BLATCHFORD ON CAMPUS JUSTICE.

Few on campus determine what thoughts are good

There was something genuinely alarming about the matter heard Wednesday at the Ontario Superior Court before Judge Paul Perell.

It wasn’t the motion, whereby a lawyer for three student groups denied official recognition as approved clubs at three Ontario college campuses was seeking an order deeming the Byzantine school processes unfair and granting the clubs status.

It wasn’t that it was a surprise that the denied clubs seeking redress are a men’s rights group (at Ryerson University) and two pro-life groups (at University of Toronto Mississauga and at Durham College/University of Ontario Institute of Technology).

Anyone remotely attuned to the mood on university campuses knows that while faculty associations, administrations and student organizations may pay lip service to the notion of freedoms of speech and expression, they rarely mean it.

Remember Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto psychologist who was warned by the university that his dissing of the new gender pronouns was dangerous (particularly to Peterson), wrong and possibly illegal.

Remember Lindsay Shepherd, the Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant and student who was late last year brought in for a brainwashing by two of her superiors and a gender violence bureaucrat for having dared show a class an excerpt of a televised debate, starring Peterson, about those very pronouns.

Remember how few of Peterson’s fellow professors, and Shepherd’s contemporaries or teachers, spoke up in their respective defence, and how very many signed petitions condemning them.

None of that is scary. None of it is news. What it is, alas, is the status quo.

What was unsettling were the references, made by lawyer Marty Moore, who represents the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which has taken on the fight for the student groups, to the reasons given, either in meetings, email, affidavits or testimony in examination for discovery, by the student union reps.

A review of some of the documents in the case shows just how utterly ingrained are the hardened social justice views.

All three of the schools and the student unions, of course, have either bylaws or policies committing them to the fight for anti-oppression, decolonization, feminism and positive or safe spaces.

None of that is even up for discussion any longer; these are the givens.

At Durham/UOIT, for instance, one of the nowdefunct student association’s statements of principle read as follows: “Its goal is to work toward building an environment free of systemic societal oppression and decolonization and to do all other things that are incidental or conducive to these purposes.”

(The association was later legally dissolved by court order, and is now two associations, one per school. The three court cases, joined now as one, date back to the 201516 school year.)

But last March, when the then newish student association president Jesse Cullen was being cross-examined, Moore asked if there was “only one correct interpretation of systemic societal oppression.”

“Yes,” said Cullen. “Who determines what is the correct impression?” Moore asked.

And Cullen replied, “Scholars, academics, marginalized groups who experience oppression.”

A criminology student and seasoned activist, Cullen is so correct it almost hurts to read what he says. He sounds as well-schooled as any North Korean raised in the cult of the Kim despots.

Asked how anti-oppression might be put into practice, he said, “… in particular, when we hire folks who, as an example, work at Outreach Services, right, who operate our women’s centre, food bank, sexual health resource centre, our LGBTQ centre, we look for folks who have come from a background … (and who) have the background and educational, you know, requirements to carry out our anti-oppression mandate. (They) are sought to fulfil those roles within our organization to ensure that we’re, you know, abiding by our mandate.”

In fact, Cullen said, officially recognized clubs have to “go through an anti-oppression workshop as part of the ratification process.”

The group at Durham/ UOIT that was denied official status was Speak for the Weak, a pro-life group.

The student association, Cullen said, had several concerns with the group: Its members planned to attend the pro-life March for Life, and the march organizer was Campaign Life.

Cullen said: “So I think if you refer to ‘from fertilization to natural death’ (as Campaign Life did in some of its material), in terms of oppression, we know that women have been historically an oppressed group globally not just in Canadian society, and access to safe and legal abortions is a fundamental, you know, human right that women should have access to.”

Thus, any restriction of that right, he said, “would be a form of oppression” and would even conflict with the association’s decolonization mandate. “Women’s bodies,” as Cullen said, “have most definitively been colonized, and abortion could be interpreted as the colonization of a women’s body through state intervention, through the criminalization of that abortion.”

As Cullen later told Moore, it wasn’t as if the student association had invented anti-oppression out of whole cloth.

Why, he was about “eight years old,” he said, when the student association incorporated and “looked to the body of literature” and then adopted the anti-oppression mandate.

Exactly.

Cullen was elected in an election where seven per cent of students turned out to vote, down from the usual 10 per cent. There’s the lesson.

Judge Perell reserved his decision.