Deconstruction: The Lindsay Shepherd Affair
Of professors from Wilford Laurier to talk about the Lindsay Shepard scandal and what happened with Professor Rambucana and Pimlot and Administrator Adria Joel. Adria, right? Adria Joel, who I think is the unsung—what would you call it? The unsung villain in this entire process because she seems to have escaped relatively unscathed, even though I think her role is more reprehensible than anyone else's.
Anyways, why don't you guys introduce yourself and talk about what you've been doing at Wilford Laurier and also just let everybody know why we're meeting?
Yeah, well, uh, I'm Dave Haskell and I'm a professor at Laurier. I'm in the Faculty of Liberal Arts. This is my colleague Will.
Will: How did we come into this whole thing? Like, this didn't just happen with the Lindsay Affair.
Dave: Well, to background, we support maximum freedom of expression and we've really found each other along with a few other professors who feel the same way that we do, that free expression and free inquiry is the core value of a university.
Will: And but sort of how do we run into each other?
Dave: Business school, uh, so my exposure to Faculty of Arts is minimal and I've been really sheltered from this professionally. But watching what's happening in the U.S., watching what was happening to you at UT, I'm a grad. I did my PhD here, and um, it was in January that our university leadership sent out an email explaining to the Faculty how to think about the Trump travel ban, and declaring its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity.
I was really offended by that, that they would see fit to pronounce on a political issue in another country.
Will: Offended? Why?
Dave: I'm, I've got a PhD, I'm able to reach my own conclusions about whether these things are good or bad. I don't need my Administration preaching to me about the right way to think about an issue, a political issue particularly.
Will: So why do you think they did that?
Dave: Well, and what do you think they were thinking when they did that? Because that sort of seems self-evident, right? It's not the administration's role to dictate a political stance to the Faculty; that's just clearly not their role. So what do you think they were thinking?
Will: It seemed like a manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It seemed like just the same reaction that the Democrats in the U.S. were having that they lost to this horrible person and they couldn't understand why, and it was so reprehensible, and here was yet another terrible thing that he was doing, and we must all agree how bad it was.
Dave: Well, I mean, even if—the funny thing is even if you can make that case and say personally and even socially the idea that you could make that case and then be University Administration and then tell your Faculty to think that way, I mean that's taking it to a whole different level of presumptuousness.
Will: Did that come from our Administration or from the Diversity and Equity...
Dave: From the administration. From the leadership. The university leadership.
Will: Is that right? I remember the, uh, it's confusing because I remember we also got an email from the Diversity and Equity office when Trump won and they said that they’ve created a safe space and they were going to be open for extra hours in case anybody needed to go and find Comfort, right? That happened a lot in the United States, eh?
Dave: But you think at least the Americans have some justification for it, given that it's their country?
Will: I mean, we need safe spaces because a conservative was elected in the United States and not even in our country. It does seem to be a little bit on the absurd side.
Dave: Well, it's just to me, you know, they didn't send out an email when Justin Trudeau won, and I have to imagine that there were some students who were offended. There's got to be conservative students at Laurier, but it's very much a one-sided conversation when we talk about Administration. When we talk about the Diversity and Equity office—they talk about diversity but they really don't mean it because they do not want those students who are ideologically diverse. They talk about inclusion, but they purposely will exclude those students, and an email like that is proof positive of that kind of exclusion.
Will: But didn't...
Dave: So that was the thing that just got me hopping mad, and I was emailing back and forth with a colleague of Queens, and we were talking about the importance of free speech, and this had outraged me, and he sent me a link to a Star article that David had written—this is now maybe a month later in February or March about this guest speaker...
Will: Oh, Daniel Robitaille?
Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that she couldn't speak, and was she Umeshi's lawyer?
Will: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So merely because she served as a defense lawyer for someone, she was pilloried.
Dave: Well, this was another... When people look at the Lindsay Shepard Affair, this is not an isolated case at Wilford Laurier; this is something that is a regular occurrence. And now it isn't always as high-profile, but whether it's students in my office saying "I can't speak," whether it's my colleagues sometimes saying to their students who believes that they're stifled and every hand goes up, and there have been cases of that, colleagues have come and told me. But we've got these other examples.
Like when Daniel Robitaille came to speak at the Brantford Campus of Wilford Laurier, and some students agitated until she was forced not to do so.
Will: My president—
Dave: Right, we should provide some background, so that was the Gomeshi case, right? And so Gomeshi was a CBC journalist who was accused of sexual assault and sexual misbehavior by a number of people who was immediately let go at CBC, who was dragged viciously through the Press, I would say, and then was found innocent in the courts. And he had a defense lawyer, and the defense lawyer had been invited to speak.
Will: Yes, she was part of the defense team. She was going to speak, and she wasn't going to speak about the Gomeshi trial. In fact, she was going to talk about what it's like to be a high-powered lawyer in the big city in Toronto. And I mean, that would have been really valuable for the criminology students, but the students who were agitating against her really, with the support of several professors, they were saying, "Well, no, if she comes on it will trigger students; it will mentally harm students." And so that was used as justification for...
Dave: Interesting too to see that these claims of harm and so forth are generally put forth by people who have no clinical expertise whatsoever, and their idea is that the way that you—first of all—that the way to aid people’s mental health is to protect them, and there's no evidence for that whatsoever. And the second is that in your attempts to protect them, the best thing to do is to shelter them from exposure to ideas that would be challenging or frightening, which is precisely the opposite of what a clinician does when he or she is trying to deal with someone who has excess anxiety.
What you do in a case where someone has excess anxiety, even as a consequence of trauma, let's say, is you get them to voluntarily expose themselves to increasingly larger doses of exactly what frightens them. That's the curative route.
So not only is it advice that's being disseminated, say by people who aren't clinicians, but it's actually advice that's being disseminated who are promoting the opposite of what an informed clinician would do. And it isn't, that isn't my opinion; that's as close to a consensus as anything you could reach among clinical practitioners, right?
One of the rules for clinical improvement is get your story straight—something like that. Talk about your past, sort it out, and expose yourself to the things that you're afraid of, that you're inclined to avoid. That's the pathway to resilience and more robust mental health.
Okay, so tell us the story a bit. You guys have an inside view of what's happened on the Wilford Laurier campus since the Lindsay Shepard Affair broke.
I should just say that after this Robitaille event, I read David's piece and immediately emailed him and just said—and that's how I hindered—right? And we met, and we had lunch—and just talked about the, you know, free speech in the Chicago statement and how can we get it implemented at the university, but we just couldn't see any way forward.
Will: And really...
Dave: Right. So that's another thing we want to discuss. You guys have rewritten the Chicago statement, right, so that it's more appropriate in a Canadian context.
Will: Right, we call it the Laurier statement for freedom of expression.
Dave: Okay, okay. And you've been trying to convince or you're trying to be—tried—you've been trying to communicate with the university authorities to have that ratified, essentially adopted as a statement of principles, and have you had any success with that, or what's the consequence?
Will: They deferred to a task force that's—that's going to be held, uh, and we can certainly...
Dave: Okay, and is that in the aftermath of the Shepard Affair? Is that going to be part of it?
Will: Really, do anything over the summer? Just because it just seemed too big a mountain, and there seemed to be no way to introduce the idea.
Dave: Right. Catalyst forward now you've got your catalyst and Lindsay Shepard becomes the catalyst. And, oh my goodness, what an object lesson in what goes on at Laurier, but also what an object lesson in how you handle these Free Speech opponents.
Will: She's really given a model that other students, I hope, will follow.
Dave: But it was through this Robitaille thing that we got to know each other and a few others.
Will: Yeah, there are a couple more of you, that's right.
Dave: Yeah, and about five, I think you told me.
Will: That's right.
Dave: So the Robitaille incident really brought us out of the woodwork. We started to chat and say, you know, we see this problem at our university; we don't know what to do. And then when the Lindsay Shepard scandal broke, we all immediately—we were emailing us—it happened again is essentially what we were saying. We said we've got to do something about this.
Will: I'd already—the I was out on a trip, and I came home and I said to my wife, "Where are the newspapers?" This was November 12th when the story broke, Christy Blatchford's story, and I said, “Hey, honey, where are the newspapers?" She said, "I can't let you see them." I said, "Why not?" She said, "You cannot read the papers." And of course it was because Christy Blatchford's article was in there. So, as soon as I read it, I was beside myself. I thought it's happened again, and this time this is really terrible. They've attacked a TA is what they've done.
Dave: So I contacted with the full force of the administration and claims that she had done mental harm, broken two laws, two laws—federal and provincial. Sincerely worried that they were going to railroad this young lady or they could have easily taken her to the Ontario Human Rights Commission; they would have had a field day. What was going to happen?
I contacted Christy Blatchford. I said, "Can you put me in touch with her?" She was kind enough to do so. I got in touch with Lindsay and I said, "I know that this is a terrible time, but you've got a professor who supports you." I knew that these gentlemen also would—and then quickly, as quickly as I could, I wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star that week just again saying this is happening, the world needs to be aware of it.
But it was really after that—uhh—that Monday after the story broke on the Saturday, we started to talk and, and how can we assist Lindsay and, and how can we—well, the op-ed helped, and the fact that the Star ran it was quite remarkable as well, so hooray to the Star. The Star really does want to do its best to champion free expression.
Will: Yeah, well, you'd think journalists would actually be concerned about that to some degree.
Dave: Well, and I think they are. Like, one of the things that's happened to me in the last year is that although the press coverage of what I did—and just to remind people, so last year I made a video about Bill C-16, which was the bill whose provisions Lindsay Shepard theoretically transgressed against, just to be clear about that.
And when I first made the video, I was accused by all sorts of people, including journalists, of, well, first of all making unnecessary noise and being unnecessarily alarmist, which were the minor accusations. And then the more major accusations were that, you know, I was all the things that you'd expect a far right agitator to be: a bigot, a transphobe, a racist, and all of these things.
And so, but what was interesting was that the journalists by and large, especially the main journalists turned around on that issue really quickly; it was probably within three weeks because what happened was a couple of them actually went and read the policy documents that I had referred to on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, which are still there and which are still appalling and have led exactly to this situation with Lindsay.
And as soon as they read what I had been, uh, what I had been outing, let's say, in my video, then they started to understand that this—not just ringing a bell for no reason at all; it was actually reasonable.
I think people go after me to begin with because Canada is such a safe and peaceful place, and our political situation, our economic situation is so stable that when someone comes out and says, "Look, we're in danger of making a major error," the logical first response should be, "No, there's something wrong with you." It's like, "We're fine. There's something wrong with you."
I was just trying to protect these people.
Will: Right, exactly.
Dave: Well, and, and so, it's reasonable. I think it was reasonable for me to be hit hard in the aftermath of doing that because generally speaking, whistleblowers in Canada are alarmists; Canada has very little to be alarmist about.
Right, but this—okay, so now, so fine, so this thing happened with Lindsay. What have you seen happening on the Wilford Laurier campus? Things that I’m not particularly proud of, I would say. I mean, I knew that Will and some other colleagues were going to come to the aid of Lindsay, but I was thinking that once her recording became public, that we would just have a flood of professors coming to support our cause, which is we had a Laurier statement for freedom of expression modeled on the Chicago statement.
We thought that immediately people would just say, "Of course we need to reinforce that; this needs to be the primary mission. Free expression, free inquiry needs to be the primary mission." And we got that up pretty fast. We really did in about ten days and got it on change.org, and then where I was emailing everybody that I knew and trying to get people interested, and I would say out of 50 emails I sent, I got 15 signatures from personal relationships. So even with personal relationships, you could only get a 30% hit rate.
Will: So what do you think is stopping professors from signing that, say, or clambering on board, especially in the aftermath of the Shepard recording, which we should point out—you know, and this is one of the things that's very interesting is that outside Wilford Laurier and perhaps outside universities that are in the same boat, the reaction to that recording was universal, right?
And national and international, and uniform. And the reaction was, "What the hell? This is scandalous." There's nothing about this that is acceptable, right?
And so what's struck me as so remarkable is that even though there's been international outrage over this and not—outrage of a sort that's only been disputed by a very small number of people at least to begin with, Wilfred Laurier responded en masse, let's say, as if this was somehow debatable, you know, as if there were two sides to the story here, let's say.
And I thought, well, I thought Rambucana and Pimlot, who were the professors, did what they did; I thought was appalling for in upgrading her and in the manner in which they did it and in the language that they used.
But I thought what was truly terrifying was the presence of Adria Joel at that Inquisition because she was an administrator who was hired specifically to do exactly what she was doing by legislated necessity on the part of the Ontario liberal government.
Right, because it wasn't just the university that was involved in this; her position was set up because of legislative necessity, which is something also to keep in mind when we're going after the universities.
Will: Okay, so you had a hard time getting faculty on board. How many faculty members did sign it?
Dave: 59, is it?
Will: Yeah, out of how many faculty?
Dave: 550 full-time.
Will: And so you say, well, what's going on with them? Well, I think that some maybe— I know this is hard to believe, but maybe unaware even now. I think there's a big proportion that are unaware.
Will: Yeah, I—it's unbelievable, is that it is?
Dave: I think that, okay, well that's its own mystery because I don't know where you'd have to have been in the last month to not have noticed that this has happened.
Will: People, perhaps, in The Sciences, the Computer Sciences, the Math—they've got their head down and they're doing their research.
So, I don't think there's anything diabolical there. I think that business as well, I've got very few signatures from the business faculty. I mean, some, but a lot of people just aren't engaged. It's a bit of a commuter school a little bit, and so I think people are just getting on with their research and their teaching, maybe not aware of the problem.
Dave: Well, that's that's an interesting thing in and of itself because I think part of what's led to the occupation of the university, let's say, by the radical post-modern types is the proclivity of the scientists in particular, but also I would say the more serious scholars to be focusing near thoroughly on their field of inquiry, which is essentially what they should be doing, and not paying attention to any of the broader contextual issues, which is actually a perfectly fine strategy when things are going well but a terrible strategy when they're not.
And what you also see—so we've got these people who might not be aware—and we've got the few who are aware and are supporting maximum free expression—but then you've got these other people who are convinced that maximum free expression, free inquiry is not a good thing for a university.
And those people are definitely congregated within the arts and the humanities, and they justify it because they are applying a social justice lens or what they would call a critical theory lens to this entire issue.
Will: And how about a quick summary of critical theory?
Dave: Well, critical theory, I mean, in a nutshell, it's an idea that came from the Frankfurt School in Germany. It transfers over to Columbia University. It is some German scholars who are Marxists and what they're saying is that Marxism as an economic unit or as an economic philosophy really doesn't work; it doesn't transfer very well.
But let's change it over to a social theory, and it's a theory of oppressor and oppressed, and it's very bifurcated. You are either one or the other. And if you are the oppressed, you're good, and if you're the oppressor, you're bad. And it's as simple as that; there's no nuance.
Or, okay, I'm being as bad as they are, too. So, I'm giving you the really broad strokes on this, but essentially it does set up the villain and the victim, and it is the idea that we must do everything to silence the villain, the oppressor and to Center the oppressed.
Yes, and then we will elevate the oppressed. And the same thing happened essentially with the French deconstructionists in the 1970s.
So this is, this is the motivation behind it. But when you hear them talk about critical theory, it is not critical thinking; there's a big difference. And so parents will hear, "Well, they're teaching critical theory; isn't that a good thing?"
No, because critical thinking means I'm going to show you both sides of this argument. Critical theory means I'm going to deliberately give you one side of the argument. I'm going to tell you who's right, and I'm going to tell you who's wrong. There's an oppressor and a press. The oppressor is the bad guy; the oppressed is the good guy, and it's a very manipulative way of thinking.
So, there are, let's say, two reasons why people wouldn't sign the petition. One is they're doing something else, and they're just not interested in it, and fair enough, even though I think that that's dangerous at the moment. The second is that they're actually philosophically or ideologically opposed to the propositions.
And so, to what degree do you think the latter is the determining factor behind the relatively small degree of support that you guys have been able to drum up?
Will: That's a big thing that a group of faculty signed an open letter to the university complaining about the violence and that the administration needs to make the campus safe.
Dave: Yeah, they did the same thing with me after I made my video, I was I made the campus unsafe and 200 people signed a petition.
Will: What does unsafe mean? I mean, this is the problem. The left, the far left are taking words that have a traditional meaning, a traditional definition, and they're blowing that definition completely away.
And at one time, harm meant that there was an infliction of damage that would have a lasting effect and it would compromise the appearance or the function, right? We can think about damage to a car, right? Lasting, and it's affecting the appearance or the function; that's what harm is. But they've stretched that definition so that it becomes meaningless, that an objectionable idea becomes harm.
That when you show a video, you've made a place unsafe and that you know—that's the language of trigger warnings and safe space—but it's disingenuous. There was a trans rally and one of the speakers said that letting Peterson's views be heard in the classroom is violence.
Dave: It is violent, yes. You can react with violence.
Will: Right, yes. Well, that's often what I think, that I've thought a lot about one of the tenets of post-modernism, less so, I would say, of critical theory, but particularly of post-modernism and its more Marxist variants, is that the only motivation for the construction of hierarchies is power.
You think, well, that's no, there's lots of reasons for producing hierarchies, right? There's hierarchies of competence; there's hierarchies of interest; there's hierarchies of aesthetic quality. Like there's all sorts of—wherever you can make a qualitative judgment, you make a hierarchy.
So there's the idea that power is the only driving force behind the construction of hierarchies is absolutely preposterous. So you think, well, why in the world would anyone make that claim that it's only power that exists?
As far as I can tell, at least one of the reasons is that it justifies the use of power. If you have your position because of power, which is basically tyranny, then I'm fully warranted in my use of power against you; that's all there is to it.
So I think it's a great justification for it.
Dave: Okay, so how many people signed the petition stating that the campus had become unsafe?
Will: That was like 79, 79 just like that.
Dave: Okay, so you got more people signing a petition claiming that what Shepard did made the campus unsafe than you did getting—okay, so that's interesting because one of the things we're going to address later is the president's letter as a consequence of the inquiry into the Lindsay Shepard Affair.
And one of the things she says—people who've tried to downplay what happened at Wilford Laurier have said basically two or three things. One is that, well, the Shepherd is not to be trusted and she's really like a subtle arm of the right wing that's one—and that she's a reprehensible character.
Yes, yes, sir—Peterson, I know they directly went after him, quite sneaky that way.
The second is that Pimlot, Rambukana, and Joel misinterpreted Bill C-16, which I think is absolutely preposterous.
I think they interpreted exactly the way that it was written, especially if you consider the surrounding policies, and that's what I was warning about last September.
And the third is that this was an isolated incident and doesn't truly reflect the reality either of Wilford Laurier or other campuses and that stated explicitly in the president's letter.
And so that's one of the things I wanted to discuss because I don't buy that. I think this wasn't an anomaly; this wasn't people stepping out of line.
And I think the proof of that is not what Rambukana did or Pimlot, because we could say, "Yeah, yeah, they're ideologically committed professors," and they're not very professional in their administrative abilities, and they went after a TA unprofessionally and stupidly.
That's bad. That's really bad; what's truly bad was that there was a paid administrator at the meeting who was hired to do exactly that, and so the fact that she was there is the proof to me that this is not only not an isolated incident, it's actually a logical and inevitable consequence of legislative moves that made these bureaucratic positions necessary.
And the practical reality is that these administrative positions do exist on the campuses, so there's no isolated incident issue there.
Now, how do you think Lindsay's been treated at Wilford Laurier? Like, what's your impression of her personal situation there?
Will: I think that, so on the positive side, there have been students who have rallied to her support, and that's been really encouraging to see. It was some students on campus who are dedicated to freedom of expression. They mostly are coming from the conservative clubs, whether it's the conservative political club or other conservative groups, although definitely, invitations have been extended to other groups of other political stripes, or other they really haven't rallied to Lindsay sadly.
So those students have, to a certain extent, befriended her or brought her under the wing or just have begun associating with her and saying, "How can we support you?"
I think in her classes, and I'm just going from what I've seen. I follow her on Twitter, so I see what's been going on there. Apparently, you know—and I don't think this is inaccurate—the other grad students are being quite scathing.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, that's what I've heard from her and from her tweets, is that at least they're cold, at minimum they're cold.
And the professors as well, including the one who told her that she couldn't use her laptop in class because she didn't want to be recorded.
I mean, you couldn't script this level of idiocy. But my thought is students always ask me, "Dr. Haskell, can I record these what you're talking about?" I say, "Yes, yes, the answer is yes."
Yeah, the answer is yes because you know what? I don't say anything in my class that I wouldn't publicly say because I—and I want to be accountable. I want people to know what I'm saying in my class; I want them to know I'm fair, I'm balanced, I present both sides of the argument. I'm not afraid of that.
I mean, why are people afraid of accountability? That’s beyond my understanding.
Will: Yeah, well, that's a very good question. So, okay, so I think what we'll do now is go through this letter because what happened yesterday, I guess, is the president had appointed a third-party fact finder to look into what happened with the Lindsay Shepard affair.
And there were concerns about that because many people, including Christy Blatchford, were concerned and the lawyer that's representing Lindsay, Howard Levitt, was concerned that the person who was appointed to do the third-party investigation wouldn't be neutral because he had tweeted his agreement with a variety of—let's call them politically correct issues—quite publicly.
But it does look like he's done a credible job; that's how it appears to me, anyways. The president, who is very closed mouth or assiduously neutral about this whole affair, has released a report, and I thought we could go through it and talk about whether or not we think that it addressed the issues reasonably.
So because I think it did in some part but I think it didn't in others.
So this is from McClatchy, Deborah McClatchy, PhD, who's the president and new vice-chancellor at Wilford Laurier, relatively new at it, so I mean she's really being raked through the coals, that's for sure.
But she was a vice president academic, which was the second most senior position for the last five years.
Will: She's not. So she's accustomed to this, okay, okay.
Dave: It is, I believe, time for some clarity around the events of the past few weeks here at Wilford Laurier University, stemming from the very regrettable meeting—so that's an interesting turn of phrase to begin with—that followed the showing of a TVO clip by a teaching assistant during a tutorial.
As the newly appointed president and vice-chancellor of this incredible 106-year-old institution, I'm here to set the record straight and announce some important changes.
The issue has highlighted some deficiencies, but as importantly, it has created opportunities.
Will: Yeah, well, to me that's a kind of marketing doublespeak. It's like we could just go with the deficiencies issue for now.
Dave: Opportunities for Laurier to improve our own performance to lead a broader discussion on academic freedom and freedom of expression and opportunities to work together as a community to demonstrate the strengths we have as an institution.
When the issue first broke, I erred on the side of caution as a person, and as a president of Laurier, I'm sensitive to the viewpoints and concerns of our students, staff, and faculty. As an employer, I am cognizant that the four people who are in that meeting room are employees, and one is also a student; all four are entitled to due process.
I did not want to rush judgment; rather, I wanted to ensure we were able to objectively assess the facts and make sound decisions flowing from that assessment.
Will: That seems reasonable enough, and I would say the events that have transpired probably justified her approach, although I had taken issues with some of the things that she had said and not said when she was on the agenda, but whatever.
Dave: We hired an external fact finder with expertise in Human Resources issues. I've received the report and we are taking decisive action to ensure these events will not be repeated. The report, along with what we already knew, has led me to the final conclusions and actions: there were numerous errors in judgment made in the handling of the meeting with Ms. Lindsay Shepard, the TA of the tutorial in question. The meeting never should have happened at all.
Okay, that's probably the most damning statement in the entire report, I would say, because she—and then she says: "No formal complaint nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy was registered about the screening of the video. This was confirmed in the fact-finding report."
Will: Okay, so we could take that apart a little bit—no formal complaint. Okay, so Rambucana claimed that one or more students had complained. He wouldn't say how many and he wouldn't say what the nature of the complaint was.
Now, what this document seems to indicate that is that, well, if there was a complaint, which leaves vague, there was nothing that would constitute a genuine complaint in an administrative sense, and that's why the meeting should have never happened.
Dave: So, I guess one question would be, um, what if any appropriate disciplinary action should be taken against Rambukana and Pimlot, and I don't know the answer to that because, you know, they're not administrative experts, and I don't think faculty can be, but by the same token, I don't feel like I understand exactly what happened to bring about the meeting to begin with.
Do you guys know? I mean, whatever we do know, we've had to piece together from different media reports because, as has been said, our president is not releasing the findings of this.
Like, we will never know what it actually says; we don't know what all the recommendations are.
Will: We, I think we can take her at her word that she's telling us what's going on.
Dave: Why is she making it secret or keeping it secret? Is that concern with what you call it—confidentiality? That seems to be the, the what, the camouflage behind which these things are always hidden.
Will: That seems to be implied or even said explicitly, but I've seen other cases where there's been disciplinary measures and we get more details than this, right?
Dave: So, so I don't know— I don't know the level of confidentiality that is required under law, but what I can say—and I'll let Will talk about what the disciplinary actions can be—let's keep in mind that when Rambukana said that there had been a complaint and it says here that there wasn't, he then echoes that in his apology to Lindsay.
He then says, “Of course, there are things I can't discuss because of the complaint that was made by a student.”
Right? So he's echoing what seems to be an untruth.
Will: Yes.
Dave: And while this is about as close a statement as you might imagine in a statement like this, stating that it was an untruth, I mean, he said—she said, no formal complaint nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy was registered.
I mean, that's as close as you can get to coming right out and saying that the statement that there was a complaint was a falsehood.
And I just want to follow that thread for a second. So here we have a controversy that was started on an untruth and it seems to be that this is part of the whole modus operandi here when we hear—and there's been harm, right? And it's unsafe, right? Daily violence—
Although, again, when the media—Global National News, Globe and Mail checked in to see if there were any police reports related to any harassment or any threats—no police reports.
Will: So at some point, don't we have to say, "There's a boy who cried wolf?"
Dave: Well, this is even, this is more egregious even than claiming harm. I mean, because, you know, maybe people were getting nasty tweets and so forth, and I suspect they were.
But the thing is, is that Rambukana and Pimlot directly claimed that there had been a complaint, right? And so that's a big problem that isn't thoroughly addressed here.
Will: Well, and either somebody heard about the tutorial and the fact that a Peterson video was shown, and Rambukana found out somehow, but he decided that was unacceptable, and that the right way to approach it was to claim that a student had complained. Because it's not a problem that he found it; it's not such a big problem that he found it unacceptable, let's say.
It is his class; like, he has a right to talk to his TA about what's going to be shown and what's not going to be shown, even though he handled it, I think, reprehensibly in that meeting.
But he could come out and say, "Look, that isn't the sort of thing I want to be discussed in my class; I don't agree with Peterson; I think he's a jerk. And like here's the other things you should be concentrating on."
But to come out and say a student complained, and then to buttress that with the accusation that she had violated federal and provincial law, as well as the University—exactly.
And I don't understand why Joel was there without some sort of formal paperwork or evidence of a complaint.
Will: Well, I think that the reason for that is that the positions that people like Joel occupy are so ill-defined and so fundamentally reprehensible in their organization and their aims that this is exactly the sort of thing that you would expect.
And so I thought she didn't say much in that little inquisitorial recording, but I thought the things she did say were spectacularly concerning, let's put it that way.
Dave: So what is the discipline? What is the discipline? Do you have any sense of this?
Will: I can't speculate; I don't know communications or what I don't—what happens when somebody lies or when somebody brings forth a complaint that wasn't a complaint?
Dave: Well, that is one of the things this document does not address; like, it's a big problem. It's a big problem if there was no complaint and the reason she was disciplined was because there was a claim that there was a complaint.
Like, that's—well, we can; we don't have to; if there's a claim that there's harm, what about if there's a claim that the campus has daily violence? What if there's a claim that such-and-such area has become unsafe?
Does that need to be proven, or should we be seeking disciplinary action against people who are making those claims?
Will: Well, that's a very good—that's a very good question.
Dave: Okay, so, so that's it; that's a problem that isn't addressed in this report; it's a big one, okay?
And, and I mean the president is all obviously not how happy with this because she also says the errors in judgment—okay, no formal complaint, no informal concern was registered about the screening of the video.
This was confirmed in the fact-finding report.
So they're not beating around the bush about this; they're stating it very clearly. The errors in judgment were compounded by misapplication of existing university policies and procedures—basic guidelines, basic guidelines, and best practices on how to appropriately execute the roles and responsibilities of staff and faculty were ignored—not just not understood; ignored or not understood.
Okay, that's a pretty damn damning statement there too.
So I don't even know all the particulars here. I heard Howard Levitt say that she was entitled to some sort of representation under the bylaws of our university. She was supposed to have had that and that nobody offered that, right?
So that's an administrative follow-up at the level of employee-employer relationships to say nothing of the academic issues at stake.
So we don't have policies and procedures about how to carry out an inquisition.
That's not what she's saying!
I think there's a medieval document that you can—but one thing Jordan I want to point out here is that the errors in judgment were compounded by misapplication of existing university policies.
Misapplication of existing university policies—at the end of this document, she's going to say that our gendered and sexual violence policy needs to be reviewed.
So which is it? Was it an error in application or an error in policy? And that's confusing.
Will: Yeah, it is! Because my suggestion would be the policy is terribly flawed. We have a colleague who's one of the free speech proponents at our university, Dr. Andrew Robinson. He went through our gendered and sexual violence policy with a fine-tooth comb, and he says, "This document is unworkable; it makes thought a crime."
And he wrote an op-ed to that effect.
Dave: My point would be, and who did he—what organization is he part of?
Will: Yeah, but which—sub—which, uh, human rights and human diversity, right?
Dave: I mean, that's exactly it! This is his field!
Will: Yes! Exactly! And so when he looked at this, he says, "This goes beyond what the Ontario government was even asking for," and it gets to the point where it actually makes—you can be guilty of thought crime; you can be guilty of transphobia without any intent.
That's the same if someone—if someone says, "I've been harmed mentally," that is enough for conviction under this particular policy.
So this isn't misapplication; I'm saying Adria Joel actually got it right.
And so is it a misapplication or do we—so it'll be interesting if the university does discipline her if she gets legal representation who claims that she was actually applying the policies correctly; because that is the question!
Right? So—but it could be two things. It could be the policies are flawed and this is the consequence and they were misapplied.
We don't know, but there's definitely ambiguity here, and that's a crucial issue.
I think Lindsay was guilty under the gendered and sexual violence policy, and she was—Adria was right in accusing her. She was wrong about C-16; it would have been a—Ontario Human Rights Code violation, but GSB—she was right if there had been a complaint.
Will: Right, right! Yeah, okay, okay! And how many angels can dance?
Dave: Right! Okay, procedures in how to apply university policies—same issue here, and under what circumstances were not followed? The training of key individuals to meet the expectations of the university in addressing such an issue as this was not sufficient and must be improved.
Okay, the question is, who are these key individuals? Do they mean Rambukana, Pimlot, and Joel? Is there—are they putting all three of those in there?
And then the next question would be, how are they going to improve the training of key individuals? Because that actually worries me as a faculty member, right?
Because whenever the administration decides that it's going to engage in some additional training of faculty members, then that raises the hair on the back of my neck.
Like, is this unconscious bias training? Is that what they're talking about?
Will: Which has been—well, I think, I can't remember, I've just read recently, Nosek himself who developed the IAT just published a review paper stating clearly, stating clearly that attempts to reduce unconscious bias by explicit training—there's no evidence whatsoever that they have any positive effect, and that was Nosek himself who helped develop the IAT, because the little coterie that developed that test—the chair of the Harvard psychology department—I’ll remember her name in a minute—Greenwald.
Anthony Greenwald and Nosek—what's her name?
Mazarin Banaji—three of them developed it; they're starting to fragment a bit because the thing has been pushed way too hard, right?
It's not a test that's valid for the purposes that it's being put to, and they know it perfectly well even though they're consulting about it and have made that Enterprise out of it.
But Nosek is, you know, seems to be a pretty credible scientist, and he's actually looking at the data, and it's clear that these unconscious bias training programs have zero positive impact; there's some evidence that they have negative impact because of course people don't like being accused of being unconscious racists, right?
So I wonder, is that the kind of training? And there's nothing in here that says this, but this is the problem: that there will be training.
Dave: Unconscious bias—is that the same as systemic discrimination?
Will: Well, it's the neurological equivalent of systemic discrimination.
So even before you act or think, you're biased against the members of an out-group, that's the claim. And not only biased against the members of out-groups, which is a different claim than biased in favor of your in-group, which of course almost every human being is, especially if you think about your family.
But that implicit bias also manifests itself in behaviors that would essentially be categorizable as racist, at least at a low level.
And there's very little evidence that the implicit bias that this test hypothetically measures manifests itself in measurable behavior.
So we went through a thing in the summer where they ran a regression on salaries at Laurier and found that women were paid a little bit less than men by about four percent.
Dave: And so they gave all the...
Will: Did they include, did they include age as a covariate?
Dave: The answer to that would be no.
Will: The model was—it had, um, rank, and I don't know that it had, e—It only had four categories of professor, when this has been done at the University of Michigan for instance, because I looked at comparables, they had 21 categories of professor, or 21 departments, and at ours, we had four.
So you were comparing people, for instance, within the business school who might be in marketing versus someone who—
Dave: Yeah, well I know, I know from setting up regression equations ad nauseam that the covariates that you include in the equation determine the outcome of the equation.
Will: Well, the conclusion they reached, the explanation for the statistical significance of the gender coefficient was systemic discrimination.
Dave: Right, right, of course. Well, that wasn't the conclusion they reached; that was the conclusion they stepped into the inquiry with, and they gerrymandered the statistics until they found a regression equation that supported their initial claim.
So that was—that's not an inquiry, but so there's what I hear you saying is there's really no scientific basis for this idea that there could be this unconscious bias that could drive...
Will: There is evidence that we're full of unconscious biases. I mean, we couldn't even see if we didn't have unconscious biases because we have to use shortcuts and heuristics to just process the world.
The issue is what measurable impact does that have on behavior?
That's the first thing, and it's minimal at best.
First of all, it's not easy to distinguish between racial bias and novelty avoidance because what you'd have to do is you'd have to find a person in a racial group, say a white person, who is just as familiar with black people as with white people and then show that there was a bias, because otherwise you can't distinguish it from a novelty aversion.
And people are characterized by novelty aversion. You already have developed a preference for that cup over this cup. I mean, it happens that quickly and it's that subtle and grand.
And let's say, so the first issue is we can't really distinguish unconscious bias from perceptual habit, let's say, or from—or stereotyping from categorization for that matter.
And that literature has been under assault in a major way in the social psychology literature. But even assuming that an implicit bias does exist, which you might—there might be grounds for by noting that people do have an in-group preference, say for their family members and perhaps even for their racial members, although it's hard to distinguish that from novelty or from familiarity preference.
Putting all that aside, which you count, there's no evidence that these courses that are put in place to reduce that bias have any effect whatsoever.
Will: That's complete—even the people who are pushing the IAT and the idea of implicit bias are willing to say, "Well, all these things that we're doing to try to reduce it have absolutely no effect," or if anything, a negative effect.
Dave: And again, just we don't know what the training is going to be. I guess where we went down this rabbit hole was we don't know what the training is going to be, right? We don't know—it's—we have no evidence to assume; we have no reason to assume that the training is going to address the proper problem and every reason to be skeptical that it won't.
Okay, so next, there is also institutional failure that allowed this to happen.
Well, we don't know what that means because I'd like to know what the institutional failure was, but that's a pretty broad—and she says when there is institutional failure, responsibility ultimately starts and ends with me.
Well, that's a nice statement and, okay, she's taking responsibility for it, but unless it's specified what the institutional failures are, it's just handwaving. Going forward, we will implement improved training and new procedures and engage in a very specific administrative review—details would be nice— to strengthen and enhance confidence in what students and employees can expect at Laurier.
Specifically, there was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepard in showing the clip from TVO in her tutorial.
Showing a TVO clip for the purposes of an academic discussion is a reasonable classroom teaching tool.
Well, thank God for that, given that TVO is a publicly funded, middle-of-the-road, left-leaning liberal news media establishment, a credible one, for sure.
I wish that early on, immediately following this story breaking, that administration had said exactly that because remember for more than a month now, the public, the Canadian public has wondered, "Can you show TV Ontario videos in classrooms at Laurier?"
And I'm not, I'm not joking!
Yeah, like this was—this is a question, and there has not been an answer from administration on that very basic question.
And so people who are thinking about sending their kids to Laurier are thinking, "Is that the place where they didn't know whether or not you could show public television in a classroom?"
Is that—well, we still don't, yes, exactly! It is the place where all of that was in doubt; that is Wilford Laurier, is the place where those things were in doubt.
And so they're not quite as in doubt, but we also still don't know. What else is still in doubt, right? Because if that can be—you wonder, well, you know, that's pretty damn innocuous.
Okay, any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course.
Yeah, well, the question there is any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context. The question there is, who decides what the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context are?
Because that's supposed to be—the that's supposed to be the bailiwick of the professor, period!
And with some leeway for the— for the teaching assistants and so on, but I worry when I hear about context because I've seen opinion pieces from some of my colleagues who tell me that the appropriate context is within the frame of social justice or within the frame of critical theory.
Well, that's what Rambukana said to Shepherd; was that part of the reason you were wrong was because you portrayed it neutrally? If you had contextualized it, essentially if you had connectionized Peterson as Hitler, which was Rambukana's statement, then it would have been perhaps appropriate to air the video.
And that is equivalent to leading the witness, right?
And leading the witness is when we have a lawyer, an authority figure telling the person on the stand what to say.
Taking my ideas and putting them into that person's mouth, right? Well, that's how you produce unconscious bias!
Will: Well, but my point would be, so I'm not saying that this is in here, but we really need to clarify!
Dave: Well, that's a sentence that doesn't—that I'm not happy about: "appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course."
Jesus, it's just administrative doublespeak the whole way through. You present in class, you know, what are the criteria for evaluating that, I—I show videos all the time in a class.
Yeah, I don't know if they have the adequate underpinnings!
Will: Yeah, well that's, that's the question is, who decides that?
Dave: The answer to that is a simple answer to that—the professor! That's the answer! There isn't another answer, there's no board, there’s no higher authority, there's nothing else!
You know, when I show—I do show clips from Hitler in my class, in my personality class when we talk about orderliness and totalitarianism.
I show clips from The Triumph of the Will, and I show this other documentary called Crumb, which is about an underground cartoonist from the 1960s named Robert Crumb.
And it is an absolutely shocking documentary!
Like if you ever want to know more than you want to know about rapists and serial killers, that documentary will tell you; it's really, it's a tough watch!
You know, and I can't imagine a—a committee reviewing my teaching materials and allowing those things to go forward without challenge; it'd be a disaster!
The ensuing discussion also needs to be handled properly.
Yeah, well, we have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question.
Okay, so whatever handled properly means, Lindsay Shepard managed it, which I think is a good sign here! Because if we take that as the model, Lindsay did present the information neutrally, and she was not taking sides. And if that's our model, that's—that's a good sign, okay, that's good.
Will: So I'm a bit troubled by this because we're gonna, in three or four paragraphs find out that we need enhanced training for TAs.
Great! So did she handle it properly, right? Why do we need to treat the training?
Yes, that's right! And again, who's going to do the training? Because it's not going to be the faculty, because the faculty don't have time or the inclination for that matter to run that kind of training. Is it going to be the diversity and equity?
Yeah, right! Well that's the question! Who's going to do the training?
I have apologized to Ms. Shepard publicly, as has Dr. Rambukana, her supervising professor. The university has conveyed to her today that the results of the fact-finding report—will make the results of the fact-finding report to make sure she understands it is clear that she was involved in no wrongdoing.
Yes! Well for someone who was involved in no wrongdoing, she sure bloody well got raked over the coals for the last month! So the university is taking concrete steps to make changes to ensure this doesn't happen again.
Yeah! Well good! It has been made clear to those who were involved in the meeting with Ms. Shepard that their conduct does not meet the high standards I set for staff and faculty.
Well that is a big question there, right?
How has it been made clear to those who were involved in the meeting with Ms. Shepard that their conduct does not meet those high standards?
Because we don't know! Does that mean did the president talk to them? Has there been disciplinary action like we—we—because if it was, I don't even know what would be appropriate, but I would say that not knowing what was done is not appropriate.
So, and I think it deserves specifics.
I mean, that's what got me into this was you— the Christy Blatchford's article was very accurate because she already had the audio, but then when we heard the audio, it was so appalling what was done to her in that room. It was such horrible bullying, and just such a violation of what the university should stand for.
That's what coalesced all of the anger, I mean in Canada.
Yeah, the devil's in the details, so it's the same with the how it has been made clear to those who were involved.
Because I don't—I mean maybe this is something we could talk about too, I don't know what would constitute appropriate disciplinary message measures as a concept. I mean, you have here three people acting on a non-existent complaint, who produced an international scandal that damaged Lindsay in a real sense, although it might have also made her stronger, but it certainly, it certainly didn't have to, because a lesser person would have crumbled.
I don't know if she would feel that she—we all, I think she might take exception to that; she certainly has not claimed any kind of victim status through this whole thing—
Will: I think that's no, but that's more a testament to her character than anything else, because I mean, she was subject to the kind of attacks I would say that would have snowed under a lesser person.
Yes, but she has risen to this challenge!
Dave: Yes, definitely, definitely! Well, and thank God for that! But then there has been real harm done to the university as far as—so, and I don't know how you would quantify that in financial terms, but I suspect it's substantial.
But reputational terms? I mean, now I would say internationally this is what Wilford Laurier is known for.
So maybe that’s an overstatement, but I don’t think so.
As these are individual employment issues, I cannot go into greater detail on any individual case.
Well, that could be, but know that the university has and is taking action to rectify the situation and send a clear signal that this cannot and will not happen again.
That sounds pretty—that's very forthright!
Yeah, it is. One key Improvement highlighted is the need to enhance our faculty and TA training.
Well, like I said, as a faculty member whenever I see that I don't see the role of the administrators at a university to train the faculty, that's not their role.
Their role is to move paper around for the faculty fundamentally. It is the responsibility of course instructors to develop guidelines for the roles and expectations of their TAs.
Fair enough! The university also has high expectations of professors as TA supervisors.
We recognize the need to do more in this area; we rec—and the university's intent is to enhance the training and support for both TA supervisors and teaching assistants, making these mandatory and standardized.
Jesus, dismal!
So my suspicions as a skeptic are that the making of training for faculty mandatory and standardized will do more harm than this scandal has done over the long run.
So we don't know what the training is, we don't know who's going to do it, we don't know what it's going to be about, but the one thing we do know is it will be mandatory.
Yup, mandatory and standardized, right?
Yeah, mandatory and standardized. It'd be interesting to see how they'll do that too because it's not so easy to make training mandatory for faculty members, right?
You can't just do that by fiat because they can generally tell you to go to hell, and should.
The Gendered and Sexual Violence policy has become clear to us that managing the new Gendered and Sexual Violence policy—now that's the one that's mandated by the provincial government, so it was Bill 163, the provincial bill that said you need to have a policy on gendered and sexual violence.
According to our colleague Dr. Andrew Robinson, he says we go way beyond what the province even asked for to the point where it becomes unmanageable and you have instances of thought crime.
So, so that's what we have like this—like this, yeah, where you can claim that somebody is transphobic for simply showing a video!
Can I can I read you the definition?
Will: Is this from the gendered?
Dave: Yes, it is! This is from our policy!
It is: "An action that reinforces gender inequalities resulting in physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or mental harm."
Will: Okay, so what's the first part of that again?
Dave: Yes! Yeah, you got lost, don't you? It is an action that reinforces gender inequality.
Will: Okay, so let's start with that: "An action that reinforces gender inequalities."
Okay, so the first thing we might point out is that no one knows what the hell that means, right?
It's a box that you can put anything in!
So actions—that's a problem because it isn't obvious what constitutes an action or an inaction for that matter! So I mean—and then that reinforces gender inequalities, right?
So that—that's the sort of sentence that only someone who's ideologically possessed to the maximum would create, because you can't parse it.
Dave: Gender inequalities? Like what does that mean, exactly?
Will: I don't—I, well anyways, discrimination and sex or gender; it doesn't talk about discrimination; it talks about inequality, right?
Which would be different if the phrasing had included the words discrimination.
Okay, and the next part is resulting in physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or mental harm.
Right, right, so it's as broadly construed—both clauses are as broadly construed as they can be, and the reason for that is to allow maximum scope for interpretation—which is exactly what happened with Adria Joel.
Dave: Well, mental harm, again—
Will: Mental harm—as you pointed out—mental harm is not backed up by the empirical evidence apart from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Like cognitive behavioral therapy would suggest that you actually can do mental good by exposing someone to objectionable ideas when they've—in moderation—in order to help them become less mentally fragile.
Scott Lilienfeld out of Emory University, we're a very, very scholarly—well, he is—he's written several textbooks on psychopathology, right? He knows his stuff!
And just this year he put out a paper where he explored the empirical evidence around microaggressions, and he did all of the literature, and microaggressions are, of course, these innocuous actions that are deemed to be bigoted or somehow sexist.
Well, they are actually—showing a video from TVO is what a microaggression is, and what he said was there is absolutely no evidence; there's no evidence that microaggressions, these objectionable ideas, lead to mental harm.
He also said that the concept itself is extraordinarily ill-defined, which is also a big problem, right?
That was the beginning of our conversations—everything is ill-defined!
Dave: Yes, well, if you make the box big enough you can put anything into it!
So and what you see, uh, in this gendered and sexual violence policy that Will is reading from: they are—they actually go on to say that this can include heterosexism!
Like you can be—your mental crime could be heterosexism!
Will: Yeah! So what if I said something in class like the empirical evidence strongly suggests that raising children in a two-parent family leads to better outcomes, which it does by the way!
Like it—and seriously— it does! Then, then...
Dave: Well, so that's the question! Well, arguably, right?
Arguably, I’ve transgressed that policy.
Now here’s an interesting thing too, so it has become clear to us that managing the new gendered and sexual violence policy has led to a confusion in its application.
Right, okay, so this is back to the issue we described earlier; is it a confusion in the application or in the policy?
Now you just read the damn policy!
Now it seems to me that there's no way you could apply that policy without confusion, so it's not a confusion in its application; it might also be that, but it's a confusion in the policy written right into it!
Okay, so that's of crucial importance! Right? In fact, the interviews conducted by the fact finder confirmed that the rationale for invoking the GSVP did not exist, it was misapplied, and was a significant overreach.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about that!
Because I know that these kind of policies emerge from the same sort of policy framework that characterizes the Ontario Human Rights Commission; it's the same people doing it and the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies are written so that they can be broadly misapplied with no significant overreach!
So, so okay, a problem to provide clarity of the policy’s intent and to strengthen accountability, we will engage in an administrative review with the goal of finding the appropriate structure to oversee and execute the GSVP and its accompanying procedures.
We will also undertake a full review of the policy and its procedures.
Okay, so good! So there they're saying, "Well, it might have been misapplied, but maybe the policy itself also has some problems."
I think this is really good news, and we had a meeting with our colleague Andrew Robinson today and we said, "Well, you know, what do you think about this?"
And he was pleased; he said, "You know, if some good has come out of this controversy, this is one of those good things because definitely the gendered and sexual violence policy we have at Laurier isn't workable; it is prejudiced against certain people and—and certain ideas, and so it needs to be reworked because at this, it is not an inclusive document; it excludes, and so it needs to be fixed."
So this is a good thing!
Dave: Well, and it's also a canary in the coal mine for similar policies at universities all across Canada, we'd say, and maybe broader because one thing you'd hope is that the Lindsay Shepard Affair has produced enough negative repercussions to set people back on their heels a little bit to make them dig into these policies!
Because I can't imagine that there's another university in Canada who would enjoy partaking in a scandal of equivalent magnitude.
Will: What I would hope—and on that point, Jordan, if someone is a student or if someone is a faculty member, ask for the evidence.
That's what I've learned from this— there are a lot of claims out there: mental harm, our campuses become unsafe, the ideas that are contained in the gendered and sexual violence policy.
I'm saying, "Okay, what is the evidence that proves this?"
Because this is what a university is supposed to be based on from the Enlightenment to today; we are supposed to be able to say here's the evidence for why we do this.
And the further we get away from evidence and the more we embrace ideology, we completely remove what the mission of a university is supposed to be.
Dave: Well, and the idea of evidence—we remove the idea of evidence, which means we remove the idea of knowledge because there's no distinction between knowledge and evidence!
Right, right!
So if you are a student and you want to say, "What can I do?" say, "What's the evidence of mental harm? What's the evidence that I'm transphobic?"
Well, so partly what you're also saying there is a restatement of the old presumption of innocence idea; it's like, okay, you're accusing me of something; prove it; I'm innocent, buddy!
Yes, prove it; where's your evidence?
Yeah, I know!
Dave: Well, part of that's tied up with this—with the sexual harassment issue because increasingly, and this is—this has started, I think most particularly in the United States, we're moving towards a preponderance of evidence standard instead of a presumption of innocence standard.
Will: That's especially true with these sexual harassment policies that are being derived by—derived from institutions and administrators concerned with such things as the Gendered and Sexual Violence policy, and that—that's related to the comment you made earlier about the lawyer who wasn't allowed to speak, right?
Because she had the temerity to offer someone who was accused of a crime a legal defense, right?
When apparently what we were supposed to do was just assume that the people who were making the accusations were right?
Dave: And to be— I mean, we always have to do our caveats, don't we?
We say, "I know that we want to protect people who are victims," like you, each of us would agree.
But it can't be done at the—by sacrificing truth, right?
Will: Well, you don't protect people from being victimized by undermining the rule of law, quite the contrary; because ultimately, it comes back to bite you in the Bahamas.
Yes, that's for sure and very, very rapidly.
So, okay, in the interim, we will ensure access to the existing support and complaints procedures by providing management and oversight through the Office of Dispute Resolution and Support.
Okay, I'm not sure what that—
Dave: Well, it's actually very good news, okay?
Okay? It means that the oversight of this is being removed from the Diversity and Equity office and put under the president's direct control so she doesn't think that they're responsible.
Will: And I'm very worried about Diversity and Equity overreach.
This suggests that the president, as you should be, it suggests the president is also worried about the Diversity and Equity office. That she has said, "We're not imagine why—"
But, but the fact that she has done this is really a strong sign that she is aware that that office needs to be—it needs to be reined in, right?
Or at least that she's concerned enough about the reputation of the university so that she's not going to let the same mistake happen again, which is a good thing.
Like, I don't care why she's doing it particularly, but it's a good thing that it is being done!
Okay, so fine, so that's good news.
This has the added benefit of improved accountability as that office reports through to me as president.
Will: Yeah, okay, well, you can see in those lines that she's not particularly happy about what's happened.
I wonder what sort of financial hit Wilford Laurier took, because you could imagine that while the donors are going to be a lot more conservative than the professors and the administrators and the students.
Dave: Well, there we have— we've been contacted by a group of alumni who have now organized; they haven't yet released what would be their press release, but slowly, they've been reaching out to other alumni, and it's the Laurier alumni for free expression.
And what they have said is their mandate is one to withhold all donations until Laurier accepts the Laurier statement for freedom of expression.
And I haven't checked in; it was just someone acting on her own; she's a Laurier alumni; she has, I guess, contacts within the Alumni Association, and she just— she sent us some contact information and said, "Here's what I'm doing; wanted you to know I support your efforts, and I'm working on this; I'll let you know when I'm ready to go."
And so that was really encouraging!
Will: I have a colleague who does a survey of Chief Financial Officers quarterly to gauge their optimism about the economy, and it started down at Duke, and he's doing it now for Canada, and he got responses from two—he because he sent out an email just shortly after this broke, he got responses from two alumni who just said, "You know, why should I participate in this? Why should I help you? This is not so..."
Dave: So I don't have any respect for you!
Will: These are alumni of Wilford Laurier University.
Dave: Yes!
Will: Well, and I can imagine too that enrollment is going to take a pretty vicious hit.
You know, our business school is quite excellent; we have a great common program. We, in the finance area, attract a lot of very strong students, and we compete for top-tier students in Ontario. The entry average is like 89 or something and we really compete for the what we call the high flyers, and they can choose any school, right, in the province.
Dave: Alright, right!
Yeah, well it doesn't take much of a hit to a reputation to give people who have options the reason to go elsewhere, right? And then you lose the best people, and that's when things really start to fall apart.
And what you might begin to see—and I would say that this is something that the general public might look at—watch what happens to the entrance averages in the Arts and Humanities.
Will: So we might not take a hit, but let's see if the averages take a hit of course, because suddenly—and currently the entrance average to get into our general arts program, uh, in communications, let's just talk communications, is mid-70s with an average of 60 in English!
Dave: So, so I don’t—I don't—I mean, right?
Which is basically a failing grade, right? Because if you hand in an essay in high school, you'll get 60!
You really will, right? So it's basically the grading basically runs from 60—it goes zero, you didn’t hand it in—60 to 100, you handed it in.
And let's keep in mind that the tutorial that Lindsay was running was a grammar tutorial, the content of which looked a lot like a grade six curriculum!
Will: Yeah, yeah, well, that gets us into a discussion of the schools in general, but we're—
Dave: Alright, I'm thinking that maybe it's not a good idea to lower standards anymore, right?
Okay, okay, so academic freedom and freedom of expression for those who have chosen to use this incident as an indictment of Wilford Laurier University or the plight of Canadian universities in general, I say your assertion is unreasonable and unfounded.
Will: Well, better stop this interview!
Dave: Yeah, yeah, well you can say that all you want. I would say, instead, that what happened at Wilford Laurier is a precise manifestation of exactly the sort of rot that both produced Bill C-16 and that I was warning about last September.
And so I don't think the assertion is unreasonable and unfounded at all!
And here's one piece of data: 80% of humanities papers are not cited once!
So, so let's just translate that for the viewing public—yes, that means that they're producing scholarship that nobody looks at!
Yes, that even their friends don't look at!
And, and because, okay, so what a citation is, is I read someone's paper and I find a good idea in it and then I use that idea to buttress an idea of my own or to riff off or to, or to, or to criticize even for that matter, and then I cite them. I say who they were and when they published it, and then the paper—the sign that there's a huge bureaucracy that keeps track of citations, and it's a major indication of academic ability to be cited!
Right! It's the academic payment to be cited!
Okay, so 80% of humanities papers don't get cited once, it's absolute failure!
It's absolute failure as a game!
If someone wanted to play a game, uh, I would suggest that they go and they look at the publications of the professors in a particular area and see if the titles all sound the same and if they all say something about intersectionality, colonialism, and these other various social justice words.
You might wonder, am I going to get taught the same course again and again by every professor in this program? Because it seems to me that all of their research is very similar!
Uh, and how can that be when there's such a broad base of knowledge in the world that we can have similarity between every publication?
Which then goes on to why—why do I need to read my colleague's stuff when it's exactly like my own?
Which we see, so just as a baseline, Jordan, how much—what would you say is—someone who's doing some good research, what's—how many citations would they be receiving?
Maybe, uh, collectively—like what are we looking at?
Thousands! Thousands!
Yeah, well a good—like, if you write a good paper, then like a great paper will get you 100 citations, right?
An outstanding—overwhelmingly outstanding paper will get you a thousand citations.
10 isn't none! You know, it—you register with 10!
But zero? That's failure!
Right! It means your work had zero impact!
It means your work wasn't worth the paper it was published on!
And this brings us to a kind of interesting little issue with regards to the rot in the universities, which Deborah McClatchy says does not exist.
It's like here's how the game works: is that we set up a little ideological garden, right? The 10 of us play in and then we all publish in the same journal and we peer review each other's articles and we just publish them with no critique or very little.
So the—the barrier for publication is very, very low when it should be very high.
Like a good journal—a good journal will reject 90% of the papers that are submitted to it, right?
So, um, rejection rates really matter!
So the question is, why do these papers get published since no one reads them and they have nothing to offer?
And the answer to that is very straightforward: the journals are extremely expensive; they're way more expensive than they should be.
So just to buy a single paper online for the ordinary person is like $40, which is more than a hardcover book. That's just to download the PDF!
And so the journal itself—the libraries are full of them, they're very expensive, and the subscriptions are very expensive.
And so what happens is the professors pressure the university libraries to buy the journals and the library funds the publisher!
And so the publishers will publish damn near anything! Routledge is a good example of that, much to my chagrin, because they published my first book, but—and they used to be a great publishing house, but they'll publish damn near anything!
And the reason for that is that the libraries are forced to pay radically inflated prices for the publications that no one ever reads!
And so people write to publish in journals that libraries have to purchase at inflated prices to produce knowledge that no one will ever read!
And that's the little scandal that plagues the humanities.
I think it characterizes the humanities more than plagues them, so the idea that there's no systemic rot, let's say, in the universities, especially in the humanities, is just not—this is just