Laurier’s toxic stance flouts basic freedoms

When, we wonder, will Wilfrid Laurier University start pulling down campus statues of its own namesake?

Because surely his political views are toxic by the standards of the institution’s current administrators.

In a particularly odious example of political correctness run amok, the university named after Canada’s seventh prime minister censured a grad student encouraging debate about a brief segment from a TV Ontario public affairs program.

Lindsay Shepherd, a first-year communications studies teaching assistant, engaged students in a debate on gender and language with a three-minute clip from The Agenda. It featured an exchange between University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson and sexual diversity studies instructor Nicholas Matte.

The clip included Peterson’s criticism of U of T administration as authoritarian for insisting instructors refer to students by the gender pronoun of their choice.

Shepherd’s class then discussed the issue. “It was a friendly debate,” she told The Waterloo Record. “I thought it went really well.”

While the students may have liked it, the administration did not. Shepherd was hauled into a meeting with two professors and a diversity officer and shamed for playing the video because she presented Peterson’s position “neutrally.”

“This is like neutrally playing a speech by Hitler,” professor Nathan Rambukkana reportedly told Shepherd.

Rambukkana then insisted he’d have to look over Shepherd’s lesson plans, sit in on her classes and further discuss the issue with colleagues. Shepherd, who recorded the meeting, now fears losing her teaching post, which helps pay her tuition.

This is hypocritical, bullying behaviour on the part of taxpayer-supported WLU.

As Mark Bonokoski writes in his column, perhaps it’s Rambukkana who should be censored for violating the basic tenets of education in a free society, to say nothing of his offensive invocation of Hitler.

Laurier — who embraced liberty, compromise and free expression — would no doubt be aghast at such censoring of expression.

He did, after all, argue a day would come when just ideas, “planted in the soil, will germinate and bear fruit” regardless of the “prejudices and fear” of others.

Higher education is where students are taught how to think, not taught what to think.

Wilfrid Laurier University owes all freedom-loving Canadians an explanation.