Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on The meeting should never have happened at all.

I appreciate the university addressing the problem as an employment issue:

We hired an external fact-finder with expertise in human resources issues. I have received the report and we are taking decisive action to ensure these events will not be repeated.

The employment issue gave a concrete framework for procedure (including legality). That was different than arguing for freedom of expression in the abstract (which was the popular argument, and maybe valid, but would lead to a different chain of logic, and probably conclude in terms of ideologies).

I see two remaining issues.

One issue is the so-called apology that Shepherd’s supervisor Prof. Rambukkana … Read the rest

The presidents (two, apparently) of the Laurier Student Union have issued A Statement. It is exactly what you’d expect – loaded with the dreariest bureaucratic jargon imaginable. It’s as if they’re afraid even to talk in a human way, let alone saying anything that might trouble The Orthodoxy.

To undergraduate and graduate students of Wilfrid Laurier University,

Laurier has been the center of a contentious debate pertaining to academic freedom and freedom of expression.

See what I mean? “Pertaining to” ffs – what’s wrong with “about” or “on”?

Now that the University has publicized the composition of the Task Force on Freedom of Expression, the student body has an opportunity to directly contribute to this important discussion. As Presidents

Andrew Robinson, associate professor of Human Rights and Human Diversity at Wilfrid Laurier University, thinks their policy on [what they call] gendered violence needs urgent repair.

The public’s reaction to the treatment of a Wilfrid Laurier University grad student at the hands of two professors and a rep from the university’s Diversity and Equity Office (DEO) has been one of horror and outrage. The resounding opinion was that student, Lindsay Shepherd, was completely in the right when she offered both sides of a debate involving the use of non-gender pronouns.

And while the public has agreed Shepherd was right, she wasn’t. At least not according to a disturbing regulatory policy enforced by my university. In fact, in the meeting

A student group at Laurier University, Lspirg Waterloo, has posted an essay explaining its positionality. LSPIRG stands for Laurier Students’ Public Interest Research Group; it identifies as a social justice group.

Dear Laurier Community,

Due to recent events on the Laurier Waterloo campus and the heightened media coverage, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out against the level of transphobia that has been emerging on campus and in on-line forms.

We have spent a lot of time over the last while speaking about “freedom of speech”. We have, however, not spent much time questioning how the increase of transphobic rhetoric on campus has been impacting students and the larger community. If there is one thing we

Behold Nathan Rambukkana’s open letter to Lindsay Shepherd:

Dear Lindsay,

I wanted to write to apologize to you for how the meeting we had proceeded. While I was not able to do so earlier due to confidentiality concerns, including your privacy as a grad student, now that the audio of the meeting is public I can say more. While I still cannot discuss the student concerns raised about the tutorial, everything that has happened since the meeting has given me occasion to rethink not only my approach to discussing the concerns that day, but many of the things I said in our meeting as well.

First, I wanted to say that when I was made aware of the concerns,