Two professors at Wilfrid Laurier University sat down with Jordan Peterson last week to discuss the recent Lindsay Shepherd incident.
After an audio recording of Wilfrid Laurier faculty interrogating teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd for playing for students a clip of a Canadian television debate featuring University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson was leaked, Wilfrid Laurier University’s president and a professor featured in the clip apologized.
In the leaked clip, Wilfrid Laurier Professor Nathan Rambukkana accused Shepherd of violating Canadian law. He also compared her decision to showing the Peterson debate clip to neutrally showing a video of Adolph Hitler.
Wilfrid Laurier University professors David Haskell and William McNally sat down with Jordan Peterson for a discussion that was released online on December 26. The conversation runs for slightly over two hours.
“I was beside myself. It’s happened again and this time this is really terrible. They’ve attacked a TA with claims that she has down mental harm and broken two laws,” Haskell said.
“What struck me as so remarkable is that even though there has been international outrage over this and an outrage of a sort that has only been disputed by a small amount of people, at least to begin with, Wilfrid Laurier responded [to the outrage] as if this was somehow debatable, as if there were two sides to the story here,” Peterson said.
“You have these other people who believe that maximum free expression, free inquiry, is not a good thing for a university. Those people are definitely congregated within the arts and humanities. And they justify it by applying a social justice lens, or what they would call it, a critical theory lens, to this entire issue,” Haskell added.
“Critical theory, in a nutshell, is an idea that came from the Frankfurt school in Germany, it transfer over to Columbia University, its some German scholars who are Marxist. What they are saying is that ‘Marxism as an economic unit or philosophy doesn’t work, it doesn’t transfer very well. Let’s transfer it over to a social theory. It’s a theory of oppressor or oppressed. It’s very bifurcated. You are either one or the other,'” Haskell explained.