EDITORIAL: Side with freedom-loving Laurier profs

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The battle for liberty and academic freedom at Wilfrid Laurier University seemed to be going well.

After grad student Lindsay Shepherd’s poor treatment at the hands of her superiors, a group of professors and students rallied to her defence.

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A number of professors banded together to form a petition asking the school to enshrine a free speech charter on campus.

“It is our view that the university community would be best served – and would live up to its own values and mission statement – by enshrining, in writing, a commitment to protect maximally free expression, critical inquiry and open debate,” the petition read.

Sounds good to us. This past weekend these points were reiterated at a campus rally, featuring Shepherd and her supporters. The tide was turning against shameless campus indoctrination.

Not so fast though. Now, a much larger group of professors, mostly from the social sciences, have published their own call for action asking the school to go further down the social justice warrior rabbit hole.

The faculty say they’re “troubled by the events that have recently taken place on our campus and the impacts on trans, non-binary, and gender diverse students and faculty.”

They say students and faculty “are now being subjected to threats of violence, harassment, intimidation, and our campuses have become unsafe.”

If anyone at WLU is being assaulted and threatened with assault, that’s a serious matter. They should call the police and seek justice.

But they then go on to label “transphobia” as a form of campus trouble and we know, from the original audiotape provided by Shepherd, that progressives on campus seem to consider mere words as a form of violence.

Shepherd was censured for daring to show a few minutes of a public affairs program that featured University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson voicing disapproval of gender neutral pronouns.

These progressive profs call on “transphobia” to be “carefully monitored.” What does this mean? If it means calling the cops if someone is being assaulted, then we wholeheartedly agree.

But given the language games played by these social justice warriors, it could also mean bringing the thought police out in full force against the likes of Shepherd. That sort of madness must stop.