Lindsay Shepherd
Lindsay Shepherd is a Canadian columnist who became known for her involvement, as a graduate student and teaching assistant, in an academic freedom controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario in 2017.
In November 2017, Shepherd played her communications class two clips of a debate with psychologist Jordan Peterson on Bill C-16, which added "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground for discrimination to the Canadian Human Rights Act and as an identifiable group to the Criminal Code. Following the class, Shepherd was summoned to a meeting with her supervisor; the head of her academic program; and an acting manager from the university's Diversity and Equity Office.
Shepherd recorded the meeting, during which she was asked about the video clips and told 'at least one' complaint about her class had been raised. Shepherd was accused of having created a "toxic climate for some of the students" by playing the clips and told she would have to submit a lesson plan to Professor Nathan Rambukkana prior to each class.
After she released the recording, an independent fact-finder hired by the university reported that the meeting should not have taken place, that "no formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy" had been registered, and that Shepherd had done nothing wrong by showing the clips.
After the tape's release, Shepherd became active online about issues of free speech and academic freedom. In 2018, she founded the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry at WLU, and in May that year received the 2018 Harry Weldon Canadian Values Award from Canadians for Accountability. The following month she filed a lawsuit against the university, the two professors, the third staff member and a student, alleging "harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, and constructive dismissal". Peterson also filed a lawsuit, for defamation, against the university and the staff members in the meeting.
Early life and education
Shepherd was born in British Columbia and raised in a non-religious household. Her mother teaches elementary school and her father is a youth counsellor. She attended Cariboo Hill Secondary school, Burnaby, before completing her undergraduate degree in communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 2018 she was awarded an MA in Cultural Analysis & Social Theory from Wilfrid Laurier University, after joining the graduate program in September 2017.Wilfrid Laurier University incident
Class
On 1 November 2017, Shepherd was teaching a WLU first-year undergraduate class, "Canadian Communication in Context". Discussing grammar and pronouns, she showed the class one two-minute clip and a second three-minute clip from The Agenda with Steve Paikin, a current-affairs program produced by TVOntario, a publicly funded channel. Broadcast in 2016, the context of the episode was Bill C-16, which added "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground for discrimination to the Canadian Human Rights Act and as an identifiable group to the Criminal Code. The bill became law in June 2017.The first clip featured the host, Steve Paikin, discussing gender-neutral pronouns with Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto. A critic of Bill C-16 and "what he sees as an intolerant left-wing in higher education", according to The Globe and Mail, Peterson was arguing against being legally compelled to use pronouns such as zie and zher or the singular they. He told Paikin that he was being asked "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 and that I also regard as dangerous", and described it as an "attempt to control language in a direction that isn't happening organically ... but by force and by fiat". The second clip, from the same debate, showed Peterson discuss the issues with Nicholas Matte, a historian, also at Toronto, who teaches in the Sexual Diversity Studies program. Matte told Peterson: "I don't care about your language use. I care about the safety of people being harmed."
After the clips were shown, a heated discussion took place among students in the class, some supportive of Peterson and others critical; one told a college newspaper that students had used the discussion "as an excuse to make fun of trans identities".
Meeting
According to Toby Finlay, an administrator with the university's Rainbow Centre, an LGBTQ support group, one student approached them with an expression of concern about the clips. The Rainbow Centre then spoke to Adria Joel, acting manager of gender violence prevention in the university's Diversity and Equity Office. On 7 November 2017 Nathan Rambukkana, Shepherd's supervisor, emailed Shepherd to ask that she attend a meeting the following day with him, Joel, and Herbert Pimlott, head of Shepherd's academic program. Shepherd's mother suggested that she record the discussion; the other participants did not know they were being recorded. Citing confidentiality, they did not show Shepherd the complaint, say who had complained, or explain how many complaints there had been; she was told only that "one or multiple students had come forward" expressing concern.During the 40-minute meeting, Shepherd was accused of having created a "toxic climate for some of the students" by playing the clips and adopting a neutral stance between the positions. Shepherd argued that students must be exposed to mainstream ideas, and that the ideas should be presented without taking sides. The professor compared the pronoun debate to discussing whether a student of color should have rights; that is, it is "not something intellectually neutral that is up for debate". Shepherd responded that the matter at hand was indeed "out there" and up for debate. Arguing that the ideas had been presented as a valid perspective, the professor compared the Peterson clip to "neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos from Gamergate." Presenting such material devoid of criticism was "diametrically opposed to everything that we've been talking about in the lectures", he said.
The professor added that Peterson's arguments were "counter to the Canadian Human Rights Code ", and that what had happened in class had been contrary to the university's Gendered and Sexual Violence Policy; the manager offered the view that it might have violated the Ontario Human Rights Code.
The meeting ended with Rambukkana asking that Shepherd send him her lesson plan prior to each class because there had been a breakdown in communication. This was the extent of her punishment, but Rambukkana said that he wasn't sure what else might happen going forward and that he had to discuss the matter with other members of the faculty.
Recording released, apologies
Shepherd released the recording to the National Post, as well as to a local newspaper and another on Canada's west coast. The National Post contacted her immediately, and Christie Blatchford ran the story in the Post on 10 November. WLU's president, Deborah MacLatchy, and Professor Nathan Rambukkana published letters of apology on 21 November. MacLatchy said of the meeting that it "does not reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires". In his apology, Rambukkana said he should have done more to support Shepherd as her course director and supervisor, and that he had reconsidered some of his positions since the meeting. He wrote that he regretted comparing Peterson to Hitler, which was "untrue and was never my intention".University inquiry
The university asked a lawyer, Robert Centa, to conduct an independent investigation. His report, which the university did not release, found that Shepherd had not violated university policies and that the meeting had involved "significant overreach". On 18 December 2017 the university president, Deborah MacLatchy, issued a statement saying that there had been "numerous errors in judgement made in the handling of the meeting". The meeting should not have taken place, she wrote, because "o formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video." She concluded that there had been "no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepherd in showing the clip from TVO in her tutorial".According to MacLatchy, the information about the class had been received via a staff member in the Rainbow Centre "from students who had been on campus talking about it. The policy was not designed to deal with those kind of comments and concerns not actually being raised through the process." In April 2018 she repeated that whatever issue had been raised about the clips, it "was not a complaint as the term is defined in the university’s Gendered and Sexual Violence Policy, which Mr. Centa reviewed in establishing his findings".
Lawsuits
In June 2018, Shepherd filed a lawsuit against the university, Rambukkana, Pimlott, Joel, and a graduate student for damages of $3.6 million, claiming "harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, and constructive dismissal". On 18 June that year, Peterson filed a $1.5-million defamation lawsuit against Laurier, Rambukkana, Pimlott, and Joel. His statement of claim alleges that he was compared to Hitler and portrayed as "sexist, misogynist, dangerous and racist" during the November 2017 meeting. In December 2018, Rambukkana and Pimlott filed a third-party claim against Shepherd, alleging she had had control over the recording and should therefore be liable for any damages Peterson suffered as a result of its publication.Subsequent activism
After the incident, Shepherd gave multiple interviews, including to newspapers and CBC News, as well as on YouTube shows such the Dave Rubin Report and Louder with Crowder, discussing the implications for free speech and academic freedom. She remained active online, gathering over 30,000 Twitter followers by December 2017. She appears in the 2019 documentary No Safe Spaces.In early 2018, Shepherd founded the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry. The LSOI invited Faith Goldy to speak at the university in March that year as the first in its "Unpopular Opinions Speaker Series". Before Goldy could speak, someone activated the fire alarm and the event had to be cancelled. This proved to be a pivotal moment for Shepherd and she stated the experience caused her to no longer consider herself a leftist in her Youtube video "GOODBYE TO THE LEFT." Another speaker was Frances Widdowson, an associate professor at Mount Royal College, Calgary, and co-author of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, who asked "Does University Indigenization Threaten Open Inquiry?"
The Boston Herald identified Shepherd in May 2018 as one of a group of intellectuals described as the intellectual dark web. On 7 February 2019, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announced that Shepherd was joining the Justice Centre as a "Campus Free Speech Fellow." As of 2019, Shepherd writes a biweekly column for The Post Millennial, a Canadian news site founded in 2017. As of December 2019, Shepherd has worked for the conservative organisation True North Centre.