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Dec. 8, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
50:06
The Culture War in Canadian Universities
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This video is a follow-up to the video I did called Jordan Peterson was Right.
I'll leave the link in the description so you can watch that to get the full context of what's going on here.
We are once again returning to Canadian universities to discuss Laurier University and what happened with Lindsay Shepard.
So let me get my rake.
The incidents at Wilford Laurier University have certainly provoked a debate within academia and beyond on finding that sweet spot between freedom of expression and respecting the diversity of the student body.
Is it possible to satisfy both of those legitimate aims?
Let's find out.
I actually really like the host of this program, but this question is completely malformed.
Freedom of expression is not at odds with the students who are considered to be diverse.
They also have freedom of expression.
The problem is that diversity doesn't actually mean people, it means social justice ideology.
And so what he really means is, is your right to freedom of expression compatible with social justice's ability to bully you into silence?
The answer is, of course, no.
So here's the lineup of the panel.
Shannon Day, Professor of Philosophy, University of Waterloo.
Emmett McFarland, Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo.
Thomas Merritt, Canada Research Chair in Genomics and Bioinformatics at Laurentian University in Sudbury.
Janice Stein, founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
And Ronaldo Walcott, Associate Professor in Social Justice Education at OISI, the Ontario Institute for Studies and Education.
I'm sure you can already tell who's going to be throwing around accusations of white supremacy.
So on the left-hand side of this panel are three problem professors who think that your rights are negotiable and who have abandoned liberal principles.
And on the right-hand side of the panel are two social justice advocates who still think liberal principles have value and haven't realized that eventually they are going to have to choose between them.
And this is where we begin with Janice Stein, who is a lady who is, in my opinion, the most correct when it comes to this discussion.
We have gone too far in limiting the debate if the debate is upsetting to people.
And that's where some of the excesses in all of this have happened.
So if some faculty, and the university does not ask for this, this is part of a larger social movement.
It's part of no university policy.
I think that's very important for people to understand.
And most of the university, most of the time, most of the day, we are engaged in free and open debate about issues.
There are parts at times where a faculty member will say, I'm going to warn you, I'm teaching a book in which there is violent sexual assault.
And if that upsets you, you can leave the classroom.
That's probably not a good thing.
To leave the classroom.
Right.
And to give that warning?
Even to give the warning, because most faculty members who are in touch with their students have a feel for the class, understand the context.
And what we're really trying to do in university is have an open discussion which creates more resilient people.
So then when they have to engage with these issues beyond the university, when they leave, feel confident and equipped to do that.
And she is, of course, absolutely correct.
Not only has the pendulum swung so far to the left that there are social justice tribunals on universities in Canada for wrong-thinking professors, but yes, it is also infantilizing the students to say that adult students at universities can't possibly deal with a certain set of ideas.
And the thing is, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you tell these students that they can't handle these things, then they will begin to believe that they cannot handle these things.
They will begin to act as if they can't handle these things.
And the professors themselves will have been the ones to do the disservice by priming them to be upset when they hear an opinion that they don't like.
Personally, I would view this as a failure of the professor's duty of care towards the students.
I'm sorry that you cannot simply coddle people for their entire lives, but that's a part of real life that you just have to accept.
Sometimes, some people will get their feelings hurt.
They have to learn how to deal with that.
There is no other option.
Okay, lots to unpack there, so let's start doing that.
Shannon, let me go to you next as we look for this sweet spot as the pendulum swings between erring on more free speech or erring in whatever word we should use here, protecting the individual needs of students more.
Where are you?
That's interesting, isn't it?
Whatever euphemism we should use here, because what we're really talking about is to maintain the ideological dominance of social justice in this space.
Social justice has come in with a demand.
You will not say certain things.
And this obviously contradicts a person's freedom of expression.
So now we need a euphemism that doesn't expressly say that people are being oppressed by social justice.
They are literally unable to say certain things because of social justice ideology, but nobody wants to say it like that, despite the fact that that is what is literally happening.
I want to shift the discussion from freedom of expression to academic freedom.
I think that a lot of the strong responses we see in the media have been because of the conflation of those two terms.
And I think that while freedom of expression at university campuses is important, I think it's academic freedom in particular that is tied to the mission of the university.
And that mission is scholarship, whether it takes a form of research, teaching, or service.
And so academic freedom is the freedom to engage in research, teaching, and service as scholars, right?
No, not right.
I don't agree with that at all.
I don't believe that the professors do have a duty of service that involves preventing some students or teaching assistants from saying certain things.
But if you want to conflate all of these things together, then maybe you could make a case for that.
But it's interesting how you say that academic expression and freedom of expression are somehow not linked.
Academic expression is a corollary of the principle of freedom of expression.
It doesn't make sense to say that these things are separate when one follows from the other.
Normally, I would think that this is deliberately slippery wordplay, but I'm honestly getting to the point where I'm not sure if the social justice academics even realize what they are doing.
The reason that I want to shift it to academic freedom is because that means that you're focusing in on particular kinds of research, teaching, and learning outcomes.
And there has been far too little discussion throughout this debate of what the outcomes are.
Well, that's very interesting, isn't it?
Because the outcome was a social justice tribunal that went viral and made Laurier University look absolutely terrible because it looks like some of the staff are engaging in Stalinist tactics.
But this is the problem, isn't it?
It's not just the outcome that must be moral.
The means to achieve the outcome must also be moral.
And I don't think that anyone would sit there and say that the professors who were bullying Lindsay Shepard were being moral.
So I suspect that Professor Stein and I teach in a very different way.
I teach in not only philosophy, but gender studies.
And I take real pains at the beginning of the class and throughout the term to try to cultivate a learning environment in which some of the people who have been historically less able to participate in that environment feel well supported.
Her classroom operates under the principles of social justice, which means she implements the progressive stack.
She is one of those people who listens to white men last and brown women first on the basis that they are white men and brown women.
You could say that you are privileging or disadvantaging some people on the basis of their race and gender, or you could say that you are a supporter of social justice.
Right.
And let me understand what that means.
Does that mean, using the example she just did, that you will give quote unquote a trigger warning to students that we're about to deal with something very heavy here.
If you can't handle it, you can leave.
Well, I don't use the word trigger warning because that's something that's associated with PDF.
I say, I'll occasionally give a caution.
I'll give students a caution occasionally about the content.
You ever had anybody walk out?
No.
No, I mean, one of the reasons that we give students a caution about the content that we'll be facing is so they can prepare themselves, so they're better able to participate, right?
If I suddenly shock somebody with, for instance, to use Professor Stein's example, violent sexual imagery in the content, then they don't have a chance to kind of study themselves and be ready to process it, right?
And so giving them the warning makes it easier for them to stay and participate and makes it easier in particular for people at the intersection of various kinds of historic oppressions to stay and participate.
And all of that is part of my academic freedom, right?
Yes, you may well have the freedom to do that, but like you are arguing from your consequentialist point of view, is it wise to do that?
It's got to the point now where the snowflakes are complaining about being called snowflakes because apparently it's damaging their mental health.
Pointing out that they are too fragile is too much for these people to handle.
This is what happens when you indulge people who wants to be coddled.
It's not good for them.
And the more you do it, the weaker they get.
So the more you have to do it, it becomes some kind of negative feedback loop.
And can you really say that this is doing the students a service?
Can you really say that this is helping them, preparing them for the real world?
Which is precisely what the lady was saying at the very beginning.
So according to social justice and the people who support it, the personal is political, which means everything is political.
And politics really is just the management of power in society.
And this is why you end up with straight white male allies.
An ally is a military term, a political term, to determine who is going to fight for you, who is on your side when you are presented with a power struggle.
This is what a male ally sounds like.
Sort of, I am the epitome of the problem with STEM, right?
So I'm a straight, able-bodied white guy, and there are lots of us in science.
That's right.
You're fucking a white male!
So why are you even here?
Because you are a white male and you admit you are part of the problem, you have an ethical duty to step down because you are currently occupying a position that could be occupied by a non-white, non-straight, non-male person, and that, in your opinion, would be better than you holding your position.
So you, my friend, are either a coward or a charlatan.
And we're about to find out which one it is.
So how do we improve that diversity?
And part of that is how do you get people to speak up in class and actually have a voice and have a discussion?
And then as a professor, how do I promote that at a genetics class, which is not necessarily, you know, traditionally an area for discussion?
And I think it's one of the things that we're learning how to do over the last 10 years, 20 years.
How do you start those conversations?
How do you engage people?
And then as an individual, how do I, as somebody who does not embody diversity, do a better job of being an ally and try to support that and grow that in the classroom?
And part of that is you're starting those conversations.
No, that's you living in denial.
You know, you have no legitimacy here.
There is absolutely no argument from social justice that enables a straight white man to have a position of prominence over non-straight non-white people.
Anything you do is a form of oppression until you relinquish all of your power to someone who looks differently to you.
You know this.
I know this.
Everyone listening to you knows this.
So what are you doing here, you coward?
Have any students expressed any discomfort to you because of that?
They haven't.
I am conscious of the fact that at some point I will offend somebody.
And I think that at that point I will have to figure out how to really graciously and appropriately apologize.
And that's part of the game.
And that's part of the game.
Because this is all a game.
Because that's all politics is, really.
It's all a game.
It's a competition.
It's to see who wins and who loses.
And you are preparing your defense for when you were attacked on the basis of your gender and your race and your sexuality.
You know, I know, the other people here know, but no one seems to want to say it.
You are a fraud and you know it.
So we will not be hearing any more from this man for the rest of this video.
His opinion is irrelevant by his own admission.
So as far as it is within my power to do so, I'm going to make him live by his own principles by deplatforming him on the basis that he's a straight white privileged man.
I know I sound frustrated, but seriously, it really is frustrating to have one group of people talking about power politics and what are effectively military tactics against another group of people who just don't understand how they are being engaged.
Listen to this.
Okay, Ronaldo, come on in here and tell us what your view is on how the pendulum, as Janice suggests, has swung too far to the let's protect students from as opposed to let's let free speech bloom.
Okay, so a couple of things.
One is that I take the long view on this.
So what we're actually seeing today in 2017 is a long cultural war that has been waged in the university in the 60s when women's studies, and I happen to be the director of women's studies at the same university as Janice, when women's studies and black studies broke into the North American university.
There's been a consistent push against them from the 60s until the present.
And there we have it.
A group of Marxists admitting that they, since the 60s, have been performing their long march through the institutions as part of a culture war against what otherwise would have been a liberal institution.
This is the crux of the problem of social justice.
It is a takeover, which is why Lindsay Shepard found herself in a social justice tribunal being reprimanded, disciplined for playing a controversial clip that really, outside of social justice, isn't controversial at all.
And part of this debate around free speech, around academic freedom, are ways to diminish the fundamental impact that women's studies and black studies and other ethnic studies has had on the university all the way up to having women as presidents and women as vice presidents in our institutions.
Yes, that's absolutely true, because the impact that they've had has been illegitimate.
It has not been done through liberal means, through a meritocratic, anti-discriminatory framework.
It is in fact the complete opposite.
It's anti-meritocratic.
It's pro-discrimination.
They are trying to get people installed in positions who have not earned them.
and who are literally being given preferential treatment on the basis of race and gender.
This is the crux of the cultural war against social justice.
And this is what social justice's war against the wider liberal culture has been about.
I teach difficult material all the time.
My students, I don't have to give trigger warnings.
I don't have to do any of that.
It's not about what's in our books that's at stake here.
It's about a reframing of the university where people like myself, indigenous people, queer people, are making a demand on an institution that had hitherto previously locked us out.
And we're saying that our voices matter too.
And we're saying that the ways in which the languages of academic freedom and free speech have been framed within the context of the university has often provided pathways, in particular for straight white men, to say really cruel, harmful, hurtful things and words do hurt.
And now we're responding to that and we're saying, no, this can't happen.
This cannot happen in our workplaces where we come to study and so on.
This is a cultural war that's being waged within a particular institution.
Could he make it any more clear than that?
This is a professor of social justice who is literally saying he is attacking the meritocratic nature of universities because in his opinion it favors straight white men and hurts his fucking feelings and that is the weapon that he is going to use against you to shut you down to deplatform you and to advance other people against you because of their race and gender.
That's what he is saying.
Why anyone at all will ever give any credence to this racist and sexist ideology that seeks power at the expense of merit, I have no idea.
But everyone on this panel fundamentally agrees that these people should be given a space on this panel.
If that's the case, why not just give spaces to neo-Nazis?
These people do not believe anything different.
They just disagree on the race and gender of the people who should have power.
That's it.
They don't believe it should be earned.
They think it is something that should be gifted from innate characteristics, which if you are a liberal, you should be screaming at right now.
And we should be extremely clear about that.
This is a pushback against the way in which academic scholarship has actually revealed on the pinnings of the university as a kind of white supremacist logic.
That doesn't make any sense.
How can he explain his own position at a university that perpetuates white supremacist logic?
How could a brown person become a professor in a white supremacist university?
Social justice warriors are race realists.
They do not believe that brown people are capable of the same academic achievement as white people in much the same way that the alt-right believe exactly that same thing.
This is why they can look at a liberal meritocratic system and say that is a white supremacist system.
But do you know what's really weird is that they're never prepared to point to any one individual within their own ranks who also is a white male ally and is also prepared to self-abnegate in the pursuit of promoting social justice, playing the game and say that person is the racist.
These Canadian universities are filled with people who will openly describe themselves as anti-racists and will yet decry the entire structure that they work within every goddamn day.
And they are the ones who comprise the hierarchy itself and say that that hierarchy is white supremacist.
I think I agree with most of what's been said in terms of, you know, I teach courses on the intersection of rights and public policy.
We talk about abortion, assisted dying, reasonable accommodation.
We talk about the issue that got this TA at Laurier in hot water.
I've never had a student complain.
I've never had to encourage a student to leave a classroom.
I think we underestimate students.
How diverse is your classroom?
At Waterloo, it's actually incredibly diverse.
In fact, I often have classes where white students are the minority.
Well, I'm glad to hear it.
But since you've consented to all of social justice's premises so far, I'm going to deplatform you too, because you're a white male and no one needs to hear from you.
Our senior administrators jump into PR mode, not to address what's happening inside a university, but to quell the shouting voices largely of the right wing outside the university.
I see this every day at my university at the University of Toronto with the ongoing Jordan Peterson matter, right?
The response has not been to say women's studies, black studies, African studies, these kinds of studies have been tremendous contributions to the university.
Well, what has social justice contributed?
What has it done to universities?
Has it made them freer or less free?
Because it seems to have contributed an authoritarian attitude amongst the professors who think that they can bully teaching assistants and students and whoever else into complying with everything they say.
And it's being done through emotional manipulation, as you will show us right now.
Instead, there's been a profound silence, as though the work that folks who work in those areas do does not matter to the overall wealth and generative intellectual sphere of the university.
And that is their fundamental flaw.
What are you going to cry?
Are you going to cry that you're being challenged?
You realize that you are the hegemons of the university.
People are afraid to speak out against you.
You are the ones holding the tribunals.
You are the ones who have three men or two men and a female administrator hovering around a young girl and making her cry because there was some wrong thing in your classroom, in her classroom.
That where we've seen or seen administrators become managers in favor of the donors, in favor of a scared right-wing mob.
You never see the so-called left actually getting that kind of response from university administrators.
Because you are the administrators.
You are the ones with the power.
You have co-opted these hierarchies.
You are the ones controlling how these things go.
This is why on the outside there is your quote-unquote right-wing mob who are genuinely scared of what's happening in these universities and want it to stop.
And you're realizing that you are actually coming up against resistance by people who don't give a fuck about your feelings.
So you can't manipulate them into doing what you want.
Yeah, I actually don't agree with you, Ronaldo, on that.
I think it's much more subtle and it's much more complex.
Actually, the role of university administrators is not to get into those debates.
What really matters is that all the programs you talked about, which are very important and from my perspective, a core part of the university, thrive and faculty members and students feel free to come into the classroom and have these debates.
The role of university administrators, fundamentally beyond everything else, and many of them are scholars in their own right, but their role in their current jobs is to protect those rights.
Which is why any of this is happening because currently, at least with Ram Buchana and Lindsay Shepard, their job is to infringe those rights.
How dare you express things on a university campus that go counter to social justice?
It's problematic.
But what I'm saying to you, Janice, is that often their silence is an abrogation of those rights.
By their very silence, by their very silence, what they're saying is that some voices matter more than others within the context of the institution.
I don't think that's true.
Well, we fundamentally disagree.
Let's look at what the University of Toronto, one concrete example, did when Jordan Peterson's work became very controversial.
They did what the university should do.
They organized a debate.
That was fundamentally flawed.
And Jordan Peterson's, it was not even the question of Jordan Peterson's work because he doesn't work in the areas that he's claiming to criticize.
That's not true.
Ironically, I think it might be exactly the wrong way round.
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist.
He is an expert in identity.
In fact, here's a voice clip of him explaining precisely what you don't seem to understand.
So I was watching Louis C.K.
The other night and you know he's a great philosopher and he said that, if you and I'm sorry, I don't normally use profanity, but Louis C.K. Does, and I am quoting him and he said, well, if you call someone an asshole, they can't actually object because it's not up to them, it's up to someone else to determine if that's the case, because that that identity classification is actually a socially negotiated process.
And that's the thing about your identity, the idea that your identity is a subjective construct.
It's like I'm being literally truthful about that.
That's what two-year-olds think and that's why they can't play with others.
So two-year-olds are egocentric and they cannot expand their conception of the world to include the minds of others.
They don't really learn to do that till between two and four.
And, by the way, if they don't learn that by four, they never learn it.
And so by the time they're four, what they learn is that your identity is actually a negotiation.
It's a negotiation from moment to moment and also throughout the course of your life.
So, for example, even a child who's pretending knows that you be the mom, I'll be the dad, we'll play house, you can take on that identity and I'll take on this one, but we both have to agree on what the identity is or we can't play.
The problem you're having is that Jordan Peterson can deconstruct your nonsense, because that's what it is.
It is a thinly veiled attack, a culture war you have been launching against universities and frankly, against white people in general, and it is the unbelievably altruistic nature of white people that accepts this.
Do you think you could go anywhere else on earth and go?
Well, you know what the majority of people here have, privilege.
Therefore, we need to be given things for free.
He doesn't.
He has no expertise in them.
If, If I, as a black faculty at the University OF Toronto, had engaged in the kinds of things that Jordan Peterson engaged in, I am sure I would have been drummed out of the university.
White kid.
Bitch, the only reason you have a position at the university is because of social justice and the fact that you are black.
You don't do anything else.
That's your career.
And judging by your Twitter handle and the things that are coming out of your mouth, it seems to be your entire fucking worldview.
I am black, therefore.
Can I ask you to address this?
Are students entitled not to be offended in your class?
I'm so glad you asked me about that because every time I hear the word offended, I twitch a little bit.
Oh God, me too.
Because I think that the rhetorical move of talking about offended students wrongly implies that there's something sort of subjective and capricious going on rather than again shifting the discussion to pedagogical design and to scholarship and to how we design spaces so that lots of folks can participate.
But there is something capricious and subjective going on.
This is a nice way of deflecting from the concept of offense as being a bludgeon with which you people use to get your way.
But frankly, that's what you're doing and you know it.
And if I've been the recipient of a lifetime of abuse and micro inequities because of my embodiment, my racialization or my gender identity or something.
You haven't suffered a lifetime of abuse because of micro inequities.
Next.
That's harder for me to participate in a classroom that constructs this notion of two sides that are equally just.
Well, that's too damn bad, isn't it, Bus Cup?
If it's harder for you, you'll just have to put in more work.
Because you know what?
Each person's different.
The amount of effort that they have to put in is different for each person depending on their own personal circumstance and you can't legislate for it.
So just deal with it.
I'm asking whether your students are entitled to be free from abuse.
Of course they are.
Are they entitled to be free from offense?
But my worry is that when we talk about offense, rather than talking about the harms that some students can suffer in a poorly designed learning environment, that we make it seem like the students are capricious snowflakes rather than focusing on the responsibilities of educators to try to design learning environments that are truly inclusive.
The problem is that in you designing learning environments that are, quote, truly inclusive, you turn your students into capricious snowflakes by pandering to their every feeling and whim.
Sometimes they're just going to have to deal with it and grow up.
Emmett, follow up.
I think there's an extent to which we're falsely putting.
I'm sorry, you might be making a good point, but you're a straight white man.
I'm not interested in your opinion.
Next.
The issue is really one about the role the university has played in helping to produce the very kinds of oppressions that many of us teach and research right now.
The university is deeply implicated in producing certain kinds of logics of white supremacy.
And if we don't grapple with that, then we can't actually begin to grapple with the claims that people who have been tradition who have been consistently oppressed and shut out now entering into the university are making claims on that institution to better respond to them.
This is what this is fundamentally about.
Yes, and he keeps saying it.
And I really hope that after this we can all just agree social justice is a power grab.
That's all it is.
These people are not legitimate academics.
They are in fact powermongers.
They are control freaks.
They are saying, listen, because something happened before I was born, this gives me justification to get something without earning it.
Social justice academics are freeloaders.
But also I would say to you, Steve, that what happens is it's not from women's studies and black studies that these kinds of things emerge from.
It's neutrally from white male scholars by the majority, often making claims about things for which they have no expertise in.
And then we find the entire institution coming into place to support their right to speech.
It's fundamentally a problem.
He's right that it's fundamentally a problem for social justice, but that doesn't make it fundamentally wrong.
It is in fact fundamentally right that the university does protect their rights to free expression and free speech.
It's just a problem for social justice because they're trying to control this.
And if these white, straight white males who refuse to be put under the yoke are allowed to speak up, then yes, that's a problem.
But fuck him.
Fuck his idea of what a problem for social justice is.
The power social justice has accrued in universities is completely illegitimate.
It has not earned it through merit.
It has not demonstrated itself to be superior.
It has been subtle and duplicitous and has attacked people without them even knowing.
With a smile on their face, crying out as they strike you, stop oppressing me, stop oppressing me, oh, won't you think of my feelings, you evil woman, Lindsay Shepard, you problematic woman.
Honestly, that these people have the goal to sit there and just act like they are the aggrieved party absolutely blows my mind.
They're given every institutional advantage.
They have so many programs in their favor.
Everyone on this panel just sits there and nods and they go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Things that happened before you were born were terrible and therefore you need my help.
Unbelievable to me.
But it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if he's been privileged by social justice.
It doesn't matter if there's unbelievable amounts of white guilt that give these people everything that they want.
It will never be enough.
Seriously, and engage and say, if there are scholars in the university who have no expertise, as you claim, who are speaking and writing about things which they are not really qualified to speak about, it's precisely when there's free debate and academic freedom that that kind of shoddy work is exposed.
And that's where I want to agree with what it is.
The marketplace of free ideas has not consistently worked for non-white people.
You should be honest about that.
Listen to what he's just said there.
It's not been perfect and we should be honest about that.
Okay, we can be honest that it's not been perfect.
But you don't get to have an unwarranted position like a priest just because something isn't perfect, you serpent.
I think we're, again, there's a confusion here.
I think having, you call it marketplace, and I don't.
I call it an agora, which is a different thing, but an open public square, not a marketplace, an open public square of free debate, not only for faculty members where academic freedom has been, but for students.
Students also have to feel free to say things that may be unpopular, may be unconventional, maybe risky.
But not illegal.
No, of course not illegal.
But she is completely right.
The students are not free to voice their concerns.
They are not free to speak as they would choose.
And the guy who is the social justice professor is arguing for their oppression.
And don't make the mistake of thinking that this goes both ways.
She is not arguing for the silencing of students of color.
She is just arguing for the freedom of the university.
And the social justice academics are arguing against it.
20 years ago we had marketplaces and agoras where people debated other people's humanity as well.
Right now what we do is in classrooms we have people debating whether or not trans identities are viable identities.
God, this is just infuriating to me.
He has sat there actually arguing whether white people should have the right to freedom of expression.
He is against it, just so we're clear.
And then he's complaining that not everyone accepts the subjective identity constructed by trans people being impressed onto them.
But that's how universities evolve.
And that's how they improve.
It's okay.
They evolve by also saying that some things are intolerable.
What is the fear of saying that some forms of speech are intolerable in a world where we already have limits on speech?
Isn't that amazing?
Because you're not free, why can we not make you even less free?
Because we're already inhibiting your freedoms, it's okay for us to continue inhibiting your freedoms to a greater extent.
We've seen it happen in the university around BDS.
We've seen it happen in Rome.
Israeli apartheid.
We've seen the university in many skillful kinds of ways limit speech.
Yes.
And you are on the team that wants to limit speech.
I love the way you bring up what is it, slavery and apartheid?
What has that got to do with social justice oppressing people in universities?
Apart from the fact that it kind of looks like you're going for a new form of apartheid.
Seriously, how long until white people drinking from the same fountains as black people is a microaggression or a form of oppression?
And that white people should have different drinking fountains because the black people want it.
But let me go back to Janice's original point, which is to say, are you denying those students an opportunity to develop resiliency skills by, in some respects, as some would say, infantilizing them?
Trans students are more resilient than anyone you have ever met because they have dealt with a lifetime of oppression and stigma.
Then you're admitting that they do not need special treatment.
Thank you very much.
This notion that they need to be introduced to Jordan Peterson's views in a classroom so that they know what the world is like out there is so ridiculously naive.
That's not the argument.
That's actually not the argument that Trent...
It's the argument that the TA is making.
Yeah, but that's actually not the argument.
Certainly trans students have a great deal of experience too much with those kinds of arguments and have heard them.
The argument is that Jordan Peterson, whatever you think of his expertise, he is a faculty member who has the right to academic freedom and that trans students are capable of dealing with that argument in a sophisticated way.
And so it's actually to me, that's the core of the argument, as you've just said, they're stronger than we think.
And therefore, it is possible to have a debate as long as they're in the room, they have the opportunity to speak, and everybody recognizes checkmaze.
That's where social justice loses the argument.
You either admit that trans people are weaker than non-trans people and need special treatment, or you carry on with your rhetoric of empowerment saying, oh, these people are strong and impressive and majestic and don't need any help.
It can't be both.
They're mutually contradictory.
You have to pick one and you pick the trans people are strong enough to get on with their lives without all of this nonsense, which incidentally is also my opinion.
I think they're strong enough too.
I don't think there's any need to social justice to dominate universities and stop them from being free.
I think everyone is perfectly capable of hearing these ideas and just getting on with their lives.
Back on this and then I'm going to throw to a clip.
I just want to notice again that one of the things that keeps coming up is this notion of the importance of debate.
A debate is just one means of learning.
It's just one means of communicating ideas.
And it's a pretty egonistic approach as well.
When we're dealing with ideas relating to people's historical and current lived oppressions, it seems to me that there are a lot of other communicative and pedagogical mechanisms available to us besides debates that don't then set up a polarization and tend to oversimplify.
So feel free to use them.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't use debate.
And like you said, trans people are more than strong enough to cope with it.
So we're fine.
We'll carry on and you have no objection here.
Jump in and jump.
I'm going to be clear that it's morally and ethically bankrupt.
I put this as in as harsh terms as I can to debate other people's humanity.
If we can't begin there, then there's something fundamentally wrong with the university as an institution.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I totally agree that's unethical, which is why it's really weird to see social justice warriors and a Texas student newspaper publish an article with the title, Your DNA is an abomination aimed at white people.
If that's not debating the fundamental humanity of white people, I don't know what is.
So go on, what were you saying about that?
Go on, what was your opinion on what social justice is doing here again?
It's morally and ethically bankrupt, but in as harsh terms as I can, to debate other people's humanity.
I totally agree.
You're absolutely right.
Social justice is morally and ethically bankrupt by your own standards.
Thank you very much.
This interview is such a catastrophe for the legitimacy of social justice.
I'm honestly, I was amazed watching it.
I was just like, wow, how can they be so blind as to undermine their own cause this way?
Let me jump in here because this became an issue on the floor of the House of Commons not too long ago.
The Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister a question about this.
He punted it to his science minister and here's how the exchange went.
Roland.
Mr. Speaker, will the Prime Minister join me in condemning the egregious crackdown on free speech at Laurier University?
You're here.
Mr. Speaker, our government is committed to creating open spaces for Canadians to debate and express their views.
In the free society, we may disagree with the person's views, but we must defend their right to hold them.
Wow, I was really expecting worse from the Canadian Parliament.
I mean, I was kind of expecting them to say that actually, you don't really have freedom because you're not allowed to say certain things.
But that was really, really liberal, really free thinking.
Really.
Unless those views promote hate.
There we go.
Okay.
Well, I guess we'll just cross our fingers and hope you define hate as a really narrow, really specific thing and not just broadly term it to any kind of criticism.
Intolerance and hate have no place in Canadian society or in our post-secondary institutions.
We will continue to fight to ensure the charter rights of Canadians are upheld and that every Canadian can feel safe and secure in their community.
That's pretty staggering mission, to be honest with you.
You're insisting that all people at all times feel a certain way.
That's a mission I would never assume for myself because I don't think I could ever fulfill it.
It seems like this is giving you an infinite mandate to continue with the oppression of social justice under the guise that some people are still having feelings that are not approved of by the government.
A point that I think you made really well is this idea of how we value ideas.
And if I can come back to a point.
No, you absolutely cannot, you white coward.
Your DNA is an abomination and you should resign in favor of a dark-skinned, non-male identifying person.
Fuck off.
Let's say his name, Professor Rambakuhan, found himself in a very difficult situation.
He's also an untenured man of color.
And we know, I've been a professor for over two decades.
I know that as a young, untenured black professor, when I had white TAs, they often felt that they could do the course better than I could too.
Oh, this is just brilliant.
Now, Professor Rambuchana, during his interrogation, leading the interrogation against a 21-year-old student teacher, is now the victim of that student teacher because he's black.
Despite the fact that he holds the power in the situation, he's persecuting her and no, but it's okay.
Suddenly, you know what other people think and you know how they feel and that means that Rambuchana is the victim of Lindsay Shepard.
Do go on.
And they often overstretch their own responsibilities as TAs.
I am sure that in the context of this one particular instance, that there's much more surrounding that professor's own experience with this young white woman.
Well, before or after he started persecuting her for sharing something that was on the wrong thing list.
Are you insane?
She is not the perpetrator and he is not the victim.
She was the victim of him.
That is how it was and there is no amount of racialized sophistry that is going to change that.
That Cher raised this in Parliament speaks to these longer, deeper histories again that the best academic and scholarly work in women's studies, black studies and other what I'm going to have to use this term sub-all disciplines have been raised in, which is that, you know, we see that kind of response when it's a young white woman.
We see that kind of response when it's a white woman.
Cher did not raise Khan in parliament, right?
And it's not just about hypocrisy.
It's about a long embedded history of who matters, who counts.
And you want to reverse that.
You don't want to neutralize it.
You don't want to make it so that there are no distinctions drawn by the institutions on the basis of these arbitrary characteristics.
That in the past, people were actually oppressed by systematically.
You're okay with systematic oppression.
The problem you have is that it was affecting brown people and not white people.
That's your problem with systematic institutional oppression.
This is about a culture war where representative democracies have had to yield more space to people who've been normally shut out.
And as we come into these institutions and we ask for their transformation, things are beginning to fray.
The university, as it looked in the 60s, it looks different now.
And 20 years from now, it's going to look different.
And we should be prepared for it.
It absolutely will.
And if I get my way in 20 years' time, there will be no social justice in universities.
It will just be one rule for all.
But please pay attention to how often he talks about this as a culture war.
That's what he is prosecuting right now.
And we have to be very cognizant of the fact that we are doing the same.
There have been an investigation of a student who made that kind of comment.
There could be all kinds of debate inside the university about whether it's about women's.
But there should not have been an official process launched.
And that's why I don't know.
And I don't, that's why I'm not sure if the university allows for the kinds of positions that a Peterson or a Shepard hold to take precedence.
Well, she said she didn't hold that position.
For the record, she said she didn't have to do that.
I said that a Peterson or a Shepard.
I'm not talking about her necessarily holding the position that he holds, but previous to the event, it's very clear what position she holds.
Are you calling her a white supremacist or a transphobe or something like that?
Because I don't know what you mean by it's very clear the position she holds.
Not really, actually.
But what I'm saying is using them as examples.
The university itself, in its normative practices, allow those kinds of positions to have credence.
And those are the kinds of positions that are often given weight and freight within the logic of the white supremacy university as we know it today.
Well, I suppose he is calling her a white supremacist then.
But yes, these things have credence because there is truth to them.
These things actually stand up to scrutiny, unlike social justice, which is why it has to spend so much of its time trying to silence problematic speech.
I've probably taught about 3,000 students over 10 years.
No one cares, you evil white oppressor.
Next.
But it demonstrates the crisis in whiteness.
That's why he's doing it.
Much of this is about the crisis of whiteness taking place in the context of the university.
What's the crisis of whiteness?
I can explain that far more honestly than he will.
Whiteness is a code word for meritocracy.
Whiteness literally means the practice in Western liberal democracies of believing that the person who is hired for the job should be the person who is best suited for the job, who has the best qualifications.
And the reason that we want a meritocratic society is because it's the only way to recognize the agency of the individual.
It shows that we acknowledge that someone who makes good life choices and who puts in hard work and who actually accomplishes something deserves to be rewarded for that.
And I'm sure you've noticed this theme by now, but with social justice, the opposite is true.
The mediocre, the lazy, the people who constantly make excuses for their own failures, they deserve to be rewarded under social justice because they are being oppressed by their own incompetence.
The crisis of whiteness is what he terms the effect of the meritocracy being undermined by people being privileged enough to be given positions without earning them.
The crisis of whiteness is that white people are no longer allowed to simply say and behave in ways that they could, for instance, in the 50s in the context of the university.
We now push back on it.
We now call it illegitimate.
We now call it intolerable.
We ask for better behavior, better practices, better policy.
I thank you very much for confirming exactly what I said.
It's not that you're better.
It's not that you're going to out-compete them.
It's that you're offended, that you aren't given the same privileges, even though you've not earned them.
And a big part of that is people calling out what a big bunch of fucking frauds you are.
And all of this could be avoided by simply not being frauds.
If every person in a gender studies degree or a social justice course had in fact done something productive, done something that would provide them with a career outside of the academy, none of you would feel like frauds.
None of you would need to police the speech and actions of others.
But instead, you've made your choice and now we are engaged in this culture war.
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