally speaking whistleblowers in canada or alarmists in canada have very little to be alarmist about but this this okay so now so fine so this thing happened with lindsay what what have you seen happening on the wilford laurier campus things that i'm not particularly proud of i i would say i mean i knew that uh will and some other colleagues were going to come to the aid of lindsay but i was thinking that once her recording became public that we would just have a flood of professors coming to support our cause which is we had a laurier statement for freedom of expression modeled on the chicago state we thought that immediately people would just say of course we need to reinforce that this needs to be the primary mission free expression free inquiry needs to be the primary mission and we got that out pretty fast we really did in about 10 days uh and and and got it on change.org and then where i was emailing everybody that i knew and trying to get people interested and i would say out of 50 emails i sent i got 15 signatures from personal uh relationships so even with personal relationships you could only get a 30 hit rate so what do you think's stopping professors from signing that say or clambering on board especially in the aftermath of the shepherd recording which we should point out you know this is one of the things that's very interesting is that outside wilfred laurier and perhaps outside universities that are in the same boat the reaction to that recording was universal right and national and international and uniform and the reaction was what the hell this is scandalous there's nothing about this that is acceptable right and so what's what struck me is so remarkable is that even though there's been international outrage over this and and very and not and an outrage of a sort that's only been disputed by a very small number of people at least to begin with wilfred laurier responded on moss let's say as if this was somehow debatable you know as if there were two sides of the story here let's say and i thought well i thought rambuchana and pimlot who were the professors did what they did i thought was appalling for in upgrading her and in the manner in which they did it and in the language that they used but i thought what was truly terrifying was the presence of adria joel at that inquisition because she was a administrator who was hired specifically to do exactly what she was doing by legislated necessity on the part of the ontario liberal government right because it wasn't just the university that was involved in this her position was set up because of legislative necessity which is something also to keep in mind when we're going after the universities okay so you had a hard time getting faculty on board how many faculty members did sign it 59 is it out of out of how many faculty 550 full-time and now and so you say well what what's going on with them well i think that some maybe i know this is hard to believe but maybe unaware even now i think there's a big proportion that are unaware unbelievable is that it is i think that's okay well that's its own mystery because i i don't know where you'd have to have been in the now last month to not have noticed that this has happened the people perhaps in the sciences the computer sciences the math they they've got their head down and they're they're doing their research and and so and so i don't think there's anything diabolical there i think that what as well i've got very few signatures from the the business faculty i meet some but uh a lot of people just aren't engaged it's a bit of a commuter school a little bit so i think people are just getting on with their research and their teaching maybe not aware of the public well that's that's an interesting thing in and of itself because i think part of what's led to the occupation of the university let's say by the radical postmodern types is the proclivity of the scientists in particular but also i would say the more serious scholars to be focusing narrowly on their field of inquiry which is essentially what they should be doing and not paying attention to any of the broader contextual issues which is actually a perfectly fine strategy when things are going well but a terrible strategy when they're not and what you also see so we've got these people who might not be aware and we've got the the few who are aware and are supporting maximum free expression but then you've got these other people who are convinced that maximum free expression free inquiry is not a good thing for a university and and those people are definitely congregated within the arts and the humanities and they justify it because they are applying a social justice lens or what they would call a critical theory lens to this entire uh this entire issue and and how about a quick summary of critical theory well critical theory i mean in a nutshell it's an idea that came from the frankfurt school in germany it transfers over to columbia university uh it is some german scholars who are marxist and what they are saying is that marxism as an economic unit or as an economic philosophy really doesn't work it doesn't transfer very well but let's change it over to a social theory and it's a it's a theory of oppressor and oppressed and it's very bifurcated you've you are either one or the other and if you are the oppressed you're good and if you're the oppressor you're bad and it's as simple as that there's no nuance or okay i'm i'm being as bad as they are to so i'm giving you the really broad strokes on this but essentially it does set up the villain and the victim and and it is the idea that we must do everything to silence the villain the oppressor and to center the to the oppressed yes and then we will elevate the oppressed and the same thing happened essentially with the french uh deconstructionists in the 1970s it is so this is this is the motivation behind it but when when you hear um them talk about critical theory it is not critical thinking there's a big difference and so parents will hear well they're teaching critical theory isn't that a good thing no because critical thinking means i'm going to show you both sides of this argument critical theory means i'm going to deliberately give you one side of the argument i'm going to tell you who's right and i'm going to tell you who's wrong there's an oppressor and an oppressed the oppressor is the bad guy the oppressed is the good guy and it's a very manipulative way of thinking so uh so so there's let's say two reasons why people wouldn't sign the the the uh the petition one is they're doing something else and and they're just not interested in it and and fair enough even though i think that that's dangerous at the moment the second is that they're actually philosophically or ideologically opposed to the propositions and so to what degree do you think the latter is the determining factor behind the relatively small degree of support that you that you guys have been able to draw it's a big thing that the uh a group of faculty signed an open letter uh to the university complaining about the violence yeah uh and and that the the administration need to make the campus safe safe yeah they did the same thing with me after i i made my video i was i made the campus unsafe and 200 people signed up signed a petition what does unsafe mean i mean this is the problem the the left the far left are taking words that have a traditional meaning a traditional definition and they're blowing that definition completely completely away and at one time harm meant that there was an infliction of damage that would have lasting effect and it would compromise the appearance or the function right we can think about damage to a car right lasting and it's affecting the appearance or the function that's what harm is but they've stretched that definition so that it becomes meaningless that my an objectionable idea becomes harm that that when you show a video you've made a place unsafe and that yeah that's the language of trigger warnings and safe spaces but but it's disingenuous there was a trans rally and one of the speakers said that letting i hope i can quote this privately letting peterson's views be heard in the classroom is violence it is violence yeah right right now those are certainly yes you can react with violence yes well that's often what i think that i've thought a lot about one of the tenets of post-modernism less so i would say of critical theory but particularly of post-modernism and it's more marxist variants is that the only motivation for the construction of hierarchies is power you think well that's no there's lots of reasons for producing hierarchies right there's hierarchies of competence there's hierarchies of interest there's higher hierarchies of aesthetic quality like there's all sorts of wherever you can make a qualitative judgment you make a hierarchy so there's the idea that power is the only driving force between behind the construction of hierarchies is absolutely preposterous so you think well why in the world would anyone make that claim that it's only power that exists well as far as i can tell at least one of the reasons is that it justifies the use of power now if you have your position because of power which is basically tyranny then i'm fully warranted in my use of power against you that's all there is so i think it's a great justification for it okay so how many people signed the petition stating that the campus had become unsafe that was like 79 79 just like that okay so you got more people signing a petition claiming that what shepard did made the campus unsafe than you did getting okay so that's interesting because one of the things we're going to address later is the president's letter as a consequence of the inquiry into the lindsay shepherd fair and one of the things she says um people who've tried to downplay what happened at lin's at wilford lori have said basically two or three things one is that well the shepherd is not to be trusted and she's really like a uh a subtle arm of the right wing that's one one and that she's a reprehensible character yes yes sir peterson i know they they directly went after i'm quite sneaky that way um the second is that pimlott rambuchana and joel misinterpreted bill c-16 which i think is absolutely preposterous i think they interpreted exactly the way that it was written especially if you consider the surrounding policies and that's what i was warning about last september and the third is that this was an isolated incident and doesn't truly reflect the reality either of wilford laurier or other campuses and that's stated explicitly in the president's letter and so that's one of the things i wanted to discuss because i don't buy that i think this wasn't an anomaly this wasn't people stepping out of line and i think the proof of that is not what rambu canada did or pym law because we could say yeah yeah they're ideologically committed professors and they and they're they're not very professional in their administrative abilities and they went after a ta unprofessionally and stupidly that's bad that's not really bad what's really bad was that there was a paid administrator at the meeting who was hired to do exactly that and so the fact that she was there is the proof to me that this is not only not an isolated incident it's actually a logical concept and a logical and inevitable consequence of legislative moves that made these bureaucratic positions necessary and the practical reality that these administrative positions do exist on the campuses so there's no isolated incident issue there now how do you think lindsay's been treated at wilford laurier like what's your what's your impression of her of her personal situation there i think that so on the positive side there have been students who have rallied to her support and that's been really encouraging to see uh it was some students on campus who are dedicated to freedom of expression they mostly are coming from the the conservative clubs whether it's the conservative political club or other conservative groups although definitely invitations have been extended to other groups of other political stripes or other they really haven't rallied to lindsay sadly so those students have to a certain extent befriended her or brought her under the wing or just have begun associating with her and saying how can we support you i think in her classes and i'm just going from what i've seen i i follow her on twitter so i see what's been going on there apparently you know and i don't think this is inaccurate the other grad students are being quite scathing yeah yeah that's that's what i've heard from her and from her tweets is that at least they're cold at minimum they're cold and the professors as well including the one who told her that she couldn't use her laptop in class because she didn't want to be recorded i mean you couldn't script this level of idiocy but my my thought is students always ask me uh dr haskell can i record the what you're talking about i say yes yes the answer is yes the answer is yes because you know what i don't say anything in my class that i wouldn't publicly say because i and i want to be accountable i want people to know what i'm saying in my class i want them to know i'm fair i'm balanced i present both sides of the argument i'm not afraid of that i mean why are people afraid of accountability that that's beyond my understanding yeah well that's that's a very good that's a very good question so okay so um i think i think what we'll do now is go through this letter because what happened yesterday i guess is the president had appointed a third-party fact-finder to look into what happened with the lindsay shepard affair right and there were concerns about that because many people including christy blatchford were concerned and the lawyer that's representing lindsay howard um levitt howard levitt was concerned that the person who was appointed to do the third party investigation wouldn't be neutral because he had tweeted his agreement with a variety of let's call them politically correct issues quite publicly but it does look like he's done a credible job that that's how it appears to me anyways the president who is very closed-mouthed or assiduously neutral about this whole affair has released a report and i thought we could go through it and talk about whether or not we think that it addressed the issues reasonably so because i think it did in some part but i think it didn't in others so this is from um mcclatchy deborah mcclatchy phd who's the president and new and vice chancellor at wilford lurie and relatively new at it so i mean she's really being raped through the calls that's for sure but she was the vice president academic which is the second most senior position for the last five years so she's not so she's accustomed to this okay okay it is i believe it is time for some clarity around the events of the past few weeks here at wilford laurier university stemming from the very regrettable meeting so that's an interesting turn of phrase to begin with that followed the showing of a tvo clip by a teaching assistant during a tutorial as the newly appointed president and vice chancellor of this incredible 106 year old institution i'm here to set the record straight and announce some important changes the issue has highlighted some deficiencies but but as importantly it has created opportunities yeah well to me that's a that's a kind of marketing double speak it's like we could just go with the deficiencies issue for now opportunities for laurier to improve our own performance to lead a broader discussion on academic freedom and freedom of expression and opportunities to work together as a community to demonstrate the strengths we have as an institution when the issue first broke i erred on the side of caution as a person and as a president of as the president of laurier i'm sensitive to the viewpoints and concerns of our students staff and faculty as an employer i am cognizant that the four people who are in that meeting room are employees and one is also a student all four are entitled to due process i did not want to rush judgment rather i wanted to ensure we were able to objectively assess the facts and make sound def decisions flowing from that assessment that seems reasonable enough i would say the events that have transpired probably justified her approach although i had taken issues with some of the things that she had said and not said when she was on the agenda but whatever we hired an external fact finder with expertise in human resources issues i've received the report and we are taking decisive action to ensure these events will not be repeated the report along with what we already knew has led me to the final conclusions following conclusions and actions there were numerous errors in judgment made in the handling of the meeting with ms lindsay shepard the ta of the tutorial in question in fact the meeting never should have happened at all okay that's probably the most damning statement in the entire report i would say because she and then she says no formal complaint nor informal concern relative to a laurier policy was registered about the screening of the video this was confirmed in the fact-finding report okay so we could take that apart a little bit no formal complaint okay so rambuchana claimed that one or more students had complained he wouldn't say how many and he wouldn't say what the nature of the complaint was now what this document seems to indicate that is that well if there was a complaint which it leaves vague there was nothing that would constitute a genuine complaint in an administrative sense and that's why the meeting should have never happened so i guess one question would be um what if any appropriate disciplinary action should be taken against rambuccana and pimlot and i don't know the answer to that because you know they're not administrative experts and i don't think faculty can be but by the same token i don't feel like i understand exactly what happened to bring about the meeting to begin with do you guys know i mean whatever we do know we've had to piece together from different media reports because as has been said uh our president is not releasing the findings of this like this is this is going to be this is a secret the independent investigation we will never know what it actually says we don't know what all the recommendations are we i think we can take her at her word that she's telling us what's going on why is she making it secret or keeping it secret is that is that this concern with what do you call it confidentiality that seems to be the the what the the camouflage behind which these things are always hidden that seems to be implied and or even said explicitly but i've seen other cases where there's been disciplinary measures and and we we get more details than this right so so i don't know i don't know the level of confidentiality that is required under law but what i can say and i'll let will talk about what the disciplinary actions can be let's keep in mind that when rambuchana said that there had been a complaint and it says here that there wasn't he then echoes that in his apology to lindsay he then says of course and i'm i'm paraphrasing here so i'm not being completely accurate in terms of what he exactly said but he said something like of course there are things i can't discuss because of the complaint that was made by a student right so he's echoing what seems to be an untruth yes and well this is about as close a statement as you might imagine in a statement like this stating that it was an untruth i mean he said she said no formal complaint nor informal concern relative to a laurier policy was registered i mean that's that's that's as close as you can get to coming right out and saying that the statement that there was a complaint was a falsehood and i just want to follow that thread for a second so here we have a controversy that was started on an untruth and it seems to be that this is part of the whole modus operandi here when we hear and there's been harm right and it's unsafe right violence daily violence although again when the media global national news globe and mail checked in to see if there were any police reports related to any harassment or any threats no police reports so so at some point don't we have to say there's a boy who cried wolf well this is even this is more egregious even though than claiming harm i mean because you know maybe people were getting nasty tweets and so forth and i suspect they were um but the thing is is that rambuchana and pimlot directly claimed that there had been a complaint right and so that's a big problem that isn't thoroughly addressed here well and either somebody uh heard about the tutorial and the fact that a peterson video was shown uh and uh or rambuccana found out somehow but he decided that was unacceptable and that the right way to approach it was to claim that a student had complained because it's not a problem that he found it it's not such a big problem that he found it unacceptable let's say it is his class like he has a right to talk to his ta about what's going to be shown and what's not going to be shown even though he handled it i think reprehensibly in that meeting but he could come out and say look like that isn't what the sort of thing i want to be discussed in my class i don't agree with peterson i think he's a jerk and like here's the other things you should be concentrating on but to come out and say a student complained and then to buttress that with the accusation that she had violated federal and provincial law as well as the universe to bring in adrian joel exactly and i don't understand why joel was there without some sort of formal paperwork or uh evidence of a of a complaint well i i think that the the the reason for that is that the positions that people like jewel occupy are so ill-defined and so fundamentally reprehensible in their organization in their in their aims is that this is exactly the sort of thing that you would expect and so i thought she didn't say much in that little inquisitorial recording but i thought the things she did say were spectacularly um concerning let's put it that way so what is what's the discipline what what is the discipline do you have any sense of this like i i can't speculate i don't know communications or well what i don't what happens when somebody lies or when somebody brings you know forth a complaint that wasn't a complaint well that is that well that's one of the things this document does not address like it's a big problem it's a big problem if there was no complaint and the reason she was disciplined was because there were because there was a claim that there was a complaint like that's well we can we we don't have to be there's a claim that there's harm what about if there's a claim that the campus has daily violence what if there's a claim that such and such area has become unsafe does that need to be proven or should we be seeking disciplinary action against people who are making those claims well that's that's a very good that's a very good question okay so so that's that's a that's a problem that isn't addressed in this report it's a big one okay and and i mean the president is obviously not happy with this because she also says um the errors in judgment okay no formal complaint no informal concern was registered about the screening of the video this was confirmed in the fact-finding report so they're not beating around the bush about this they're stating it very clearly the errors in judgment were compounded by misapplication of existing university policies and procedures basic guidelines basic guidelines and best practices on how to appropriately execute the roles and responsibilities of staff and faculty were ignored not just not understood ignored or not understood okay that's a pretty damn damning statement there too so i i don't even know all the particulars here i heard howard levitt say that she was entitled to some sort of represent lindsay was entitled to some representation under the bylaws of our university she was supposed to have had that and that nobody offered that right so that's an administrative follow-up at the level of employee employer relationships to say nothing of the academic issues at stake so we don't have policies and procedures about how to carry out an inquisition that's not what she's saying i think there's a medieval document that you can use but but one thing jordan i want to point out here is that the errors in judgment were compounded by misapplication of existing university policies misapplication of existing university policies at the end of this document she's going to say that our gendered and sexual violence policy needs to be reviewed so which is it was right was it an error an application or an error in policy and and that's this is confusing yeah it is because my suggestion would be the policy is terribly flawed we have a colleague who's one of the free speech proponents at our university dr andrew robinson he is an expert in human rights law and he went through our gendered and sexual violence policy with a fine-tooth comb and he says this document is unworkable it makes thought a crime and and he wrote an op-ed to that effect so my point would be and what and who did he what organization is he part of yeah but which which sub which which uh human rights and human diversity right i mean this is that's exactly it this is his field yes exactly and so when he looked at this he says this goes beyond what the ontario government was even asking for and it gets to the point where it actually makes you can be guilty of thought crime you can be guilty of transphobia without any intent okay well that's the same in the interim if someone if someone says i've been harmed mentally that is enough for conviction under this particular policy it's the same with the ontario human rights commission's policies intent doesn't matter so this isn't misapplication i'm saying did adria joelle actually get it right and so is it a misapplication or do we so it'll be interesting if the university does discipline her if she gets legal representation who claims that she was actually applying the policies correctly because that is the question right so or but it could be two things it could be the policies are flawed and this is the consequence and they were misapplied we don't know but there's definitely ambiguity here and that and that's a crucial issue i think lindsay was guilty under the gendered sexual violence policy and she was adrian was right and accusing her she was wrong about c-16 uh it would have been an ontario human rights uh code violation but gsb she was right if there had been a complaint right right this is the right point okay okay and how many angels can dance right okay procedures in how to apply university policies same issue here and under what circumstances were not followed the training of key individuals to meet the expectations of the university and addressing such an issue as an issue such as this was not sufficient and must be improved okay the question is who are these key individuals do they mean rambikana pimlot and joel is that are they putting all three of those in there and then the next question would be how are they going to improve the training of key individuals because that actually worries me as a faculty member right because whenever the administration decides that it's going to engage in some additional training of faculty members then that raises the hair on the back of my neck like is this unconscious bias training is that what they're talking about which has been well i think uh i can't remember i've just read recently nosak himself who who developed the iat just published a review paper stating clearly stating clearly that attempts to reduce unconscious bias by explicit explicit training there's no evidence whatsoever that they have any positive effect and that was nosek himself who helped develop the iat because the little coterie that developed that test the chair of the harvard psychology department i'll remember her name in a minute green walled anthony greenwald and nozek what's her name mazarine banerjee three of them developed it they're starting to fragment a bit because the thing has been pushed way too hard right it's not a test that's valid for the purposes that it's being put to and they know it perfectly well even though they're consulting about it and have made quite an enterprise out of it but nozek is you know who seems to be a pretty credible scientist and he's actually looking at the data and it's clear that the these unconscious bias training programs have zero positive impact there's some evidence that they have negative impact because of course people don't like being accused of being unconscious racists right so i'm wondering is that the kind of training and there's nothing in here that says this but this is the problem that it says there will be training unconscious by is that the same as systemic discrimination well it's the it's the neurological equivalent of systemic discrimination so imagine systemic discrimination is built into the structure of the system right unconscious bias is built into your perceptual structures so even before you act or think you're biased towards against the members of an out group that's the claim and not only biased in against the members of out group which is a different claim that biased in favor of your in-group which of course almost every human being is especially if you think about your family but that that that implicit bias also manifests itself in behaviors that would essentially be categorizable as racist at least at a low level and there's very little evidence that the implicit bias that this test hypothetically measures manifests itself in measurable behavior so we went through a thing in the summer where they ran a regression on salaries at laurier and found that uh women were paid a little bit less than men by about four percent and so they gave all the did they include eight did they include age as a covariate uh the answer to that would be no the model was uh it had um rank uh and i don't know that it had eight it only had four categories of professor though when this has been done at university of michigan for instance because i looked at comparables they had 21 categories of professor uh or 21 departments and at ours we had four so you were comparing people for instance within the business school who might be in marketing versus someone who psychology yeah well i know i know from setting up regression equations ad nauseam that the the covariates that you include in the equation determine the outcome of the of the of the equation well the conclusion they reached the explanation for the the statistical significance of the gender coefficient was systemic discrimination right right of course well that that wasn't the conclusion they reached that was the conclusion they stepped into the inquiry with and they gerrymandered the statistics until they found a regression equation that supported their their initial claim so that was that's not an inquiry but so there's what i hear you're saying is there's really no scientific basis for this idea that there could be this unconscious bias that could drive there is evidence that we're full of unconscious biases i mean we couldn't even see if we didn't have unconscious biases because we have to use shortcuts and heuristics to just process the world the issue is what measurable impact does that have on behavioral that's the first thing and it's minimal at best first of all it's not easy to distinguish between racial bias and novelty avoidance right because what you'd have to do is you'd have to find a person in a racial group say a white person who was just as familiar with black people as with white people and then show that there was a bias because otherwise you can't distinguish it from a novelty novelty aversion and people are characterized by novelty aversion you already have developed a preference for that cup over this cup i mean it happens that quickly and it's that it's that subtle and and great and grand let's say so the first issue is we can't really distinguish unconscious bias from perceptual habit let's say or from or stereotyping from categorization for that matter and that literature has been under assault in a major way in the social psychology literature but even assuming that an implicit bias does exist which you might there might be grounds for by noting that people do have an in-group preference say for their family members and perhaps even for their racial members although it's hard to distinguish that from novelty or from familiarity preference putting all that aside which you can't there's no evidence that these courses that are put in place to reduce that bias have any effect whatsoever on the bias it's complete even the people who are pushing the iat and the idea of implicit bias are willing to say well all these things that we're doing to try to reduce it have absolutely no effect or if anything a negative effect and again just we don't know that what the training is going to be i guess where we went down this rabbit hole was we don't know what the training is going to be right we don't know it's we have no evidence to assume we have no reason to assume that the training is going to address the proper problem and every reason to be skeptical that it won't okay so next um there is also institutional failure that allowed this to happen well we don't know what that means because i'd like to know what the institutional failure was but that's a pretty broad and she says when when there is institutional failure responsibility ultimately starts and ends with me well that's a nice statement and okay she's taking responsibility for it but unless it's specified what the institutional failures are it's just hand waving going forward we will implement improved training and new procedures and engage in a very specific administrative review details would be nice to strengthen and enhance confidence in what students and employees can expect at laurier specifically there was no wrongdoing on the part of ms shepard in showing the clip from tvo in her tutorial showing a tvo clip for the purposes of an academic discussion is a reasonable classroom teaching tool well thank god for that given that tvo is a publicly funded uh middle-of-the-road left-leaning liberal news media establishment a credible one for sure i wish that early on immediately following this story breaking that administration had said exactly that because remember for more than a month now the public the canadian public has wondered can you show tv ontario videos in classrooms at laurier right and i'm not i'm not joking yeah like this was right well this is the question and and there has not been an answer from administration on that very basic question and so people who are thinking about sending their kids to laurier are thinking is that the place where they didn't know whether or not you could show public television in a classroom is that the place where it took a independent investigation to come to the conclusion that it's okay to play a clip from the agenda that well we still don't yes exactly it is the place where all of that was in doubt that is wilfred laurie it is the place where those things were in doubt and so they're not quite as in doubt but we also still don't know what else is what else is still in doubt right because if that can be you wonder well you know that's pretty damn innocuous okay any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course yeah well the question there is any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context the question there is who decides what the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context are because that's supposed to be the that's supposed to be the bailiwick of the professor period right and with with some leeway for the for the teaching assistants and so on but i worry when i hear about context because i've seen opinion pieces from some of my colleagues who tell me that the appropriate context is within the frame of social justice or within the frame of critical theory well that's what rambuccano said to shepherd was that well part of the reason you were wrong was because you portrayed it neutrally if you had contextualized it essentially if you would contextualize peterson as hitler which was rambakana's statement then it would have been perhaps appropriate to to to air the video and that is equivalent to leading the witness right and leading the witnesses when we have a lawyer an authority figure telling the person on the stand what to say taking my ideas and putting them into that person's mouth right well that's how you produce unconscious bias but but my point would be so i'm not saying that this is in here but we really need clarify yeah well that's that's a that's a sentence that doesn't that i'm not happy about appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course jesus it's just administrative double speak the whole way through you present in class you know what are the criteria for evaluating that i i show videos all the time in the class i don't know if they have the adequate underpinnings yeah well that's that's the question is who decides that the the answer to that there's a simple answer to that the professor that's the answer there isn't another answer there's no board there's no higher authority there's nothing else you know when i show i do show clips from hitler in my class in my personality class when we talk about orderliness and totalitarianism i show clips from the triumph of the will and i show this other documentary called crum which is about an underground cartoonist from the 1960s named robert crumman it is an absolutely shocking documentary like if you ever want to know more than you want to know about rapists and serial killers that documentary will tell you it's really it's a tough it's a tough watch you know and i can't i can't imagine a like a committee reviewing my teaching materials and allowing those things to go forward without challenge be a disaster okay the ensuing discussion also needs to be handled properly yeah well we have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question okay so whatever handled property means lindsay shepard managed it which i think is a good sign here because if we take that as the model lindsay did present the information neutrally and and she was not taking sides and if that's our model that's that's a good sign okay that's good so that's acceptable so i'm a bit troubled by this because we're gonna in three or four paragraphs find out that we need enhanced training for tas right so did she handle it properly right why do we need to treat the training yes that's right and again who's going to do the training because it's not going to be the faculty because the faculty don't have time or the inclination for that matter to run that kind of training is it going to be the diversity in equity yeah right well that's the question who's going to do the training i have apologized to ms shepard publicly as has dr rambokana her supervising professor the university has conveyed to her today that the results of the fact-finding report to make the results of the fact-finding report to make sure she understands it is clear that she was involved in no wrongdoing yes well for someone who was involved in no wrongdoing she sure bloody well got raped over the coals for the last month so the university is taking concrete steps to make changes to ensure this doesn't happen again yeah well good it has been made clear to those who were involved in the meeting with ms shepard that their conduct does not meet the high standards i set for staff and faculty well that is a big question there right how has it been made clear to those who were involved in the meeting with ms shepard that their conduct does not meet those high standards because we don't know does that mean did the president talk to them has there been disciplinary action like we we because if it was i don't even know what would be appropriate but i would say that not knowing what was done is not appropriate so and i think it deserves specifics i mean that's what got me into this was you the the christy blatchford's article was was very accurate because she already had the audio but then when we heard the audio it was so appalling what was done to her in that room it was such horrible bullying uh and just such a violation of what the university should stand for that's what coalesced all of the anger i mean in canada yeah the devil's in the details so it's the same with the how it has been made clear to those who were involved so because i don't i mean maybe this is something we could talk about too i don't know what would constitute appropriate disciplinary message measures as a consequence you have here three people acting on a non-existent complaint who produced an international scandal that damaged lindsay in a real sense although it might have also made her stronger but it certainly it certainly didn't have to because a lesser person would have crumbled i don't know if she would feel that she i i think she might take exception to that uh she certainly has not claimed any kind of victim status throughout this whole thing and i think that's no but that's more a testament to her character than anything else because i mean she was subject to the kind of attacks i would say that would have snowed under a lesser person yes but she has risen to this challenge yes definitely definitely well and and thank god for that but then there has been real harm done to the university as far as so and i i don't know how you would quantify that in financial terms but i suspect it's substantial but reputational terms i mean now i would say internationally this is what wilford laurie is known for so maybe that's an overstatement but i don't think so as these are individual employment issues i cannot go into greater detail on any individual case well that could be but know that the university has and is taking action to rectify the situation and send a clear signal that this cannot and will not happen again that sounds pretty that's very forthright yeah it is one key improvement highlighted is the need to enhance our faculty and ta training yeah well like i said as a faculty member whenever i see that i don't see the role of the administrators at a university to to train the faculty that's not their role their role is to move paper around for the faculty fundamentally it is the responsibility of course instructors to develop guidelines for the roles and expectations of their tas fair enough the university also has high expectations of professors as ta supervisors we recognize the need to do more in this area we reckon uh the university's intent is to enhance the training and support for both ta supervisors and teaching assistants making these mandatory and standardized that's my favorite part jesus dismal so that so my suspicions as a skeptic are that the making of training for faculty mandatory and standardized will do more harm than this scandal has done over the long run so we don't know what the training is we don't know who's going to do it we don't know what it's going to be about but the one thing we do know is it will be mandatory yeah mandatory and standardized right yeah mandatory and standardized be interesting to see how they'll do that too because it isn't so easy to make training mandatory for faculty members right you can't just do that by fiat because they can generally tell you to go to hell and should gendered and sexual violence policy it has become clear to us that managing the new gendered and sexual violence policy now that's the one that's mandated by the provincial government so it was bill uh 163 the provincial bill that said you need to have a policy on gendered and sexual violence right according to our colleague dr andrew robinson he says we go way beyond what the province even asked for to the point where it becomes unmanageable and and you have instances of thought crime so so that's what we have like this like this yeah where you can claim that somebody is transphobic for simply showing a video can i can i read you the definition is this from the genderedness yes it is this is from our policy this is from our policy it is an action that reinforces gender inequalities resulting in physical sexual emotional economic or mental harm okay so what's the first part of that again yes yeah you get lost don't you it is an action that reinforces gender inequality okay so let's start with that an action that reinforces gender inequalities okay so the first thing we might point out is that no one knows what the hell that means right it's a box that you can put anything in so actions that's a problem because what it isn't obvious what constitutes an action or an inaction for that matter so i mean and and then that reinforces gender inequalities right so that that's that's the sort of sentence that only someone who's ideologically possessed to the maximum would create because you can't parse it gender inequalities like what does that mean exactly i don't i'd well anyway discrimination on sex or gender it doesn't talk about discrimination it talks about inequality right which is which is it would be different if the the phrasing had included the words discrimination okay and the next part is resulting in physical sexual emotional economic or mental harm right right so it says broadly construed both both clauses are as broadly construed as they can be and the reason for that is to allow maximum scope for interpretation which is exactly what happened with adrian joel well mental harm again mental harm and and as you pointed out mental harm is not backed up by the empirical evidence apart from uh post-traumatic stress syndrome like cognitive behavioral therapy would suggest that you actually can do mental good by exposing someone to objectionable ideas when they've in moderation in order to help them become less mentally fragile uh scott lillifeld out of emory university they're a very credible scholar well he is one of the master he's written several textbooks on psychopathology right he knows his stuff and uh just this year he put out a paper where he explored the the empirical evidence around microaggressions and he did all of the literature he and microaggressions are of course these innocuous actions that are deemed to be bigoted or or somehow sexist it's essentially well they are actually it's showing a video of from tvo is what a microaggression is and what he said was there is absolutely no evidence there's no evidence that microaggressions these objectionable ideas lead to mental harm he also said that the the concept itself is extraordinarily ill-defined which is also a big problem right that was the beginning of our conversation everything is ill-defined yeah while that if you make the box big enough you can put anything into it and what you see uh in this gender and violence policy that will is reading from they are they're actually go on to say that um this can include heterosexism yeah like you can be your your mental crime could be heterosexism yeah so what if i said something in class like the empirical evidence strongly suggests that raising children in a two-parent family leads to better outcomes which it does by the way like it like and seriously it does so then well so that's the question well arguably right arguably i've transgressed that policy now here's an interesting thing too so it has become clear to us that managing the new gendered and sexual violence policy has led to a confusion in its application right okay so this is back to the issue we described earlier is it a confu confusion in the application or in the policy now you just read the damn policy now it seems to me that there's no way you could apply that policy without confusion so it's not a confusion in its application it's it might also be that but it's a confusion in the policy written right into it okay so that's that's of crucial importance right in fact the interviews conducted by the fact finder confirmed that the rationale for invoking the gsvp did not exist it was misapplied and was a significant overreach yeah i'm not so sure about that because i know that these kind of policies emerge from the same sort of policy framework that characterizes the ontario human rights commission it's the same people doing it and the ontario human rights commission policies are written so that they can be broadly misapplied with no significant overreach so so okay so that's a problem to provide clarity of the policy's intent and to strengthen accountability we will engage in an administrative review with the goal of finding the appropriate structure to oversee and execute the gsvp and its accompanying procedures we will also undertake a full review of the policy and its procedures okay so good so there they're saying well it might have been misapplied but maybe the policy itself also has some problems i think this is really good news yeah and we had a a meeting with our colleague andrew andrew robinson today and we said well you know what do you think about this and he was pleased he said you know if some good has come out of this controversy this is one of those good things because definitely the gendered and sexual violence policy we have at laurier isn't workable it is prejudiced against certain people and and certain ideas and so it needs to be reworked because at this it is not an inclusive document it excludes and so it needs to be fixed so this is a good thing well and it's also a canary in the coal mine for similar policies at universities all across canada would say and maybe broader because one one thing you'd hope is that the lindsay shepard affair has produced enough negative repercussions to set people back on their heels a little bit and make them dig into these policies because i can't imagine that there's another university in canada who would enjoy partaking in a scandal of equivalent magnitude what i would hope and on that point jordan if someone is a student or if someone is a faculty member ask for the evidence that's what i've learned from this there are a lot of claims out there mental harm our campuses become unsafe uh the ideas that are contained in the the gendered and sexual violence policy i'm saying okay what is the evidence that proves this because this is this is what a university is supposed to be based on from the enlightenment to today we are supposed to be able to say here's the evidence for what why we do this and the further we get away from evidence and the more we embrace ideology we completely remove what the mission of a university is supposed to be well and the idea of evidence we remove the idea of evidence which means we remove the idea of knowledge because there's no distinction between knowledge and evidence right right so so if you are a student and you want to say what what can i do say what's the evidence of mental harm what's the evidence that that this that i'm transphobic right well well so partly what you're also saying there is a restatement of the old presumption of innocence idea it's like okay you're accusing me of something prove it i'm innocent buddy prove it where's your evidence yeah i know we do i know well part of that's tied up with this with the sexual harassment issue because increasingly and this is this is this is started i think most particularly in the united states we're moving towards a preponderance of evidence standard instead of an assumption of innocence standard that's especially true with these sexual harassment policies that are being derived by derived from institutions and administrators concerned with such things as the gendered and sexual violence policy and that that's related to the comment you made earlier about the lawyer who wasn't allowed to speak right because she had the temerity to offer someone who was accused of a crime a legal defense when apparently what we were supposed to do was just assume that the people who were making the accusations were right because they claimed that they were wronged so and and to to be i mean we always have to do our caveats don't we we say i know that we want to protect people who are victims like i each of us would agree but it can't be done at this sacr by sacrificing truth well you don't protect people from being victimized by undermining the rule of law quite the contrary because ultimately it comes back to bite you in the behind yes that's for sure and very very rapidly so okay in the interim we will ensure access to the existing support and complaints procedures by providing management and oversight through the office of dispute resolution and support okay i'm not sure what that means well it's actually very good news okay okay it means that uh the oversight of this is being removed from the diversity and equity office and put under the president's direct control so she doesn't think that they're responsible um and i'm very worried about diversity and equity office overreach this suggests that the president as you should be it suggests the president is also worried about the diversity and equity office that she has said we're not imagine why but but the fact that she has done this is really uh a strong sign that that she is aware that that office needs to be it needs to be right or at least that she's concerned enough about the reputation of the university so that she's not going to let the same mistake happen again which is a good thing like i don't care why she's doing it particularly but it's a good thing that it is being done okay so fine so that's that's that's good news the this has the added benefit of improved accountability as that office reports through to me as president yeah okay well you can see in those lines that she's not particularly happy about what's happened i wonder what sort of financial hit wilfred laurier took because you could imagine that while the donors are going to be a lot more conservative than the than the professors and the administrators and the students well we have uh we've been contacted by a group of alumni who have now organized they haven't yet released what would be their their press release but slowly they've been reaching out to other alumni and it's the laurier alumni for free expression and what they have said is their mandate is one to withhold all donations until laurier accepts the laurier statement for freedom of expression and uh i i haven't checked in it was just someone acting on her own uh she's a laureate alumni she has i guess contacts within the alumni association and she just she sent us a con some contact information and said here's what i'm doing wanted you to know i support your efforts and i'm i'm working on this i'll let you know when i'm ready to go and so that was really encouraging i have a colleague who does a survey of uh chief financial officers quarterly to gauge their optimism about the economy and started down at duke and he's doing it now for canada and he got responses from two uh he because he sent out an email just shortly after this broke he got responses from two alumni who just said you're you know why should i participate in this why should i help you this is not so i don't have any respect for you these are alumni of of wilford laurier university yes well and i can imagine too that enrollment is going to take a pretty vicious hit you know our business school is quite excellent uh we have a great car program we in the finance area attract a lot of very strong students and we compete for top-tier students in ontario the entry average is like 89 or something and and we really compete for the what we call the high flyers and they can choose any school right in the province right right yeah well it doesn't take much of a hit to a reputation to give people who have options the reason to go elsewhere right and then you lose the best people and that's when things really start to fall apart and what you might begin to see and i would say that this is something that the general public might look at watch what happens to the entrance averages in the arts and humanities that so so so we might not take a hit but let's see if the averages take a hit of course because suddenly and and currently the entrance average to get into our general arts program uh in communications let's just talk communications is mid 70s with an average of 60 in english so so i i don't i mean right which is basically a failing grade right because if you hand in an essay in high school you'll get 60. you really will right so it's it's basically the grading basically runs from 60 it goes zero you didn't hand it in 60 to 100 you handed it in and let's keep in mind that the tutorial that lindsay was running was a grammar tutorial the content of which looked a lot like grade six curriculum yeah yeah well that gets us into a discussion of the schools in general but we're already i'm thinking that maybe it's not a good idea to lower standards any anymore right right right okay okay so academic freedom and freedom of expression for those who have chosen to use this incident as an indictment of wilford laurier university or the plight of canadian universities in general i say your assertion is unreasonable and unfounded well we better stop this interview yeah yeah well you you can say that all you want i i would say instead that what happened at wilford laurier is a precise manifestation of exactly the sort of rot that both produced bill c-16 and that i was warning about last september and so i don't think the assertion is unreasonable and unfounded at all and here's one piece of data eighty percent of humanity's papers are not cited once so so so let's just translate that for the viewing public yes that means that they're producing scholarship that nobody looks at yes that that even their friends don't look at and and because okay so what a citation is is i read someone's paper and i find a good idea in it and then i use that idea to buttress an idea of my own or to or to or to riff off or to or to or to criticize even for that matter and then i cite them i say who they were and when they published it and then the paper the sign that there's a huge bureaucracy that keeps track of citations and it's a major indication of academic ability to be cited right it's it's the it's like it's academic payment to be cited okay so 80 of humanities papers don't get cited once it's absolute failure absolute failure as a game if someone wanted to play a game uh i would suggest that they go and they look at the publications of the professors in a particular area and see if the titles all sound the same and if they all say something about intersectionality colonialism and and these other various uh social justice words you might wonder am i going to get taught the same course again and again by every professor in this program because it seems to me that all of their research is is very similar uh and and how can that be when there's such a broad base of knowledge in the world that we can have such similarity between every publication which then goes on why why do i need to read my colleague stuff when it's exactly like my own which which we see so just just as a baseline jordan how many what would you say is is someone who's doing some good research what's how many citations would would they be receiving maybe uh collectively like what are we looking for thousands thousands yeah well a good like if you if you write a good paper then like a great papal paper will get you 100 citations right an outstanding overwhelmingly outstanding paper will get you a thousand citations um 10 isn't none you know it you register with 10 but zero is that's failure right it means your work had zero impact it it means your work wasn't worth the paper it was published on and this this brings us to a kind of interesting little issue with regards to the rot in the universities which which deborah mcclatchy says does not exist it's like here's how the game works is that we set up a little ideological garden right the ten of us play in and then we all publish in the same journal and we peer review each other's articles and we just publish them there's no critique or very little so the the barrier for publication is very very low when it should be very high like a good journal a good journal will reject 90 of the papers that are that are are submitted to it right so um rejection rates really matter so the question is why do the these papers get published since no one reads them and they have nothing to offer and the answer to that is very straightforward the journals are extremely expensive they're way more expensive than they should be so just to buy a single paper online for the ordinary person is like forty dollars which is more than a hardcover book that's just to download the pdf and so the journal itself the libraries are full of them are very expensive and the subscriptions are very expensive and so what happens is the professors pressure the university libraries to buy the journals and the library funds the publisher and so the publishers will publish anything routledge is a good example of that much to my chagrin because they published my first book but and they used to be a great publishing house but they'll publish damn near anything and the reason for that is that the libraries are forced to pay radically inflated prices for the publications that no one ever reads and so people write to publish in journals that libraries have to purchase at inflated prices to produce knowledge that no one will ever read and that's the little scandal that plagues the humanities i think it characterizes the humanities more than plagues them so the idea that there's no systemic rot let's say in the universities especially in the humanities is just not this is just far too general um there there is rot and it's not everywhere and this just reveals that i don't think she's that familiar with the situation she's in and and i've been listening to some of your work and and jonathan hate trying to understand what's been going on over the last two years in universities protected as i am in a business school and starting to realize that it's not everywhere it's it's the social justice perspective the stem fields are fine so far right yeah and the business schools although there there are moves into the business schools but they're still doing all right philosophy is not doing too badly like there are disciplines that have still remained untouched and mostly what's happened so far is that if the discipline has a strong economic or scientific footing it's proved much harder to corrupt an empirical yeah for my part so i play in the playground of sociology of religion but all my stuff well most of my stuff is quantitative so i actually i wasn't familiar with what was going i don't i go to conferences where everybody has to have strong empirical evidence i publish in journals that are international journals that are the scientific study of religion is what what we do so you know i'm familiar with foucault and and that stuff but that's not where i play so i wasn't really exposed to what's going on and you don't and you don't really think well they can't there's no reason to be that concerned about it until about three years ago well this is it and but then i'm trying to get into the headspace of some of my colleagues so i got out a textbook it was called race class and gender and it's it's an anthology that's used in cultural studies courses in women's studies courses and it's sort of the go-to text so i'm told and i'm reading it and i turned it and i i would turn to page 14 and i can tell you it's page 14 because i was so astounded by what i found and it said uh we the oh it says objectivity as found through rational thought is a western and masculine concept that we will challenge throughout this text yeah right yeah yeah and i said it's too bad it's too bad that you're shocked by that because so you want to go for irrational the pc types have been saying exactly that since the 1970s like that is exactly make no mistake about this this is why mcclatchy is wrong this isn't this isn't something they're secreting in this is the dead statement oh yeah it's it's that um the whole notion of logic and coherence and empirical data for that matter evidence is a very nature evidence let's question let's question the definition of evidence because the underlying idea remember the underlying idea here is that all hierarchies are predicated on power so if the reason that i put forward something as evidence isn't because it's evidence it's because it's evidence that i get to have that position of power and so if you're a post-modernist and you say well i'm going to question your evidence what you think you're saying is you're going to question my claim to that arbitrary power the whole idea that there's evidence outside of claims of arbitrary power the post-modernist dispensed with that in the 1970s that's derrida that's exactly what he said and all this time i've been trying to get samples of thousands so that i could say you know this is a little bit we can say something god just can generalize no no that just demonstrates how thoroughly entrenched you are in the reigning patriarchal ideology i guess and i was just hoping to get beyond anecdotal there's no beyond acting you there's no beyond anecdotal that's become a methodology that's auto experience it's called autoethnography there's a technical term for it and autoethnography is the publication of a journal of a of a private diary essentially in a hypothetically reputable reputable academic journal just i it's only because of in the last three or four years that these things have been happening and i said well where where do they get this how do they how do they find these thoughts yes well we don't we don't want to fall into the mistake of making of making the assumption that this hasn't been thought through no people are not just misunderstanding what evidence is that isn't what's happening at all when they say they want to question the definition of evidence that's exactly what they mean when they say we want to question the definition of evidence because the definition of evidence currently supports the scientific power structure in chemistry say and that's fundamentally dominated by let's say white men we can go after the definition of evidence itself and that's how we're going to bring it down and so the next people on the hit list are going to be the biologists they're already under attack from this paper that said that mathematics is whiteness yeah yeah yeah definitely i didn't know that mathematics could have a race yeah but the thing the thing is there's nothing illogical about these claims once you accept this central axioms the axioms are straightforward the world is a battleground of power hierarchies that's what it is there isn't anything else outside of that and each power hierarchy generates its own internal narrative including rules for what constitutes evidence that support and buttress the structure of that hierarchy and because the hierarchies exclude then it's in the best interests of the people who are excluded to invert the hierarchy and of course they also regard that as just even though that's part of the incoherence of the entire argument that's where they have to turn to marxism but make no mistake about it this isn't this isn't accidental it isn't people misunderstanding what constitutes evidence not at all no i've been listening to some of your lectures on this for the last year and thinking you sound a little deranged well i i might be a little deranged but i'm not deranged about this and and then this whole episode with lindsey shepherd just just proves it every dimension of this is about power uh the double speak the the changing of terminology from harm that exposing people the ideas could be violent uh the circling the sacred circling around the victim group well look at look at what happened at wilford laurier one of the things that was so bloody interesting that i thought was just fascinating was the unbelievably strategic attempt to transform shepard into the perpetrator and rambikana and pimlot into the victims especially ramacana as a professor of color right so so what what happens the reverse narrative was well lindsay shepard was using something like her white privilege and her white tears yeah to to harass a poor professor of color untenured professor of color yeah yeah and that and there was every attempt made on the part of the people who were going after shepherd to make that the narrative so well and they they started accusing everyone of of being transphobic just right out of the blocks within days of this we were all tired with that epithet uh immediately the labels have been just flying and without any regard to the intent of the person or even the content here here's something interesting about the transphobia issue too so i've had at least now a number of discussions with trans people by the way but also a number of letters from trans people over the last year about 40 of them as a matter of fact which is a lot of letters because there aren't that many trans people and every single one of them i think i got one letter from a trans person who wasn't happy with what i was doing but every single one of the other letters said the same thing we are sick and tired of being the poster child for these activists who claim to speak in our name because that's another thing that we should be very aware of is just because an activist comes out and says i'm a member of this minority group and therefore i speak for them it's like the first claim might be true but the second claim is not only unjustifiable it's actually i would say it's it's not racist exactly but it's it's groupist because it's predicated on the assumption that just because you happen to be the member of a class that you're a representative member of that class that class is so homogeneous that everyone in it is the same enough so that all the members within it can speak for all the other members right you used to call that racism when was it applied to racial categories absolutely but lindsay has been very good to point out and so of some of the media that there have been transgendered students at laurier who have spoken out in support of lindsay and we have to keep this in mind that this is not a transgendered issue no and neither was my comments on bill c-16 because i mean all i know that lindsay as she even said she is not transphobic she supports the rights of transgendered people this is she's unequivocal in that uh and and i think that that's just cover story for her true right-wing beliefs and there are transgendered students who have come to her support and at great personal cost to themselves like those are some brave people there right to break with that group that the hostility in that group is real in the activist end of the group you bet they were so quick uh to take over this uh issue as their own and claim that the the debate itself was violence yeah and that it was just cover for this transphobic climate uh that existed and it has nothing to do with transgendered people well you know it's it's funny too you saw the same thing with um renaldo walcott when he was on the director of the women's and diversities women's and gender studies at the at oisi at the university of toronto he claimed that he claimed like four times in that interview that the university of toronto was a white supremacist organization and i thought i i just don't know what to make of that like i i traveled down to my office about a week after that that that interview and i happened by some students who were standing outside waiting to write an exam so there's about 100 of them may and like this is particularly true at the university of toronto i would say that you you could look at that group of students for more than two seconds and think that that was a white supremacist organization i mean it's so ethnically diverse if you think that the university of toronto is a white supremacist organization then what that essentially means is that the most tolerant institution in the most tolerant city in the most tolerant province in the most tolerant country in the world is white supremacist so it's like well then well i don't well i don't i don't even know what you could especially when you say that as someone who's a full professor i don't know if he's a full professor who's a professor at that institute it's like where's your evidence for this that same professor was using racial slurs against lindsey oh yes the white tears thing they're also misogynistic right because it's white girl tears i could never ever do something like that to any student of any race i just don't understand how the people on the far left can rationalize that kind of behavior it it just it's well i think they can rationalize it with power but in terms of civility just in civility in recognizing the humanity in every person how can you resort to those kind of racial slights i just i don't i don't understand how you can say don't be racist and then you make racial comments terribly racist comments i just i don't under do people well no there's the idea there is straightforward you cannot utter racist comments against the dominant group that's the rule if there's a dominant group so once you identify them as oppressor you can say anything you want about them because by definition this is axiomatic in in the ideology you can't say anything racist about the oppressors that that's like a rule it's it's it's a rule of discourse so here's where i go with this for self-interest do you not realize when you say i don't care about your effing white fragility now that was not waldicott is that his did i get his name right walcott walcott he didn't say but others other pundits have said that and it's appeared on lindsay's twitter page where they've assaulted her there or at least that's too dramatic where they've made insulted her there insulted her there uh but my point would be even in your self-interest do you not realize that you are giving ammunition to the real white supremacists do you not realize that there are really dangerous people on the right who are looking for that exact kind of comment to rationalize their behavior well if you're trying to burn something down what makes you think you're going to be so careful about how it burns down and i really mean that look i mean i've i've have interactions with the right wing racial supremacists online they're not very happy with me and it's because i call them out for the same sort of behavior that the leftists manifest which is like i know i'm not impressed by your manifestation of group identity uber all let's say but i understand that the radical right wingers are playing the same game as the radical left winger so you might say well why would the radical left-wingers play into their hands i would say well if you're trying to if you're trying to burn the whole damn house down then why not inflame the people who are most likely to do it and you might think well no that that's not in anybody's best interest it's like it's the stated aim of this ideology right they want to invert the pi they want to invert the patriarchy essentially well what's the patriarchy well it's the white supremacist university of toronto so who cares if you're handing your opponent's weapons you're hoping that it will escalate that the people on the left as well as the people on the right escalated yeah that's the point it is so look at its power because uh this is the same thing that happened at evergreen state and the whole uh justification there was racism not uh i know when they went after brett weinstein who was about as i mean brett is he's a bernie he's a bernie supporter right exactly well they eat their own last week from mike paris who was the only colleague of his that publicly defended him and he emails me and he says i've been following the story cut closely and i just want to reach out and just you know commiserate with you and wonder is there anything we can do or talk about together and i thought no you're from evergreen state you know that's a nightmare and i thought we're not that bad yeah but but it's the same pattern repeated it's not about transgendered people and and their rights and that's just the victim sure no the transgender people as far as i'm concerned were were like sacrificial animals on the altar of bill c-16 the activists have a new group that's oppressed to wave the flag for to push forward their ideology and and as i said the consistent message i've got from transsexual people is i wish they'd just shut the hell up and quit putting us out in in the in the public eye in that guys because all they're doing is making our life more difficult it's like well it doesn't matter we're trying to tear down the patriarchy who cares if your life is being made more difficult it's like you have you don't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs we want to keep that in mind okay lori prepares our students and instructors for difficult discussions yeah probably not we support our teachers in navigating complex and divisive issues with care and confidence a more credible statement i mean especially given the outcome of this i just want to take you back to the last sentence of the previous paragraph laurier has a clear commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression well that's unequivocal perfect yes except that they won't adopt the the chicago principles so for example and something else to keep in mind that i think this is the first time anybody's talked about this when we were established in 1973 the wilfred laurier act says specifically that this university will be dedicated to research and teaching in the spirit of free inquiry and free expression that is the establishing act of our universe it's a charter charter statement and and that is what it says is our mission so in fact we are breaking the law by not standing behind maximum free expression and max free inquiry because it it is right in our very founding principle our very founding charter and the fact that we are so hesitant to to just embrace that and say we know that it's within this contest of ideas that the best facts come forward and knowledge is advanced why are we afraid of that why are we afraid what's made made every university a great university because we're doubtful about the integrity of the institution like this this critique that whose claim is that our institutions our patriarchal institutions are fundamentally corrupt and oppressive is sufficiently what would you say makes people sufficiently guilty so they're perfectly willing to circumvent their adherence to policies to charter policies like that i just think that at some point you have to say this is why you were created maybe we should get back to this and maybe i mean maybe there's a someone who is in the provincial parliament who's going to say i'm kind of upset that you've actually rejected the very founding charter i i would yeah well there's no one in the current in the current legislature that would do that certainly not in the current government not by any not by not no chance at all okay um we support our teachers in navigating complex and divisive issues with care and confidence we are leaders in ensuring our students faculty and staff have the necessary supports and tools to help those who have experienced marginalization and discrimination to engage fully okay so now you see the reversal right right away here is and this happens every time now that a modern university virtually every time that a modern university comes out with a statement in favor of free speech the next thing they do is is bring in this competing set of claims like the uh to help those who have experienced marginalization and discrimination to engage fully as soon as the word marginalization is in there then you know that that post-modern ethos has has what has has has manifested itself within the with on the confines of the document properly grounded academic debate at laurier occurs every day and encourages critical thinking and civil discourse yeah ideas that one finds objectionable should be challenged and debated the common good of society depends on the search for knowledge and its free expression hey fair enough free expression in academic university academic freedom at the university require accompanying responsibilities and accountabilities to be met by members of the university community well even that statement's not so bad i mean okay faculty members have responsibilities and they should be accountable i think i think that university should be a civil place i think that it should be civil yes right yes definitely and i think that there should be tolerance but tolerance is very different from an embrace an incomplete embrace of what diversity is now defined as or equity is defined tolerance means i disagree but i'm going to let you speak anyway and that really is the goal of a university uh so anyway yeah okay we we will continue to ensure that we are protected against protecting against and dealing with hate and intolerance these have those have no place in civil society see that i'm not so sure about that hate and intolerance have no place in civil society the problem with that is hate and intolerance is not defined here that is the problem and and the i keep hearing hate speech is not free speech and then when i ask well what do you mean by hate speech yes that is the problem well the other thing too is i'm actually allowed to hate you it's okay you might have done something that makes me hate you but that but there are limits on what i can do as a consequence of that hate and that is not so there's two problems right the first problem is this is a big one who defines hate that's a major problem and the second is well you don't limit hate you can't limit hate any more than you can limit anger or aggression but you can limit the manner in which people conduct themselves when they're motivated by those emotions and let's be clear there is really a clear definition of hate when you look at the criminal code under sections 318 and 319 it says you cannot advocate physical violence against an identifiable group i'm totally on board with that like let's let's be clear you can't say go and hurt these people i got that but that's really clear where's that definition well i just want to see well the issue there is something we discussed earlier is well then we can gerrymander the definition of hurt right well i'm talking physical advocating physical violence right physical i throw that physical in there because the criminal code also does i think it does it in such a way to say we can harm what is harm again harm is long-term infliction of damage that compromises your ability to function or your appearance right it's a pragmatic definition and it's grounded in common laws so we actually have a history of defining it so that's safe and let's not move away from these definitions because they're the thing that allow us to have conversations that are uncomfortable but needed okay good they uh these have no place in civil society let alone on a university campus they will not be tolerated at laurier yes well we see and we saw an example of that not being tolerated with the lindsay shepard case i remain concerned by the way faculty staff and students involved in aspects of this situation were targeted with such vitriol now now things are starting to get out of hand i remain concerned by the way faculty staff and students involved in aspects of this situation were targeted with what with such vitriol vitriol that's acid day so um is she do you think she's talking about the tweets that lindsay has received then is that faculty staff and students so not just lindsay but i just wonder is this does this apply to those who have been advocating free speech and and i i'm just i'm pointing it out there i mean all of us who have come out in favor of maximum free speech have been subjected to a lot of vitriol uh both emails and and it's always anonymous emails it's always from people who will not say who they are so but my point would be i and unless there was something that simply said i am threatening your life i just i delete it that's what i do because this is what happens i mean i wish people were civil but they're not there's no discussing hard issues without conflict like that's just not happening the question is how you limit the conflict and you can't limit it to none because then people can't have a conflict they can't solve a problem so what you do is you you limit it well as we've limited quite successfully in our country to date right we use the definitions of violence that have prevailed throughout the establishment of english common law and that works just fine my concern about that paragraph is is that she's cow towing let's say to concerns about the way that the people who actually let's say perpetrated this event were um dealt with by members of the general public so okay member members of the university community must be supported to work and study in an environment free of discrimination and harassment that's a tougher one and they have my commitment we will continue to make this a university priority yeah that's a sentence that worries me in an environment free of discrimination and harassment and they have my comm the problem is it's so difficult to distinguish that between real dispute you know i mean if you're if you're committed to a line of argumentation you've staked your whole your whole life on it say your whole academic career and you're engaged in a dispute with someone else who holds a contrary viewpoint there's going to be heat and sparks generated by that exchange there has to be because otherwise you're not talking about anything of any importance yeah if we all agree we don't need free speech i mean that's the standard that's the thing right but when i read this line uh members of the university community must be supported to work and study in an environment free of discrimination and harassment and and i just wonder how equally that idea has been applied at my university so far because certainly we know that our president has sent out letters of support to the lgbtq community which she was right to do if if they are feeling harassed i have no problem with that but at the same time there are official bodies at our university the women's center and other bodies that are under the auspices of the diversity and equity office if i'm correct that are petitioning to have uh there's a pro-life group on campus and and they are petitioning to have them defunded and shut down right so so did deborah mcclatchy send out a letter to all the people who are supporting lindsay shepard to say well we're really sorry about all the harassment this is all that you receive this is my point our president is aware that there's a group on campus that are marginalized these are the the pro-life students and i don't care what your position is pro-life or or pro-choice whatever your position is you bloody will have to admit that there's at least a debate there is a debate but and the point i would make is here truly is a marginalized group of students who have received no support from our university none and i know my president is aware because early on in this controversy i said and another matter is that these students are being attacked or i'm sorry i don't want to use hyperbolic language these students are being harassed and they are being harassed because they're they're being threatened with having their funding removed by official bodies of the university yeah well this the pro-life students are real canaries in the coal mine as far as i'm concerned regardless of what you think about what they're doing they represent diversity it's ideological diversity but we're not seeing any reception of these diverse students do they are they being included in this diversity and inclusion no they're being excluded purposely by actual offices of my university so i'm saying yeah that's standard practice i would say on campuses across the country it's just uneven it's uneven and i think that what what we need to see uh is just a policy that applies to all students and not just those who smell right or are orthodox to the social justice organizations or who are in the what would you call it acceptable class of victims that's right okay it bears repeating in the current context that laurier's support for our lesbian gay bi trans queer and two-spirited campus community and transgender people in particular is unwavering it isn't obvious that it bears repeating in the current context because the issue here fundamentally is that lindsay shepard was was subject to an administrative inquisition despite the fact that she was 100 percent innocent by the university's own standards and so it doesn't bear repeating in the current context that lori's support for our lbgt 2 lgbtqts campus community and pre and transgender people in particular is unwavering it actually isn't about them it's not about them at all it's about the fact that she got pilloried for doing something that she was actually right to do so i'm not happy with the fact that this paragraph was inserted into here i think it's an indication of exactly the kind of administrative weakness that allowed this sort of event to occur to begin with now this is the theme though right of the justice warriors is that this is the victim group they've repeated over and over that there's been violence harassment vitriol everybody's picking up on that the union president said there was daily occurrence the president's repeated she's issued a campus-wide email in response to the open letter saying uh we're going to make this a safe campus uh she's repeating it here so the validation of their narrative of victimization emerging from the lindsey shepherd event without evidence we we actually send an email to our faculty uh the union the union president and we said we're concerned about this daily uh violence on campus could you please supply us with evidence of this and she wrote back and she said uh what did she say well something as i'm telling everyone in the press no yeah because it would inflate didn't she say because it would inflame the it would explain the situation even further yes something like that so how how in the world providing evidence that something like that we're members of the union we are paying our fees just like everyone else and we just we wanted substantially some substantiation to these claims that there was violence as a daily occurrence the whole premise is that there's injury happening and that's why we can't speak about these things so if they can establish the violence then maybe we're sympathetic to the argument that the speech shouldn't occur but but that's susceptible to bogus claims if there's no substantiation you can't build policy that way yeah not without getting into the kind of trouble that's already emerged in light of recent events we have added measures to improve campus safety well it is by no see that that that actually seems to me to be the one sentence in this article so far that's actually a mistake because by going forward with um what practices that are going to improve campus safety then the president is validating the claims of the people who claim that this occurrence produced an unsafe environment on the campus it's like so i i think that that was weak we will ensure that all students staff and faculty know exactly what our commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression means in the classroom that would be good to us in that end we have established the task force on freedom of expression to take input from our community which we should point out which won't include lindsay shepard right because she asked to be part of that task force in fact i believe that they offered it to her i'm not exactly sure about she was some some grad students nominated her and it was prior to the revelation being made that it would be the position would be filled by the president of the graduate students association who and i think this was poor form just before that announcement was made the president of the graduate students association put out a statement where i'm not sure if it's a he or a she or i'm not sure of the the uh gender pronoun used but um that they were standing 100 percent behind the trans and lgbtq yeah and that the fact that they were going to sit on the on the task force would indicate that all students would be represented properly but it's just they they showed this incredible uh bias and and then they said and we're going to be sitting on this i just don't i don't know that that does a service to all the grad students who they represent all right look at best practices beyond laurier hey they could look at chicago that'd be good and develop a clear tangible and you never know maybe they will you never know and develop a clear tangible set of practical implementable guidelines that will bring clarity to this issue for our own classrooms and will have the potential to serve as best practices for others well that's exactly what you guys are recommending that is my commitment to you well and it's not like the university of chicago is a lightweight and it's not just the university of chicago over 30 universities many of them ivy league have adopted right the chicago statements to great effect right right and so so this is this is something that has worked yeah that is working yeah it's clearly something that should happen in canada it would be a wonderful thing it would be a wonderful thing it would be it would be so wonderful so it's not like we're trying to institute this policy that hasn't worked and that hasn't been been accepted by really prominent universities in the u.s and it doesn't it doesn't involve u.s uh law or legalese it is simply a statement of philosophy about what we want and which is maximum free expression and free inquiry within the bounds of the law and i just think this task force is going to be a disaster because the justice uh advocates aren't interested in free speech they they want to forbid certain forms of speech and it's just a question of which topics and who's going to control the world well there might be enough public scrutin like i don't think interest in wilford laurie i'm sure that the president would be real happy if this went away but i think the probability that it's going to go away is very low because i think wilford laurie is now being watched and being watched by very many people to see what the genuine outcome of this will be and i think that even if it was ignored by the mainstream media which it might be it's not going to be ignored by people on youtube and the people who've been who've been generating content associated with lindsay shepard and the the magnitude of that content online is absolutely overwhelming i don't know if the wilford laurier administrators know because you know people older than 40 usually don't know much about online media but the amount of commentary this has been generated this is generated on youtube is absolutely beyond belief like it was a major scandal back to the task force though and will you've said this in the past the freedom of expression proponents we already are the compromised position because we are saying we want you to be able to articulate whatever position you have we want you to be able like we are the compromised position we're not saying we want to shut down anybody whatever your position is let's hear it that's that that is where we are so we're already in that compromised position within the boundaries of the law within the boundary of the law sections of the uh in in out of respect for the university and its operations of course so so we're already saying we want all these sides to be able to be heard i don't understand it's already a pro diversity of opinions it is it is and and so what i have to look at is many of the colleagues that i have who are on the left and are hoping for restriction of free expression are really to a certain extent linguistic imperialists that's exactly why i objected to bill c-16 i said that i wasn't going to let the linguistic imperialists take control over my voice the fact that it happened to be about transgender pronouns was well that was just how that problem manifested itself at that period of time but that that what did you call them linguistic imperialist that's exactly right and and these the the these ideal ideologues on the radical left who are so good at neologisms are unbelievably good at grasping the linguistic territory i mean the the propagation of words like cisgendered is a perfect example of that so yeah it's just i don't understand how they can be so against colonialism and imperialism and then want to do that in in the sphere of language put in an authoritarian structure which can only be abused well that's that's part of the weird see there's this weird marriage between post-modernism and marxism right which makes no sense because you actually can't be a postmodernist and i guess you can be a critical thinker and a marxist but you cannot be a postmodernist at a marxist at the same time because the post-modernists hypothetically are critical of grand narratives right they don't believe that they that they have any universal validity of course the problem with that is that without a grand narrative you can't act but they sneak the marxism in through the back door and then the justification i think is for these author authoritarian impositions is that well it doesn't matter as long as the right people are being hurt by them and the right people would be the people who are in positions of power now who who have no justification for being in those positions of power right because they don't stable solution but you're making the assumption that what's being sought after is a stable solution and i think that's i think that's a dangerous assumption because i think that the university activists mean exactly what they say when they say that we should be flipping over the patriarchy they've put no counter proposal forward throughout this right it's like they don't have a solution uh they're not even talking about a list of forbidden topics and who's to adjudicate it and what the appeals process is that's always that's always done post talk that way you can keep the level of fear of the high you can keep adding to the list yes definitely that because it's way better it's way better if you it's way better if you want to exercise power over people to never let them be sure which policies they are violating and i think that what happened to lindsay shepard is an excellent example of that so it's a it's a canonical example of that it's it's the orwellian idea freedom is the ability to say two plus two equals four and they want to keep avoiding the ability to say two plus two is four by creating new answers and and moving on i see just went through this whole process and came up with a statement on free expression and goes on for paragraphs and paragraphs and then the last nearly the last sentence is freedom of expression does not trump all other rights in the university community freedom of expression can only thrive constructively when accompanied by other rights including the equality rights of equity diversity and inclusion there you go there you go that's right and so now you no longer have free expressions man that's the snake in the garden right there reading that yeah so there's there's this but how i mean those those are so complicated there's individual rates and group rates there's positive rights and negative rates and they're all in this salad with no guidance as to how you're going to trade them off uh against each other it's it's like you say just ad hoc uh as we go forward we'll we'll well it's so funny to produce an entire document talking about freedom of expression and then to put a sentence like that in is a codicil it's and by the way also this it's like wait a second it's not also this it's that little ad mixture of poison uh destroys the integrity of the entire argument and and and to and to put all those words in there diversity okay what the hell do you mean by that exactly inclusivity that's a word that really uh that's one i really have a trouble with because it's very difficult to understand even what that means and equity equity is equality of outcome and so that's an impossible goal to begin with because it multiplies in difficulty as you add number of measurement dimensions right so and that's the intersectionality problem so to speak so all right well with the task force the interesting thing is will didn't want to sit on it because having looked at what had happened i i suppose it was the experience at ubc that well i just saw big arguments happening with no no possibility of a constructive outcome and so but i was more hopeful and i understand will's position completely right yes well it's easy as a faculty member to get pulled into interminable administrative duties that have no positive outcome whatsoever in fact it's pretty much par for the course well he makes the i mean your most compelling argument well two one look what happened at ubc and two we're already the compromised position you mean what what more can you want and and i get that but i i have let my name stand for nomination uh we'll see this week i guess whether or not i i'll i don't know if i'll get voted well one of the things we should find out and and publicize is whether any people who have a strong free speech orientation will end up on that task force yeah i mean that that's a that's of absolutely critical importance well they'll certainly get their work done quickly if no one from the free speech side is on it because they'll just say right but maybe they'll have to create a list of their own about what can't be talked about right who knows where that will go one thing that strikes me though is just the disregard for history people who are marginalized or would be considered in the marginalized group if we look at how did they get the rights that they have today right how did that happen it was because of free expression right actually the easy case to make for free speech is left-wing it's like powerful people don't need their free speech protected they're powerful they're rich they can say whatever the hell they want it's people who are precisely marginalized and oppressed who need all the protection of the law of course they want to weight it against saying yes we want to have people without power to have the freedom of expression but let's make this a quicker process by making sure those that have power can't speak whoever those who have power is right well that's that's which issue not just well you know you could say well wouldn't it be wonderful if those who had unfair power weren't allowed to speak it's like well maybe it would be wonderful but who the hell is going to decide who has power and who has unfair power like the devil's in the details there so the only fair application of this principle is to let everybody have equal opportunity right not equal outcome by the way well that's the free market solution right because you can't determine these by central fiat because it's technically impossible which is actually something post-modernists should know because that's actually one of the logical consequences of their philosophy right things are too complicated to decide by fiat in some sense but all right is there anything else that you guys want to say that that that you've observed as a consequence of this lindsay shepard affair or that or that you're hopeful about or pessimistic about what what what's the how do we solve this just the way we're solving it this is the way to solve it is to is to have i think this is a textbook case of the utility of free speech shepard was able to make her case publicly there's been a huge debate about it there's been some moves made on the part of the university that look positive we've got ample opportunity everyone has ample opportunity to have their voice heard you know this video we're making tonight will probably be watched by 150 000 people it's like and we had a perfectly reasonable discussion you know i think we gave credit where credit was due with regards to this document and and are jointly hopeful that something positive will come of it and made some pointed critiques about about what it does contain and what it doesn't but we don't want to underestimate the utility of doing these things it's useful and i think the fact that you guys have this little cabel of people at wilford laurier who are willing to speak i was shocked when when you wrote that op-ed and when the toronto star published it i mean nothing like that from an academic happened in relationship to me last year on bill c-16 we've seen such uniformity of outcry about this from all the newspapers globe star sun which really just shows you the disconnect between what is happening in the academy and what is right it's a disconnect of staggering magnitude people outside the academy say how can you believe that yeah what they've been saying is really this happened this actually happened that's the universal response and and you know the response on the campuses is well yeah it happened and we were right i have a solution i have a solution i mean it's not a solution but it's i don't know i call it an inoculant actually so yes let's get the laurier statement for freedom expression at our university and similar statements at all universities why the federal government is not tying funding to this i know that the conservatives the suggestion that i made to the conservatives well this is this is what needs to happen but in addition to that i think that young people and and parents of young people need to look at what's happening and they need to start educating their their kids at home and they need to start and i've written several op-eds where i've said people ask me what is the solution i say start watching the videos of jordan peterson start watching the videos uh there's a jonathan height jonathan hype you bet look into the heterodox academy they know what they're doing who who definitely are scholars of repute the they they are moderate in the like incredibly civil uh there are also some people outside of academia there's a um a fantastic youtuber uh my name is josephine she's a canadian political science student who is at u of t moderate really well-spoken articulating classical liberal ideas my name is josephine okay yeah okay i'll have to remember so another she's actually been the reason that i know she knows you she was at one of your rallies i saw it in a video there she is in the background um there another uh young lady uh sorry woman who is her name is roaming millennial yeah i know roaming millennials i've been on her show oh fantastic yeah yeah yeah you betcha you bet yeah and she's a tough cookie that girl you bet and i would say start watching these people yeah well the young people are watching them in droves you know she has a big following roaming millennials and i'm grateful for that because in fact when these students go into the university classroom if they choose to go into the arts or the humanities they're going to go in with knowledge where they can i realize it's tough to challenge a professor but start a facebook group and say hey did you know that there are other ideas too do you know that there's an opposite side to this debate well we should all we could also encourage parents who might be listening or students thinking about going to university who might be listening to this is that check to see where the university stands on free speech and if they dampen down their support for free speech and for your inquiry with statements about diversity inclusivity and equity then go somewhere else it's a worry another uh thing and this is just beginning in canada uh there we have a society for academic freedom and scholarship that professors can join if if sorry if a professor has joined the society for academic freedom and scholarship you can be pretty sure they are going to be wanting to give you both sides of the story so that's not a bad check either yeah where do they have to do their research though the students to due diligence well that's good it'll educate them right i mean lindsay shepard definitely got educated over the last two months yeah i mean yeah no kidding no kidding she's got her phd thesis and communication pretty well demonstrated there's an auto ethnography for you yeah i caused an international scandal by just revealing what had actually happened yeah all right good my pleasure thank you guys for coming and also for it's not common for faculty members well to talk to me first of all like this certainly not on record and it's certainly not common for them to be writing and speaking openly about such issues so i don't know what the hell got into you guys it's really good that's happening at wilford laurier too we're we realize we're finished now by being associated with you yeah yeah yeah i i said uh earlier good of you to offer yourself on the sacrificial altar i you've got to look your kids in the eye eventually yeah and uh how are you going to say that you need to stand up for truth if you actually don't stand up for truth that is a problem yeah yeah all right guys good thanks a lot

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,127,964

Keywords: alternative media, censorship, discrimination, diversity, equality, equity, existentialism, facebook, feminism, free speech, freedom, google memo, inclusiveness, inclusivity, jordan b peterson, lecture, left wing, misogyny, pc, personality, philosophy, polarization, political correctness, politics, psychology, right wing, sjw, social justice, social justice warrior, twitter, unconscious bias, viral, youtube, Lindsay Shepherd, Wilfred Laurier University

Id: YWVmDSMl30s

Length: 124min 38sec (7478 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2017