Sorry not sorry
So it appears Laurier is feeling a little embarrassed, or at least a little uncomfortable. It’s apologized to Lindsay Shepherd.
The president of Wilfrid Laurier University said the school is proceeding with a third-party investigation into the dispute with graduate student Lindsay Shepherd, but said recently revealed audio recordings of her interactions with her immediate superiors made it clear an apology was in order.
Shepherd said she discreetly recorded a meeting with three Laurier faculty and staff members in which she was roundly criticized for failing to condemn the views of polarizing University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has refused to use gender-neutral pronouns. She had aired a clip of a debate featuring the professor as part of a communications tutorial.
Three people, to shame and berate one grad student.
“The conversation I heard does not reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires,” the university’s president, Deborah MacLatchy, said in a statement Tuesday. “I am sorry it occurred in the way that it did and I regret the impact it had on Lindsay Shepherd.”
Shepherd said she accepted and welcomed the apology, but felt it rang hollow coming on the heels of intensive media attention around her case.
…
The saga began earlier this month when Shepherd led two tutorial groups of students taking a first-year communications course.
As part of a lesson on the complexities of grammar, Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can impact the society in which its spoken in ways people might not anticipate.
To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had likely been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.
And her use of the clip with Peterson was part of that illustration; attribution not use.
Rambukkana also apologized in an open letter to Shepherd…sort of apologized. Passive-aggressively half apologized and half said he was still right.
“While I still think that such material needs to be handled carefully, especially so as to not infringe on the rights of any of our students or make them feel unwelcome in the learning environment, I believe you are right that making a space for controversial or oppositional views is important, and even essential to a university,” he wrote in the letter.
“The trick is how to properly contextualize such material.”
Rambukkana also apologized for meeting with Shepherd in the company of two other colleagues, responding to criticism that such a set-up demonstrated a power imbalance.
Ya think? Bully.
If an apology starts with “while”, I don’t think we have to read any farther.
#1: Concise analysis of language structure!
(I react the same way to “Whereas …”) :)
“Look…”
Rambukkana also apologized for meeting with Shepherd in the company of two other colleagues, responding to criticism that such a set-up demonstrated a power imbalance.
His positionality was problematic.
There seems to be a wide spread belief that admitting the existence of a contrary view on anything is equivalent to professing that view. It may be that this is a calculated position in order to suppress dissenting views. Either way to see such behaviour in Universities is troubling.
Ian, troubling even more that the course was in communications.
“There seems to be a wide spread belief that admitting the existence of a contrary view on anything is equivalent to professing that view.”
I would say that in the case of presenting “contrary views” on the topics of biological evolution, anthropogenic climate change, the Holocaust, the sphericity of the Earth and its orbiting around the sun, and the Apollo moon landings, one is close to doing that. “Teach the controversy” is the battle cry of crackpots, conspiracy theorists and cranks who want equal time for their discredited beliefs. Giving such views equal time (or any time) gives them more legitimacy and publicity than they deserve. I would say that these subjects are more “settled” than are the current sex/gender arguments. The bullying trans-activists who are pushing the most on this issue seem to be of the view that things ARE settled (or should be) and that hinting at shades of opinion is tantamount to Holocaust denial or some such. After all, there was a Godwin in the faculty dressing down of the graduate student.
Author – ha!
YNnB – But not if you’re presenting the contrary views in the sense of simply presenting them. We do certainly need to know what the views of the Nazis were, for instance. Presenting is one thing and debating is another.
Yes, of course; context is everything. If the examples I used were raised in a classroom or news story as a legitimate point of view, that would be different than saying “there are people out there who believe X, ” as a description of the belief without saying “here’s an alternative explanation of this phenomenon.”
That’s why I said ‘admitting the existence of”. The farrago here and sadly in many other academic institutions doesn’t even allow the presentation of a contrary view to dispute it. It is dogma not debate.
Dogma coupled with “I CAN’T SEE YOU.”