Open Campus Initiative Hosts Lindsay Shepherd, Talks Free Speech

Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student and teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, spoke to an audience of around three dozen about freedom of speech on college campuses Saturday afternoon in an event funded by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

FIRE, a national organization dedicated to promoting free speech on university campuses, named Harvard one of its top ten worst colleges for free speech this year.

Last year, after Shepherd showed her class an interview with University of Toronto Professor Jordan B. Peterson, who advocates against the use of non-gender-specific pronouns, she was called in to meet with supervisors. She said they told her students in her class had complained about being shown the videos, saying they were transphobic.

The public event was held by the Harvard College Open Campus Initiative, a student-run free speech advocacy organization that brings speakers to campus to challenge conventional political correctness, which they say limits free discourse.

The Open Campus Initiative hosted Peterson himself for a similar discussion last April. The event garnered protest and campus dissent against Peterson’s appearance. Several transgender students said Peterson’s appearance at Harvard gave a platform to hate speech and threatened their safety on campus.

Shepherd discussed her experience at Wilfrid Laurier, and the aftermath of the video clip controversy. She said she made a Twitter just to deal with the fallout from the incident.

Wilfrid Laurier University has since said that it mishandled Shepherd’s case.

“I think the problem is when you treat a TA like an agent of social justice,” Shepherd said.

She said she showed her class the Peterson clips to expose them to another perspective on gender identity, in the spirit of the “active scholarship” she believes universities should prioritize.

“If we can’t talk about things, then how are we going to improve as people and work out our standpoints on things?” Shepherd said.

Shepherd said she has been inaccurately depicted as a member of the alt-right, because of its association with free speech advocacy in recent years. Shepherd said she thinks political ideology shouldn’t have any stake in the issue.

“I consider myself very moderate,” she said.

After the initial student-moderated interview, audience members were invited to ask questions.

One audience member asked Shepherd whether she would ever speak at a far-right event. She said she would, in order to prove that political ideology does not matter when advocating for freedom of speech.

“I like the way the time was structured. There was so much time still for questions, which is really important,” Olivia K. Bryant ’21 said. “Even if you hear about this story and you don’t agree with Laurier’s decision to exonerate her, for example, it’s really important to be able to come and question what’s going on.”

Emily M. Shoemaker ’21 said she attended the event “because it’s a perspective that I feel like we don’t get a ton of. We don’t always get to hear the stories where someone’s freedom of speech could have been violated.”

—Staff writer Simone C. Chu can be reached at simone.chu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @simonechu_.