“This was an opportunity for the university to be like ‘it’s true, we should be able to have a debate, we’re sorry it became an issue and we’re happy to foster debate in the university environment,’ ” she said. “Instead, they’re being weird about it.”
Shepherd said the lesson to her communications tutorial class was focusing on the complexities of grammar.
Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can affect the society in which it is spoken in ways people might not anticipate. To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had probably been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.
The clip of Peterson debating sexual diversity scholar Nicholas Matte, she said, was meant to demonstrate ways in which the existence of gender-specific pronouns has caused controversy.
Shepherd said a student complained about the clip, which she showed to two tutorials of roughly 24 participants each. In response, she said, her supervisors censured her for airing the clips, told her she was “transphobic” for playing them and said she ought to have spoken out against the positions Peterson expressed during the excerpt.
She said she was permitted to keep her position so long as she agreed to file copies of her lesson plans in advance and allow faculty members to sit in on her sessions whenever they wished, constraints she said are not standard practice for Laurier.
She said the experience left her questioning the school’s commitment to academic freedom, a position Laurier maintains it upholds.
