So they crossed the line into criminal harassment and the cucked University administration still hasn't fired or charged them for it!
http://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-investigators-report-into-wilfrid-laurier-universit-vindicates-lindsay-shepherd
Christie Blatchford: Investigator's report into Wilfrid Laurier University vindicates Lindsay Shepherd 'No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video'
From here:
Christie Blatchford: Investigator's report into Wilfrid Laurier University vindicates Lindsay Shepherd
'No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video'
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Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd has been vindicated, her interrogators sharply criticized, by the independent investigator who reviewed the bizarre incident last month that saw Shepherd called on the carpet for daring to show her class a video clip from a televised debate featuring Jordan Peterson.
In early November, the 22-year-old Shepherd, a graduate student, showed a short excerpt from the debate between Peterson, the controversial University of Toronto psychology professor, and Nicholas Matte, a lecturer at the U of T’s Sexual Diversity Studies program, about the use of gender-neutral pronouns.
The full debate, moderated by Steve Paikin, had aired months earlier on TVO, Ontario’s public service broadcaster.
Shepherd was hauled into a meeting with her supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, the head of her program, Herbert Pimlott, and bureaucrat Adria Joel from the Gendered Violence Prevention and Support Program.
During the meeting, Shepherd was accused of the equivalent of “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler” by not first denouncing Peterson and his views, was identified as “transphobic” and told she was not to show any such videos again and that “one student/many students” had complained about her.
The news clearing Shepherd of wrongdoing – and revealing there never was a complaining student — came in an announcement posted Monday on the Wilfrid Laurier University website by university president Deborah MacLatchy.
MacLatchy, who is the only person who will see the full report from Toronto lawyer and investigator Rob Centa, was unequivocal.
The meeting at which Shepherd was browbeaten “never should have happened at all,” MacLatchy said in the statement.
“No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video,” she said.
“This was confirmed in the fact-finding report.”
MacLatchy didn’t say how, in the absence of a complaint, the interrogation of Shepherd came to be in the first place.
But the logical inference is that if there was no complainant, one or another of the professors may have taken the matter into his own hands, and invited Joel to sit in on the meeting to lend it an air of bureaucratic formality.
While Shepherd said Monday in a telephone interview “I was happy when I saw” the announcement, “I could never have imagined there was no complaint at all.”
That would mean, as she put it, “It (the meeting) was total abuse.”
Howard Levitt, the Toronto lawyer who represents Shepherd pro bono, was concerned by the lack of specificity in MacLatchy’s promised corrections.
The university president, for instance, said the incident highlights “the need to enhance our faculty and TA (teaching assistant) training,” and pledged to make such training mandatory in the future for “both TA supervisors and teaching assistants.”
That leaves open, Levitt said, the suggestion that “Lindsay’s behaviour was not as they would like and that she should have been supervised better.
“If this is not intended as an implicit criticism, then why would they not say that she did precisely what she should have done in showing both sides of the debate…?”
MacLatchy did say clearly “There was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. 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.”
But she added that all instructional material “needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context” and noted “the entire discussion also needs to be handled properly.
“We have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question.”
But, Levitt said, if MacLatchy believes, as she said, that the conduct of Rambukkana, Pimlott and Joel “does not meet the high standards I set for staff and faculty,” why didn’t she make a clear finding of wrongdoing on their parts?
MacLatchy also said “the interviews conducted by the fact-finder confirmed that the rationale for invoking” the new Gendered and Sexual Violence Policy “did not exist.”
“It was misapplied and was a significant overreach.”
As a result, the policy will be reviewed, its oversight tightened.
The fact-finding process was but one of the university’s two-pronged response to the Shepherd incident.
The other is to strike a task force on freedom of expression that is to develop a statement for the university.
Membership is to be decided by the end of December.
Seven seats in total, or the majority of members, are to go to the university’s faculty association, five of whom are to be directly elected.
Twenty-three nominees are running for those seats, the National Post has learned, and only three of them appear, from the statements they were asked to submit, to be overt defenders of free speech.
A half dozen others appear neutral on the issue, but the majority have either signed petitions of support for the school’s “transgendered community” or expressed support for the non-existent complainant in the Shepherd matter.
The task force is to report back by March.
HOWEVER .....
Christie Blatchford: Wilfrid Laurier investigation into Lindsay Shepherd affair complete, but public won't see report
Shepherd’s sin was to show her class a short clip of a televised debate involving the controversial Jordan Peterson without first denouncing his stance against gender neutral pronouns
The lawyer appointed to “gather the facts” of the Lindsay Shepherd controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University has finished his investigation and is preparing his final report.
Rob Centa made the comments in a note Friday to Howard Levitt, the Toronto lawyer who is representing the 22-year-old Shepherd pro bono.
She is the graduate student and teaching assistant whose browbeating last month at the hands of two Laurier professors and the acting manager of the school’s “Gendered Violence Prevention and Support” program prompted a firestorm of reaction.
According to the professors, Nathan Rambukkana and Herbert Pimlott, and manager Adria Joel, Shepherd’s sin was to show her class a short clip of a televised debate involving the controversial University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson without first denouncing his stance against gender neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “zher.”
Shepherd was identified as “transphobic” at the meeting and sanctioned by having to submit her lesson plans in advance.
Rambukkana has since issued a lengthy apology to Shephard, as has university president Deborah MacLatchy.
Levitt had written demanding Centa resign in the wake of tweets he made, before he accepted the Laurier appointment, in which he appeared to be an ardent supporter of diversity, arguably even at the expense of limits on free speech.
For instance, in the recent Law Society of Upper Canada debate over whether forcing lawyers to submit a “statement of principles” confirming their obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion was a form of “compelled speech,” Centa praised a colleague who spoke in favour of “advancing diversity.”
“Your tweets were, in my view, broadly supportive of compelling support for diversity over free speech,” Levitt wrote Centa on Dec. 4. Centa replied that “I have never taken a position on this case” and pledged to approach it “with an open mind.”
When The College Fix, a U.S. conservative, student-run website, ran a story this week about Centa’s earlier tweets, Levitt renewed his concerns.
“I am asking, on behalf of my client, that you recuse yourself and step down immediately,” he wrote Centa on Thursday. “If you choose not to step down, I am asking Dr. MacLatchy, who we understand appointed you, to replace you with someone who all parties would find acceptable.”
It was that letter Centra replied to Friday, saying, “I see no reason to recuse myself and will not be doing so. I addressed your concerns about a reasonable apprehension of bias in my previous letter.
“I have completed my investigation and will be finalizing and submitting my report to the president.”
His report will remain private, though bizarrely, MacLatchy has pledged to act “on the recommendations that come out of the report.” Since it will stay secret, no member of the university or public will ever know if Laurier follows through.
The university, via spokesman Kevin Crowley, has denied suggestions that Shepherd’s employment was at risk in Centa’s probe.
“There is no assumption on the part of the university that Ms. Shepherd did anything wrong,” Crowley told the National Post in a Dec. 8 email.
“All of the people at the meeting were and are employees of the university. Consequently, the review relates to employment and personnel matters.”
On another front, another spokesperson for Laurier, Lori Chalmers Morrison, says that the membership of the Task Force on Freedom of Expression, another of the school’s formal responses to the Shepherd situation, should “be finalized and announced next week.”
This task force is to focus on freedom of expression and academic freedom, she said, whereas Centa was to “gather and report on the facts of the recent situation … the task force and the fact-finding are not related” and the university “will not be removing Rob Centa from the fact-finding exercise.”
Shepherd herself was nominated to the task force, as a representative of graduate students, but the Graduate Students Union then decided its president would take that seat, about the same time she said that “transgender and non-binary students” have been discounted in the Shepherd story.
And just this week, the university’s faculty association president, Michele Kramer, issued a statement condemning “the violent speech and actions that have, unfortunately, become a daily occurrence on our campuses (Laurier has one in Waterloo and one in Brantford, Ont.)” and proclaiming it “stands in solidarity with our LGBTQ2 community as they continue to battle their way through walls of ignorance and oppression…”
Given that the association, according to Kramer, has a role “in helping to draft the composition for the Task Force,” it has been necessary for it to “refrain from certain public statements.”
Kramer said in the statement that the association has been beleaguered with requests from members with “diametrically opposing points of view” for the union to “intercede or to make public statements along various, diametrically opposed, lines of support.”
Not once in the Dec. 12 statement did Kramer mention freedom of speech.
The association’s priorities, she said, are the protection for members, particularly Rambukkana and Pimlott; support for faculty who were interviewed by Centa, and working with the university administration to repair “campus relations and university reputation.”
• Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter:
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