Laurier incident has students leery of talking more freely
The use of anonymity — in other words, cowardice — was one of the worst aspects of Wilfrid Laurier University’s ritual humiliation of a bright and thoughtful teaching assistant for the crime of WrongTeach.
There’s a lot of it about now. In a gig economy, anonymity is the nastiest weapon consumers have against the semiemployed who serve them. You can snitch on your Uber driver, film your flight attendant, catch another driver on your dash cam and shame him on Twitter. Stores will send you a form to rate a salesperson, even offering you her name, so you can get them fired and then stalk them, I guess.
I never complain to head office or supervisors — it’s the ultimate misuse of power — because I could wreck that person’s fragile hold on a contract job. A thought hovers: that could be me one day.
I had always thought that university classes operated in a special atmosphere of mutual respect between professors and students. At least mine did. All could speak freely. If you had a problem, you consulted your prof. You did not snitch or write mean anonymous class evaluations. And you didn’t record the prof’s words for evidence, a particular form of unkindness.
Distrust kills the academic atmosphere; it damages the classroom, the only truly safe space you’ll ever know in your life. Your prof isn’t selling, she’s teaching. You aren’t consuming, you’re learning.
So an unknown first-year student complained to Laurier about communications studies teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd, though to whom and in what manner we don’t know. Then her supervisor joined an “informal” panel, including the alarmingly titled manager of gendered violence and support, to tell her that that they’d been secretly informed of her creating a “toxic” environment.
She had shown her class A TV clip of a TVOntario debate that included a rather trollish Prof. Jordan Peterson who doesn’t like efforts to alter pronouns. She was put on trial, Handmaid’s Tale style.
Shepherd was devastated to be told about the secret complaint. “How many? Who? How many? One?” she asked. “I have no concept of how many people complained, what their complaint was, you haven’t shown me the complaint.”
She was in tears. For all the alleged informality of the meeting, no one sympathized, softened their alarmist tone, apologized or even made her a cup of tea. “I understand you’re upset but also confidentiality matters,” her supervisor said.
“The number of people is confidential?” Shepherd asked. “Yes,” he answered. It went on. Shepherd welled up again. “And I’m sorry I’m crying. I’m stressed out because this to me is wrong, so wrong.” She apologized. For crying. Wisely, Shepherd had secretly taped whatever the meeting might turn out to be, a session, an intervention or a swarming, or all three. It sounded very Cultural Revolution to me, but perhaps this is how things are handled by hamfisted Laurier.
The University of Toronto employs the man in the clip, Peterson, who pokes people with sticks on Patreon for the most absurd reasons. But U of T is serious about academic freedom, and they’re thoughtful too.
Uof T president Meric Gertler radiates calm. Possibly he has taken one of those courses on how to talk down excitable men brandishing table legs or staplers or other things the police find so unaccountably terrifying that they shoot to kill.
Anyway, someone had a chat with Peterson. He eventually agreed that it wouldn’t be good for his followers to go to his website to anonymously dox his colleagues teaching gender studies and the humanities. Good. Because someone’s going to lose an eye.
Laurier apologized to Shepherd but as she herself pointed out, only because the tape went public. Her supervisor apologized (in an alarmingly cloudily written letter) for not defending her, but the other two did not.
So Laurier is less a university than a corner on The Wire. A first-year with a scarf over his face shivs a young TA, another masked gang gathers to do the same at U of T and a posse beats down Shepherd who then produces a secret recording.
There was widespread anger, an- other of those civil brawls bred of an airy word, as Shakespeare so aptly put it, he’s good that way. But thanks to the posse, people grow leery of speaking too freely, of leaving the house for fear of being filmed and possibly publicly humiliated, of trusting others.
We’re not paranoid. We are indeed being taped, tracked, timed, watched and recorded. I hesitate to apply to teach a university semester course on column-writing, lest it be recorded and used against me. I would have to record the class to protect myself from noncontextual quoting.
What with all the taping, quoting and snitching, no student will dare to speak freely which is the only way you can learn to write freely. And I would sit at the front of the class muttering apologetic instructions and looking furtive, fiddling with my phone. Sad!
The evidence of our wrongdoing already exists. The only question is when it will be collated and used against us in informal courts not yet devised. Keep it out of the classrooms. What silent places they will become. hmallick@thestar.ca