To Junior High, High School Students & Their Parents

Hi everyone! Happy New Year! I've got some things to say to junior high and high school students and their parents about the politicization that is occurring in the public school system and what should be done about that. I have some very radical suggestions I would say, which I am NOT putting forth lightly. I think that it is time for public school students and their parents to actively rebel against the indoctrination that is being offered in the guise of education.

But before such a recommendation can be reasonably offered or considered by its recipients, some careful argumentation and review of recent events is in order. So please bear with me while I walk through that process. It's important to get these things right and not to rush about.

About a year ago, actually on September 27th, 2016, I made a series of videos. One of them criticized a new piece of federal legislation, Bill C-16. Bill C-16 is, and I'm reading this directly from the government website, an act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. Here's the summary: this enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offense was motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Now, you may notice on careful reading that the Act modifies the Criminal Code to clearly set out that evidence that an offense was motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate extends the purview of what might constitute hate to a degree that's, I think, completely unacceptable. But that's the least of the problems with this bill. You can't really tell what the other problems are though unless you go read the policy guidelines that were established by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which already guide interpretation of similar legislation in Ontario and would be used by the federal government's own admission to guide the interpretation of Bill C-16.

Now, when I made the videos, I said as much. I said that there were two fundamental dangers to this bill. One was that because the Ontario Human Rights Commission is a radical and dangerous organization bent on producing the most punitive possible policies in the pursuit of its radical neo-Marxist postmodern agenda, that the legislation would introduce the possibility of persecution, or let's say prosecution, for so-called offenses that should never be considered within the proper domain of legal prosecution.

Now, I also objected to the manner in which the relationship between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation was written into the Ontario Human Rights Commission's policies and therefore essentially into the law, pointing out that the law now demands that we consider those four different phenomena as essentially independent when they are in fact very tightly causally linked. And as well, that the claim that's being made, both implicit and explicit, that those four sets of phenomena differ within each strata as a consequence of socialization, in fact is also wrong, but also undermines the primary arguments that transsexual people and gay people use to buttress the reality of our identity, namely that they have a biological proclivity that directs them towards such identities, expressions, and orientations.

I pointed all of those things out and that we were in danger of legislating compelled speech in relationship to preferred pronouns, which are the pronouns that people who vary in their gender identity hypothetically want to use to be referred to. I pointed out that we were in danger of making compelled speech something acquired in Canada, so that for the first time in our history, and in the history of the British common law, the government would be able to legislate the content of your speech, which is quite different than legislating what you can't say, which is already something that's very dangerous.

There are a variety of consequences of making this video which were much more dramatic than I presume they might be, although I did know that Bill C-16 posed a genuine threat to the integrity of our state. Now, the first consequence was that a very large number of faculty members at the University of Toronto decided that I had made the campus an unsafe place by my statements and petitioned the university to do something about that. And then there were a number of demonstrations, and then the University of Toronto sent me two letters telling me that I was violating their policies and probably the law in Ontario, which was something I had warned about, by the way, because the law was written in such a dismal manner and over-inclusive manner to ensure that even criticizing it could be prosecuted under its guidelines, let's say.

And then there was a debate that the university held where defenders of Bill C-16 insisted that I was all the terrible things that I had been called and that I was misinterpreting the bill and that the dangers that I foresaw as a consequence of its implementation would never manifest themselves. Rather than to address himself to the scientific evidence concerning gender identity and expression, and by adopting rhetorical strategies more common to Breitbart News than a university professor's lecture, Dr. Peterson goes on to discredit the very constructs on political grounds instead of on grounds provided by scholarly evidence.

That these constructs are in no particular order leftist, radical, and politically correct. On the subject of pronouns and gender expression, Dr. Peterson is emphatic that, "I don’t recognize another person's right to determine what pronouns I use to address them. I won't do it for the vast majority of people." He goes on to say gender identity and sexual orientation, and I guess he means sex, are the same thing, and as for the definition of transgender, Dr. Peterson claims that, "I don’t believe that they, these people, these terms stand for good things. I think that these people use these terms as a pretense that they stand for good things as a pretext for them to continue their nefarious activities."

Well, this is hardly the stuff of academic scholarship. Now I should say to the university's credit, by the way, that once they got on their feet after sending me the original two letters, they seem to have come down quite strongly on the side of free speech in the last year, and so that's something positive that’s come out of all of this. But the truth of the matter was that I am none of those things, and that I had read the bill and its surrounding policies extremely carefully, and what's worse, I actually understood them, and that what I had done was merely communicate my understanding and I would say my proper and accurate understanding of the bill to a public that was actually quite willing to take the time to investigate the issue and follow it carefully.

The press initially was very ambivalent towards me, but as some of the leading journalists in Canada, including Christie Blatchford and Antonella Artuso, and eventually Conrad Black and also Margaret Wente, early listened to the videos that I had made and then actually read the policies in question, they understood that the bill did in fact pose a threat to free speech in the manner that I had described and came out very strongly on my side. Now, I have some sympathy for the fact that I was tarred with a variety of epithets immediately after having made the video because I was warning that there was something not good going on in Canada, and whenever anybody warns, that you should be skeptical of them, because Canada has been a very stable and well-functioning state for a very long period of time.

So when someone pops out of his rabbit hole or comes out of his swamp, let’s say, and says there's something rotten in the state of Denmark, the proper response is, no, there's probably something wrong with you. And then the next investigative strategy is to say, well, here's a bunch of things that are typically wrong with people that have something wrong with them. Bigoted, transphobic, racist, etc. Maybe you're one of those things, and so we'll throw those at you and see if they stick, because if they stick then we don't have to pay any attention to the problem and maybe it will go away.

But the truth of the matter is that I was and am none of those things. I was fortunate because there was evidence that that was the case. I have videotaped virtually everything I've said to students in the entire 25 years of my university tenure, and so everything that I thought was a matter of public record, and I had posted it on YouTube in the form of hundreds of lectures. Not only is there nothing scurrilous and self-damning in those videos, it's quite the contrary; people have found the content extremely useful from a psychological perspective and that's now up into the millions of people.

And so it turns out that I’m not the bad guy of the supporters of this Bill's imagination. Now, the other tactic employed by the people who have been unhappy about what I have been saying is to assume that I’m an alt-right or even a far-right figure, which is an accusation that has been leveled at me many times in the last year. And there's also a reason for that. The reason for that is that the group of people to the right of the radical left is a very large group, and it includes everyone from socialists, say, of the classic 1970s type all the way to the most far-right Nazis imaginable, who are all united in their opposition to the radical left agenda and thus form what you might describe as a group by default.

Now the fact that some of the members of a group by default are unsavory characters does not demonstrate that all of the members of that group are of that type. Now, it’s very convenient for the radical left and much more straightforward than actually formulating arguments to assume that everyone who doesn’t think exactly what they think is some sort of monstrous figure, but it happens to not be the case. There are many reasonable people, in fact vast majority of reasonable people, who are firmly opposed to the agenda of the radical left, and it's completely unreasonable to lump them in with all right, far-right, and Nazi-type figures.

Part of the reason that the postmodern neo-Marxists find themselves compelled to do so is because they believe that they are correct and that they have right on their side, and if it turns out that anyone reasonable is objecting, then the fact of that reasonable opposition would make it necessary for some things to be rethought. And so it's much easier, and I would also say much more gratifying to an inner sense of resentment and vengefulness, to merely tar everyone who doesn’t agree with the same brush and the argument be damned.

This brings us to the most fundamental reason why there has been such vociferous opposition generated in relationship to what I've been saying, and that's because I got the interpretation of Bill C-16 and its surrounding policies and the pernicious postmodern neo-Marxist doctrine that gave rise to it essentially correct. And it's in the best interest of those who are pushing this pernicious doctrine and its legislative consequences to do everything possible to discredit me so that the facts of the matter remain hidden from the general public and perhaps even from those who have formulated the doctrine themselves.

So I read Bill C-16 and the surrounding policies that would guide its interpretation as formulated by the Ontario Human Rights Commission and then I informed the public to the best of my ability about the content of that legislation and policies and its intent. And we've outlined the consequences. Two major questions remain: is what I had to say to be trusted and if I was correct in my analysis and diagnosis, what steps should be taken now, if any, to rectify the situation?

So let's begin with the question of whether or not my interpretation is to be trusted, and we'll start that with a brief overview and then an analysis of the recent events at Wilfrid Laurier University. As you may know, or may not know but should know, at Wilfrid Laurier University recently, a teaching assistant named Lindsey Shepherd found herself in hot water because she had the temerity to play a video clip from TVO's The Agenda in the class that she was charged with conducting. As a consequence of playing the video clip, she was brought in front of a disciplinary panel consisting of three individuals: Nathan Rambo Khanna, Herbert Pimlott, and Adria Joel. Rambo Khanna and Pimlott are professors in the communications department at Wilfrid Laurier University and Adria Joel is an administrator who was hired as a consequence of legislation introduced by Kathleen Wynne to conduct exactly the sort of disciplinary investigation that she sat in on.

Now, Lindsay Shepherd had the presence of mind and the fear to tape the disciplinary hearing, and after the story about what had happened was released, Lindsay released the entire audio tape and caused a national and international scandal. I would be interested to see the original complaint or complaints, because, like, I don't really have any context as to what exactly their problem was. Can I just ask you anything? Yeah, I just like to hear the whole like your what what took place, so if you just give us—

Okay, so um, we we have to teach about grammar, and in the Pearson book there was a section about pronouns and using like gendered language. So I wanted to make it more engaging, so what I did is we were talking about in papers using "bei" as like a singular. And then we were also talking about like his-and-hers and like how to construct sentences with that. And then to contextualize it, I brought up like a YouTube debate—so a debate with both sides, during Peterson's sides and this fellow named Nicholas Matt, who is also a prof at UT.

And they do have the name of the—it was from The Agenda with Steve Paikin, "What's in a Name?" Potentially, a great deal. University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson has a fight on his hands after objecting to proposed legislation that he says would violate his freedom of speech by forcing him to address transgendered people using the pronouns of their choosing. Joining us now to better understand the issue and debate what's at stake in Vancouver, British Columbia, Theron Meyer, transgender pundit and YouTuber, in the nation’s capital, Kyle Kirkup, professor of law at the University of Ottawa, and here in studio, the aforementioned Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Nicholas Mat, lecturer of transgender studies at U of T, and Mary Rogan, whose article entitled "Growing Up Trends" is featured in the October issue of The Walrus magazine. Good to have you three here and our two friends and points beyond. We appreciate everybody being on the program for what is, I think, one of the hottest topics in the country today.

Professor Peterson, and it's all because of you. And I think before we go any further with our conversation here, I want to give people a sense of how hot this has got, starting on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto. [Applause]

Well, as you can see, the opponents of free speech are capable of making annoyance inarticulate noise. Free speech is the mechanism by which we keep our society punched. By doing this, I'm going to post this online that you would like people to not be—to be more accommodating of trans people and people of color at your events in future. I felt very common here! There have been multiple, multiple recorded instances of trans people killing themselves because it wasn’t for this wall.

I ask you, why do you have the authority to determine whether or not an individual is worthy of you using their pronouns? Like, if I asked you, would you please use they/them pronouns for me? What? Would depend on what do you want to jump my pronoun?

Okay, with indulgence of everybody else on the program, I'm gonna start with Professor Peterson off the top here for a while because, as I suggested, you thought long and hard about this. You posted a few things up to YouTube because you had been thinking long and hard about it. One and a half million hits later, Jordan, one and a half million hits later, this has become a huge issue. So let's start there. Why did you post those views to YouTube in the first place?

Well, there's proximate and distal reasons. The proximate reasons was because I received some correspondence from clients of mine who had been, I would say, persecuted in a variety of ways by people who were politically correct, and they sent me some documentation about Bill C-16 and the associated policy statements on the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which I read and was not very happy about, and also because the University of Toronto decided to make anti-racism and anti-bias training, so-called anti-racism and anti-bias training, mandatory, which I regarded as a per incursion into the domain of political opinion by the university administration.

Have you taken that training yet? No, and I don't have to yet, it's the HR department personnel that have to take it. If they decide that you have to, will you? No way, not a chance. And what's the other referred to persecution that friends or clients of yours had experienced?

Yes, yeah, well there are lots of places now where the workplace has become, I would say, excessively politicized. And so people who have viewpoints—this also includes, I would say, fairly radical leftist viewpoints—people don't feel comfortable at all in being able to use the language of their choice or to have even opinions about a variety of different things. Essentially, I guess what I'm asking is to lay the case of what now. What is it you find offensive about this legislation?

Well, fundamentally there were two things that really bothered me, although there have been other things I've thought about since. One was that I was being asked, as everyone is, to use a certain set of words that I think are the constructions of people who have a political ideology that I don't believe in, him that I also regard as dangerous. What are those words? Those are the made-up words, to read that people now describe as gender-neutral. And so to me, they're an attempt to control language in a direction that isn't happening organically. It's not happening naturally; people aren't picking up these words in the typical way that new words are picked up, but by force and by fiat. And I would say by force, because there's legislative power behind them.

So just like these made-up words, “Z” and “Xur” and that sort of thing. What about the—they're not all made up? Where quote-unquote made-up words, for example, they is one of them. Yeah, but we speak to an individual as they, right? But we can't dispense with the distinction between singular and plural. I mean, I know that the advocates of that particular approach say that they has been used forever as a singular, and that's actually not correct. It's used as a singular in very exceptional circumstances.

So we understand your views and where you're coming from. You decided to lay these views out in some YouTube discourses. Yes, you put them up; the response has been overwhelming. Did you anticipate that you would get this kind of feedback? No, there was no way of anticipating this. And I think you mentioned in the intro, you know, that this is a consequence of what I've done, and I think that's true. It's a consequence of the fact I thought about it, and I think the right metaphor is that, you know, there's a large forest and it's been a hot dry summer or maybe a drought, and there's plenty of dead wood gathered, and I lit a spark, and you can't blame the forest fire on the spark.

There is out there an appetite against political correctness, which is what you have described as—in fact, your YouTube videos called professor against political correctness. But let's make sure we're all speaking the same language here. You would define that how? Political correctness? Well, I think it's a particularly illogical game, and I think the outcome is twofold: it's to make the player feel morally superior and also to take rather serious axe swings at the foundation of society.

And so the game is to identify a domain of human endeavor, note that there's a distribution of success, some people are doing comparatively better, and some people are doing comparatively worse, define those doing worse as victims, define those doing better as perpetrators, identify with the victims, have yourself a set of enemies handy to vent your resentment on, feel good about it even though it didn’t really require any work on your part.

And then endlessly repeat. Jordan, let's do one more question here, and then we'll get everybody else into the conversation. You know, of course, that since this story broke, you've been called a lot of things. Yeah, one of which is a transphobic. Some people have accused you of using the free speech issue to mask what's really going on here, which is an attempt to deprive other people of what they believe are their legitimate rights.

Well, I don't want to give you the opportunity to speak to whether or not you are a transphobic. Well, I can tell you that I’ve received more letters from transsexual people supporting me than opposing me. And I never said anything really about transsexual people, about their existence, although that was the first thing that I was accused of doing. I didn’t say that transsexual people didn’t exist; I said that gender identity, gender expression, and biological sex do not vary independently, which they don’t, and so all this issue is in some sense only peripherally about transsexual issues.

It's more essentially about gender issues, and then on top of that, and I think it's the biggest issue, is it's a free speech issue. Okay, let us continue to explore all of those issues that you have just raised, and why don’t we do this? Let’s take a moment; we're going to explain a few basic things here.

The issue of so-called non-traditional pronouns goes together with non-traditional gender identities. New York City, for example, recognizes 31 such gender expressions. In other words, besides man and woman, there are 29 other gender expressions, for example, pangender, queer gender, gender fluid, crossdresser, bigendered, gender blender, and the list goes on.

And Nicholas, this is where I want to bring you into the discussion because you teach this—you teach trans studies. So, if you would give us a brief primer on so many gender identities that in your view require non-traditional pronouns.

Basically, it's not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex, and I'm a historian of medicine. I can unpack that for you at great length if you want, but in the interest of time, I won't. So that's a very popular misconception.

It was like a YouTube debate; it was one hour long, but I showed about five minutes, and then some—I mean, the students were very interested; I could tell that all of their eyes were on the screen. And after, when we had a debate, there were people of all opinions, and like from what I could see, it was a very friendly debate. Obviously, this person who had an issue did not express it to me; they just went straight to whoever.

I don't—I don't really know what happened, so I'm just— for some additional context: you came from UT? No, no, I said himself from SFUO. I see you worked like one of Jordan Peterson's students? Yeah, so just to give you some context that of Jordan Peterson is he's a figure that's basically highly involved with the alt-right; he lectures about basically like critiquing feminism, critiquing trans rights.

I'm familiar, like I Rosie, I follow. Okay, so the thing is can you shield people from those ideas? Am I supposed to comfort them and make sure that they are insulated away from this? Like, is that what the point of this is? Because to me, that is so against what a university is about; so against it! I was not taking sides; I was presenting both arguments.

So the thing is about this is if you're presenting something like this, you have to think about the kind of teaching climate that you're creating. And this is actually—these arguments are counter to the Canadian Human Rights Code. Ever since I know that you talked about C-16, ever since this passed, it is discriminatory to be targeting someone due to their gender identity or gender expression.

So bringing something like that up in class, not critically—and I understand that you're trying to—like it was critical. How so? Like I said, in the spirit of debate. Okay, in the spirit of the debate is slightly different than being like, okay this is—this is like a problematic idea that we want to unpack, but that's taking sides. It's like it’s taking sides for me to be like, “Oh, look at this guy; like everything that comes out his mouth is BS, but we're gonna watch anyway.”

Okay, so I understand the position they are coming from and your positionality, but the reality is that it has created a toxic climate for some of the students. Hey, you know how many—it's great! Oh, how many? Okay, one? Yeah, it might be. I know I have no concept of how many people complain, like what their complaint was. You haven't showed me the complaint.

Yes, I understand that this is upsetting but there's also confidential matters; the number of people is—special. Yes, yes, is it one or multiple students who have come forward saying that this is something that they were concerned about and that it made them uncomfortable? If this is, for example, a trans student, this is basically debating whether or not a trans student should have rights within one of their classes, and that's not something that is really acceptable in the context of the kind of learning environment that we're trying to create.

It would be the equivalent of debating whether or not, you know, a student of color should have rights or should be allowed to be married. Do you see where this is not—this is not something like that's intellectually neutral that is kind of up for debate? This is—the Charter of Rights.

But it is up for debate! But I mean, you're perfectly welcome your own opinions, but when you're bringing it into the context of the classroom, that can become problematic and that can become something that is—that creates an unsafe learning environment for students.

But when they leave the university, they're gonna be exposed to these ideas, so I don't see how I'm doing a disservice to the class by exposing them to ideas that are really out there. And I'm sorry; I'm crying; I'm stressed out because this to me is so wrong!

Can I mention the gendered violence, gendered and sexual violence policy? Yeah, please! So I agree that it does gender violence; I can just include sexual violence. But it also includes targeting folks based on gender, so that includes transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, all those sorts of things are protected under the policy, and so those are things that Laurier has upheld as values, as well as the Ontario Human Rights Code.

And so those are things that we're responsible for—not impacting our students in that way. I'm not spreading transphobia! Okay, so what I have a problem with is I didn't target anybody! Who did I target? How by telling them ideas that are really out there? By telling them that? By telling them really? It's not just telling them; it's legitimizing this as a valid perspective. This is another valid perspective.

In a university, it’s all perspectives are valid—that's not necessarily true. This is something that's being debated in current society, and I don't feel the need to shield people from what's going on in society!

Okay, to imagine that this is happening in university, it's just bad! Okay, so just to give you a context, also, within all of this is happening Laurier's being blanketed with white supremacists' posters currently. There's another debate in society which is whether or not North America should be a set of white nationalist states and that it should be ethnically cleansed of other people; that is also a current debate in society.

Would you show something in your tutorial that you had, you know, white supremacists and non-white supremacists debating whether or not other people should live in North America? Is that something that you would show? If that was related to the content of the week and we were talking about right-wing speech bubbles, maybe it depends on the content.

Like, I mean if there's really ideas that are existing out there like that, then I mean look, the thing is like I don't see what's transphobic about showing a video during Petersons; he's a real person; he's out there! He is a real person who has engaged in targeted behavior that are targeting of trans students in the particular—like basically daxing them, if you know the term—like giving out their personal information so that they will be attacked, harassed, so that death threats will find them.

This is something that he has done to his own students; he has done to other students, and this is also something that the students are aware of. So this is basically like playing—not to kind of do the thing where everything is kind of compared to Hitler—but it’s like neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo, you know, police from Gamergate.

This is the kind of thing that departmentally in terms of like critical communication studies and in terms of the course of what we're trying to do is diametrically opposed to everything that we've been talking about in the lectures. Faculty and administration at Wilfrid Laurier University reacted in a number of different manners to the release of this tape.

Information I’m going to first read you some excerpts from the independent fact-finding report commissioned by Wilfrid Laurier University President Deborah McClatchy. She said: "I believe it is time for some clarity around the events of the past few weeks here at Wilfrid Laurier University stemming from the very regrettable meeting that followed the showing of a TVO clip by a teaching assistant during a tutorial.

There were numerous errors in judgment made in the handling of the meeting with Miss Lindsey Shepherd, the TA of the tutorial in question. In fact, the meeting never should have happened at all. 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. There was no wrongdoing on the part of Miss Shepherd 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. 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. The ensuing discussion also needs to be handled properly; we have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question."

So after Deborah McClatchy commissioned an independent fact-finder, Lindsey Shepherd was completely exonerated. I'll put a link to where you can read the university president's entire response to the disciplinary meeting in question. Now, this is how Deborah McClatchy sums the situation up: "For those who have chosen to use this incident as an indictment of Wilfred Laurier University or the plight of Canadian universities in general, I say your is unreasonable and unfounded."

Well, that really is the question, isn’t it? Was this a unique occurrence, consequence of the misbehavior, shall we say, of two ill-informed professors and an administrator, or was this actually diagnostic of the genuine state of Canadian universities, perhaps universities in the Western world? We have to review the evidence at hand first.

We have what happened at Wilfrid Laurier itself. I would like to point out that the events there were more serious and less predictable even than what I had warned about when I made my original video. I assumed that people would be could be prosecuted for failure to use preferred pronouns, and I was objecting to that as an example of compelled speech, but I never imagined that a teaching assistant would be accused of breaking provincial and federal laws, Bill C-16 specifically, for daring to show a video about people discussing such issues on a public television station and then also accused of being a transphob, which is, let it be noted now, a crime under the Criminal Code provisions of Bill C-16.

Furthermore, in the aftermath of her release of this discussion, Shepherd was accused of all of the right-wing attributes that had been leveled at me, all of which are also arguably prosecutable under the pages of Bill C-16. Now, we don't want to underemphasize the importance of this. Remember that these were two faculty members and as well an administrator, Adria Jewel, who is hired precisely for this purpose.

So that's the first piece of evidence. Next, we might consider the response from others at Wilfrid Laurier University itself as well as professors and pundits outside that university in other departments and institutions. I'm going to start with a letter that was written by 20 members of the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier, which is the same department that houses Rambo Khanna and Pimlott.

Here's what they had to say about the matter: I'm going to paraphrase: "A meeting with Shepherd was secretly recorded and sent to the media by that TA. This act sparked columns and op-eds that rushed to assess the meeting, generalizing from this single event a diagnosis of our program, the university, and the state of higher education in Canada.

We welcome the widening range of perspectives on this situation that are beginning to emerge in the public sphere. We recognize that the meeting was mishandled; we specifically acknowledged the power imbalance in the meeting as Dr. Rambo Khanna acknowledged in his open letter to his TA. In future meetings where serious matters pertaining to the conduct of TAs are under discussion, we acknowledge that students should be encouraged to bring someone representing them and their interests. We would support a graduate student initiative to unionize TAs, which could provide student employees with a grievance process and other forms of support in cases such as this one.

As we understand it, Dr. Rambo Khanna did not operate unilaterally when he called a meeting with his TA; rather, we believe he acted in response to a disclosure made by one or more students to university offices set up to provide confidential support. Upon being notified of this disclosure, Dr. Rambo Khanna, as course instructor, understood that he had a responsibility to act in line with university policies, including those laid out in the gendered and sexual violence policy."

Now I'm going to interject here for a minute; that's a very interesting point because President McClatchy has basically complained that Rambo Khanna and Pimlott and Jewel herself acted outside the policies that the university has established. However, the faculty members writing in support of their colleagues claim that the reason that Rambo Khanna and Pimlott and Jewel acted in the manner they did was because they were following those policies. So which is it?

Now here's my two cents for what it's worth. My suspicions are that the policies are written so badly, like Bill C-16 itself, and the surrounding policies at the Ontario Human Rights Commission that either of those interpretations are possible. It's convenient for the university to disavow responsibility for the actions of its faculty member and its administrators, and it's convenient for the faculty members and administrators to say that they were just following policy, and it's not clear at all that the independent fact-finding council has settled that to anyone's satisfaction either way.

It's serious business! Back to the letter: "While the free speech of a single individual has dominated discussion surrounding this situation, academic freedom is also a decisive term in this context. Dr. Rambo Khanna exercises academic freedom as a course supervisor by setting parameters for the multiple tutorials that supplement his lecture. It is within the scope of a supervising professor’s academic freedom to have workplace meetings with TAs regarding how course material is taught."

Alright, so I have to interject again: it isn't obvious to me that this meeting with Shepherd constituted a normative workplace meeting with a TA regarding how course material is taught, and the fundamental reason for that is the appearance at the meeting of the administrator Adria Jewel as well as the numerous accusations that were leveled at Shepherd. So I think that that sentence is disingenuous at best.

We maintain that the use of materials that invite controversy into the classroom need to be approached with pedagogical care and forethought. Public debates about freedom of expression, while valuable, can have a silencing effect on the free speech of other members of the public. We uphold the rights of trans, non-binary, and queer folk to be addressed in our classrooms in ways that they define. Those in positions of authority in the classroom—faculty, instructors, teaching assistants—are not sitting equally around the table with students. Instead, they have a responsibility to foster an environment of mutual respect and critical thinking, one wherein students should never feel that either their grades or their well-being could be impacted because of their gender, sexuality, race, class, or any other facet of their identity.

We appreciate that our university has mechanisms through which students who feel unsafe, unfairly treated, or have experienced intolerance can make appeals and find support and resources to help them. We also acknowledge that we can do a better job of making students aware of these mechanisms. We are always so grateful when students do approach campus offices for reporting problematic classroom situations, as their courage makes us do our jobs better. We thank you for coming forward; you are such valued members of our community.

Charges that our program shelter students from real-world issues or fosters classrooms inhospitable to discussing contentious issues from different vantage points seem to us simply preposterous. 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. Commentary on this event in the press and social media has emboldened individuals who see themselves as noble defenders of free speech to intimidate our faculty and students to the point that protective measures have been taken in an attempt to secure their safety.

Okay, so another bit of commentary is necessary there. So there was a concerted effort made by the neo-Marxist, postmodern, radical leftist types to paint Lindsay Shepherd as the perpetrator, and the faculty members and the administrator who were involved in this issue as the true victims, and that's where this bit of conceptualization is coming from.

Perhaps the most remarkable of such comments about Shepherd was broadcast on our national broadcaster, CBC TV's Sunday Scrum, where a number of journalists—Vicky Mochama, John Ibbitson, and Susan Riley—were discussing People of the Year. It was Vicky Mochama that made the comments that I've clipped. "John, who would your pick be?" "Another young woman, Lindsey Shepherd, who we have heard a lot about. She was a young teaching assistant at Laurier University who was called on the carpet for showing a video of Jordan Peterson, and it was the recording of that disciplinary hearing that went viral and that really exploded the whole issue of the debate that's occurring within the social sciences and humanities on the right of freedom of expression, the right of freedom of research versus the right of protection, the right to safe spaces, the right not to be subject to aggression. This is a virulent debate that's happening on university campuses across the country.

Some of us have written about it in the past but it has to be said—well, no matter where you are in this debate, it was Miss Shepherd and that tape that blew this entire issue open and made it a part of the national discourse, and for that she deserves great credit."

You disagree? I think that she is someone that exists and I think a lot of people responded to her for the same reasons—they tend to respond to things, which is that she’s a young crying white girl. But there are lots of moments in which the academic freedom conversation could have been had, and guts has been skipped over serially. And I don't think the choosing appropriate person to have launched this conversation because, as it turned out, she leans hard right and some of her choices—well, whether you like what she sees or not, we're having this debate here on this show now and we're having it because of Miss Shepherd."

Back to the letter: "Against this politics of revenge, we acknowledge the moral imperative to support and protect our colleagues and students. We urge our colleagues at Laurier and beyond to monitor carefully how this event has been framed and taken up."

Another bit of commentary for me: I would also encourage colleagues at Laurier and beyond to monitor carefully how this event has been framed and taken up. I guess that's exactly what I'm doing now! We agree with Laurier's president that we live in an increasingly polarized world. Understanding the forces and discontent driving this polarization, including how they are at play in this situation and with what consequences, is a collective task in which we all have a stake.

And 20 undersigned faculty and affiliate members of the Department of Communication Studies signed this. Although the signatories of this letter admit that the meeting was mishandled, they do not say much about how, with the exception that Shepherd was not provided with independent counsel or support. To the contrary, they state that Rambo Khanna et al. did nothing wrong except Shepherd's lack of independent representation. And if they did do something wrong, it was merely because they were following policy, which was laudatory and admirable in its intent, if not in its implementation.

Now the Wilfred Laurier Faculty Association also weighed in on this issue and here is the gist of what they had to say. I'll put a link to the entire letter in the description of this video, but this is what they considered most worthy of note: "To be clear, WL UFA condemns the violent speech and actions that have unfortunately become a daily occurrence on our campuses. In particular, the harm that has been leveled at our trans community and its supporters is unacceptable. WL UFA stands in solidarity with our LGBTQT community as they continue to battle their way through walls of ignorance and oppression—walls that seem to have been disproportionately fortified in the last few weeks."

So that's commentary on the Lindsey Shepherd affair from the Faculty Association representing all of the professors at Wilfrid Laurier University. No comment whatsoever of substance on the nature of the meeting itself, only an expression of concern for the hypothetically and very poorly documented, by the way—unsafe conditions for faculty and students that have arisen at Wilfrid Laurier University in the aftermath of the release of Shepherd’s tape of the meeting.

Now, I said that I was speaking to junior high and high school students at the beginning of this video, and so far I've only talked about the state of our universities, but I'm doing this in providing this extensive background because universities provide the teachers for our public schools, as well as the destination place for the most academically able of the students who come through the school system. Thus, before making my recommendations, which I will do with all seriousness, I have the document discontent thoroughly.

I'm therefore going to talk about the response to the Shepherd affair outside of Wilfrid Laurier University before returning to the point at hand. I'm doing that to demonstrate that the state of affairs indicated by Lindsey Shepherd's tape is by no means unique to Wilfrid Laurier itself. I'm going to start with a few video clips featuring Professor Reynaldo Walcott of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education.

These clips are taken once again interestingly enough from TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Walcott recently appeared on The Agenda to discuss the events I'm speaking with you about today. I chose to highlight Walcott because he's director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education, and I see is known as perhaps the most influential educational institute concerned with public school curriculum in all of Canada.

And therefore an organization whose decisions are of critical importance for determining the nature of what's taught from kindergarten all the way through high school—not only in Ontario but because of its influence all across Canada and perhaps beyond. I firmly believe that Walcott's attitude is indicative of the ideological stance that characterizes the philosophy that is taught to those who will be the teachers of young people in the public school system in Canada.

The incidence at Wilfrid Laurier University have certainly provoked a debate within academia and beyond on finding that sweet spot between freedom of expression and respecting the diversity of the student body. Is it possible to satisfy both of those legitimate aims? Let's find out! Can we welcome in alphabetical order Shannon D, a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, Emmet McFarland, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, Thomas Merritt, a Canada Research Chair in genomics and bioinformatics at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Janus Teen, founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and Reynaldo Wolcott, associate professor in social justice education at BoiSE, the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education.

Okay, so a couple of things: one is that I take a long, long view on this. So what we were actually seeing today in 2017 is a long cultural war that has been waged in a university. In the 60s when women's studies—and I happen to be the director of the new studies at the same university as Janice—when women's studies and black studies broke into the North American University, there's been a consistent push against them from the 60s until the present.

And part of this debate around free speech, around academic freedom are ways to diminish the fundamental impact that women's studies and Black Studies and other ethnic studies has had on the university—all the way up to having women as presidents and women as vice-presidents in our institutions. I teach difficult material all the time; my students—I don't have to give trigger warnings; I don't have to do any of that.

It's not about what's in our books that's at stake here; it's about a reframing of the university where people like myself, indigenous people, queer people are making a demand on an institution that had, until recently, locked us out. And we're saying that our voices matter too, and we're saying that the ways in which the languages of academic freedom and free speech have been framed within the context of the university have often provided pathways in particular for straight white men to say really cruel, harmful, hurtful things.

And words do hurt, and now we're responding to that, and we're saying, no, this can't happen! This kind of happened in our workplaces where we come to study and so on. This is a cultural war that's being waged within a particular institution, and we should be extremely clear about that. This is a pushback against the way from which academic scholarship has actually revealed underpinnings of the university as a kind of white supremacist logic.

Our senior administrators jump into PR mode, not addressing what's happening inside the university but to quell the shouting voices largely of the right-wing outside the university. I see this every day at my university, University of Toronto, with the ongoing Jordan Peterson matter, right? The response has not been to say women's studies, Black Studies, African Studies—these kinds of studies have been tremendous contributions to the university; instead, there's been a profound silence as though the work that folks who work in those areas do does not matter.

That overall wealth and generative intellectual spirit fear of the university, and that is their fundamental flaw, that where we've seen or seen administrators become managers in favor of the donors, in favor of a scared right-wing mom—you never see the so-called left actually getting that kind of response from university administrators!

Yeah, I don't agree with you on that. I think it's much more subtle and it's much more complex, actually, the role of university administrators. Their role is not to get into those debates. What really matters is that all the programs you talked about, which are very important and, from my perspective, a core part of the university thought, if and faculty members and students feel free to come into the classroom and have these debates.

The role of university administrators, fundamentally beyond everything else, many of them are scholars in their own right, but their role in their current jobs is to protect those rights. But their silence is an abrogation of those rights by their very silence! By the very silence, what they’re saying is that some voice says, “Madam Ward and others within the context of things.”

Do you think that's true?

Well, I think, again there’s a confusion here. I think having you call a marketplace—and I don’t—I call it an Agora, which is a different thing—but an open public square—not a marketplace—an open public square of free debate, not only for faculty members where academic freedom has been but for students. Students also have to feel free to say things that may be unpopular, may be unconventional, may be risky, but not illegal!

No, of course not illegal! Right? We had marketplaces on a course where people debated other people's humanity, as well! Right now, what we do is in classrooms, we have people debating whether or not trans identities are—

But that's how universities evolve, and that's how they improve.

Second, they evolve. But also saying that some things are intolerable. What is the fear of saying that some forms of speech are intolerable in the world? We already have limits on speech. We've seen it happen in the university around BDS; we've seen it happen—the world is really a Part IV!

We've seen the university and many skillful kinds of ways limit speech. Clearly, it's morally and ethically bankrupt! The petition has harsh terms, as I can, to debate other people's humanity. If we can't begin there, then there's something fundamentally wrong with the university of the institution.

This seemed to be one of the confusing aspects of the situation at Laurier, insofar as one of the professors who was upgrading the teaching assistant for the way she conducted the class didn't seem to understand what the Canadian Human Rights Code prevented or didn't prevent, covered or didn't cover.

Do you wonder whether faculty need a bit of a refresher on what's legal or illegal in their classrooms, let's say? His name is Professor Rambo Khanna. He found himself in a very difficult situation. He's also an untenured man of color. And we know, I've been a professor for over two decades; I know that as a young tenured Black professor, when I had white TAs, they often felt that they could do the course better than I could too.

And they often over stretch their responsibilities as TAs. I am sure that in the context of this one particular incident, there’s much more surrounding that professor's own experience with this young white woman, but she raised this environment speaks to this longer, deeper history.

Again, that the best academic and scholarly work in women's studies, Black Studies, and other—what I'm gonna have to use this term—sub-al disciplines have been raised in which is that, you know, we see that kind of response when it's a young white woman. We see that kind of response when it's a white woman in Parliament, right?

And it's not just about hypocrisy; it's about a long-embedded history of who matters, who counts. This is about a culture war where representative democracy has had to yield more space to people who've been normally shut out. And as we come into these institutions and we ask for their transformation, things are beginning to fray. Much of this is about the crisis of whiteness taking place in the context of the university.

It's the crisis avoiding us.

The crisis of whiteness is that white people are no longer now to simply say and behave in ways that they could, for instance, in the 50s, in the context of the university. We now push back on it! We now call it illegitimate; we now call it intolerable!

Now that we've talked about universities and those who teach the teachers and the ideologies that possesses them, say we're going to move a little bit closer to the school system itself. I want to focus on the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario and the Toronto District School Board. These are institutions that are unique in some senses to Ontario but I believe they are reflective or perhaps even lead the way in the development of the kind of curricula that are or soon will be used across Canada and the rest of the Western world, given how fast information now travels.

The first question we might ask is what should children and young adults be taught and not taught from kindergarten through high school? My answer to that is quite straightforward: they should be taught to read and write and speak skillfully and gracefully, and that should be done with a minimum of political bias.

If you agree with that sentiment, however imperfect you might find it, then you need to realize that it is not in the least the guiding principle of the current public education system. The people who are teaching your children no longer believe, for example, that children can be taught without political bias. They also believe that their particular political viewpoints are so self-evidently and finally correct that it is proper and just to concentrate on indoctrinating them into children as early as kindergarten, regardless of what their parents or anyone else might want.

I do not believe that this is a goal shared by even a majority of teachers, and many have written to me indicating their dissatisfaction, but a small, noisy, domineering, victimhood-claiming coterie of radically left-wing thinkers have commandeered the controls and are steering the ship where they want it to go, screaming bloody murder if anyone dares to question or worse oppose.

Both the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, which operates at the state level, and the Toronto District School Board, which operates at the level of the city, have explicitly adopted a social justice program, and if implemented, curricula based on its principles from kindergarten through grade eight, with similar programs operating in the remainder of junior high and high school.

The ETF, O Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, remembers, is equity-oriented. This means equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity, and that is a radical left-wing, even Marxist goal. They describe their own organization as a "social justice Union," and have produced educational material aimed, in their own words, at fostering a climate of social justice in Ontario.

This material is part of the "social justice begins with me" initiative. The ETF O claims furthermore that the education system is a key means of delivering messages around inclusion, diversity, and welcoming environments. They have developed a curriculum of children's literature aimed at delivering precisely this message, thus bending art, as ideologues always do, to the purposes of propaganda, justified by their belief that their ends justify their means.

The social justice and equity project encompasses all elements of the curriculum, including language arts, mathematics, science and technology, and the arts. Even the very act of reading is taught from a neo-Marxist/postmodernist radical left perspective as students are encouraged, after finishing a given book, to identify the power claims of the author and to note which groups have been excluded from consideration by that author.

The Toronto District School Board, for its part, has its own social justice action plan, committed as it is to fairness, equity, human rights, and economic egalitarianism. That is the slogan of a political manifesto, not a proper statement for an Administrative Board whose proper role is the local governance of the education system.

No matter the TDSB, unabashedly announces its progressive agenda, with no consideration whatsoever given to the fact that indoctrination and education exist at precise cross purposes to one another. Their policies continue: the TDSB has a shared responsibility to contribute to positive social change both locally and globally. Learning about and engaging in social justice issues such as equity, diversity, abuse against women, poverty reduction, and environmentalism will make school more relevant and meaningful for all students.

It will also ensure, as much as this can be done by fiat, that students within the system adopt the political stance deemed appropriate by their administrators and teachers. Now, make no mistake about it: I know perfectly well that there is a need for right and left-wing viewpoints. The right has a proclivity towards counterproductive stasis and sameness and has to be balanced by the more innovative thinking that is part and parcel of the psychological processes that also drive left-wing political belief.

So my objection to the indoctrination of children by the state and city has nothing specifically to do with dislike of the opinions of those who occupy what is after all half of the political spectrum, but the fact that such views are a necessary part of balanced public debate by no means justifies transforming public education into a system of indoctrination, and that is exactly what has happened.

It has to stop! It has to stop now. Many people have already discussed with me their intent to pull their children out of the public education system because of this transformation, but that is not the proper solution. The system belongs after all to the parents and children who use it, and it is not right that any faction bends its function to their own use.

So I'm going to recommend something radical. I have no idea how to set the universities right in any simple manner. As some of you know, I've started working on an online humanities university, but that is a major project unlikely to bear fruit until years in the future.

The humanities, as they stand, broadly speaking, geography, history, languages, and literature, gender studies, cultural studies, as well as many of the social and applied sciences—anthropology, sociology, social work—as well as law and the faculties of education, most specifically, are occupied by radical left neo-Marxists who will stay in their positions for decades into the future. The corruption that characterizes their academic practices has spread widely into the general culture, political and corporate, as well as educational, although it is only the latter that concerns us at the moment.

I think the only real hope of forestalling further deterioration of this sort that would require, for example, large-scale exodus from the public school system—which I think is inevitable if present trends continue—is for the users of such systems, schoolchildren and young adults and their parents, to put a stop to its politicization.

We have now reviewed evidence indicating widespread ideological corruption at the level of the professorial administration, university department, university and higher education systems in general, as well as a refusal to admit to that corruption and a proclivity to name-call, deride, shame, and protest when such issues are brought to light. Such corruption, particularly although not uniquely, typifies the faculties of education, where those who teach your children are in turn taught.

Because of this, the public education system becomes politicized, and that politicization is broadening and deepening, presenting social danger in the form of the involuntary indoctrination of children and compromising the proper function of public education itself, which is the creation of autonomous, self-governing, free-thinking individuals.

So I am recommending the following concrete actions affected and concerned families should first discuss the issues and formulate a plan. I think the following two books are invaluable: one more approximately locally and one more distally. There's a book called "Understanding Post-Modernism" by Steven R. Hicks. The whole book provides a good introduction to the problem, but the first chapter in particular provides a solid overview.

I think "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is also required reading for many reasons, not the least of which is his masterful analysis of the relationship between radical left-wing thinking and the absolute collapse into tyranny and catastrophe that characterized all such experiments in the course of the last 125 years.

More directly, I think students should, with the backing of their parents if possible, leave their junior high and high school classes if any of the following topics arise. This means they should stand up, note their objections to the content and say, "This sounds like indoctrination to me rather than education, so I’m leaving."

And then leave! Perhaps they could encourage a classmate/friend to videotape their actions and post it on YouTube. It wouldn't take very many students performing such an act to produce a very powerful effect, and it is certain that many who won’t have the courage to do so will agree secretly that such action was necessary.

Here are the topics I regard as indicative of indoctrination rather than education: diversity, inclusivity, equity—conveniently these form the acronym DIE, which is exactly what the philosophy underpinning their grouping and use should be encouraged to do! White privilege, systemic racism, gender.

I'm not claiming that there is nothing to be learned about such topics or even that they shouldn't be discussed. What I am saying is, if they are brought up in an elementary, junior high, or high school classroom, the odds are very high that the lesson to be learned will be one driven by ideological/propagandistic concerns rather than one aimed at the inculcation of knowledge, wisdom, or skill.

Here are the words again: diversity, inclusivity, equity, white privilege, systemic racism, and gender. There will be mistakes made with such an approach; some who discuss issues such as inclusivity and equity are going to be more reasonable than others.

But that does not change the fact that the philosophy driving the pushing forward of such topics is essentially ideological and propagandistic. So I think such active resistance will get the point across very effectively.

It is too bad that it has come to this, but in my opinion, it has! Think long and hard about it! My feeling is this: If effective action is not taken now to counteract the politicization of the public school curriculum, the need for such action will merely increase and it will take much more to forestall the process later.

Pick your poison. Good luck! The best to you and your family, and Happy New Year!