Laurier letter supports profs caught up in controversy
Supervising professor has ‘academic freedom’ to decide what material is presented
Twenty faculty members at Wilfrid Laurier University signed an open letter in support of two colleagues who criticized teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd for showing a video clip that featured a controversial figure in her tutorial.
The letter, published Monday on an academic listserv for the Canadian Communication Association, underscored the supervising professor’s academic freedom to decide what material is presented to supplement lectures.
“While the ‘free speech’ of a single individual has dominated discussion surrounding this situation, ‘academic freedom’ is also a decisive term in this context,” the letter said.
“We reject efforts of those who have seized this episode as a strategic opportunity to disparage disciplines and scholars with commitments to improving social and economic equality within universities and in society at large.”
Communications studies department professor Nathan Rambukkana, Shepherd’s supervisor; Herbert Pimlott, co-ordinator for the masters program that Shepherd is enrolled in; and Adria Joel, acting manager for Gendered Violence Prevention and Support, were secretly recorded by the 23-year-old during a subsequent meeting.
Shepherd was criticized by the three staff members for failing to condemn the views of University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has refused to use gender-neutral pronouns. She aired a clip of a TVO debate featuring the professor as part of a communications tutorial to “contextualize” the complexities of grammar, she said in the clip.
“The thing is, can you shield people from those ideas? Am I supposed to comfort them and make sure they are insulated away from this? . . . To me that is so against what a university is about,” Shepherd can be heard saying in the recording, adding she disagreed with Peterson.
In the open letter, faculty and staff from the communications studies department responded to the claim
“Charges that our program shelters students from real-world issues or fosters classrooms inhospitable to discussing contentious issues from different vantage points seem to us simply preposterous,” the letter said.