Inviting trolls
Another free speech – teach the controversy – open inquiry – shut it down – listen and learn Item. Lindsay Shepherd invited a right-wing commentator to debate / speak at Laurier University, there were protests, Laurier declined to stop the event. Once the event got started someone pulled a fire alarm and that shut it down.
The talk was set to start at 7:15 p.m. ET. At approximately 7:20 p.m, a fire alarm was pulled and police evacuated the building, preventing anyone from entering the Paul Martin Centre.
Event attendees then moved to Veterans’ Green park, on the other side of campus, where Lindsay Shepherd, the organizer of the event, announced the talk was cancelled.
Shepherd, the co-founder of the campus group Laurier Society for Open Inquiry, said she’s “super disappointed” at the outcome.
According to Goldy’s Twitter account, the fire alarm was pulled before she was even introduced and presented on stage.
The speaker Faith Goldy tweeted “MARXISTS PULL ALARM” – which seems pretty stupid. Marxists? Not in any sense Marx would recognize.
“My view of these college leftists is more damaged than it used to be,” Shepherd said to CBC News, assuming the person who pulled the fire alarm was someone who opposed the talk.
“I had faith that we’d have a nuanced discussion where people can challenge the speaker at the end — obviously that was too much to hope for,” said Shepherd.
I think this is all a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I mostly share the general fatigue with students wanting to ban every single thing they disagree with, but on the other hand…nuanced discussion? With Faith Goldy? It seems vanishingly unlikely. And more broadly – there just isn’t any necessity to invite racists or misogynists or xenophobes to give speeches in order to find out what they think and have a debate with them. It’s easy to find out what they think, and to dispute it, without summoning them in the flesh. It’s easy to argue with racism or misogyny without face to face confrontations. What’s the point of the in person thing? Why Faith Goldy in particular? Is she a scholar?
Wikipedia doesn’t describe her as one:
She received her formal education at Havergal College and studied at Huron College at the University of Western Ontario. Goldy later graduated in politics and history from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, minoring in philosophy and physics. Goldy also began a Masters of Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance.[12] Goldy is a Christian, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.[13]
Goldy has been employed by a number of press and broadcast media organizations, including The Catholic Register, the Toronto Sun, TheBlaze, Bell Media, Zoomer Media, and the National Post. She is a former reporter with the Sun News Network and was employed by The Rebel Media, an online political and social commentary platform, where she presented political commentary in regular YouTube videos and a weekly show called On The Hunt with Faith Goldy.[14] On August 17, 2017, The Rebel Media fired her for being interviewed on The Krypto Report, a podcast produced by the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer.[15][16]
She has some graduate education and she worked as a reporter. I can’t really see the need to invite her to talk at a university in order to have a nuanced discussion, just as I don’t see the need to invite Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh to talk at universities.
I guess part (or maybe most or all) of the reason was to make the point that universities should welcome diversity of thought, and choosing someone conspicuously provocative was necessary to that. I think I see the reasoning, but I also think I don’t agree with it. It’s a stretch to call what “personalities” like Goldy do “thought,” so she’s not really a good example of diversity of thought. Shepherd has very good reasons for being sick of people who say “You can’t say that!” but I still don’t think that’s a reason to invite professional trolls to university (or student society) events.
It was supposed to be the first of a series of talks at Laurier titled Unpopular Opinion Speaker Series. If this was a ‘test’ talk it certainly proved Shepherd’s point. The protestors walked straight into the trap.
I’d agree that the choice of speaker was ill-advised at best, but I wonder if the outcome would have been different with any speaker deemed ‘unwoke’.
1. I don’t know, but it might have been. But
2. More to the point, a more reasonable choice of speaker would have been far more defensible.
I’m losing all sympathy for Shepherd. The flip side of “free speech” is “invite someone worth listening to”, and a lot of the people being shut down, aren’t.
“I’m losing all sympathy for Shepherd.”
This makes me reconsider just how “innocent” and “in good faith” her little Jordan Peterson video presentation really was. “Thought provoking” and “inflammatory” are not the same thing. How many repetitions are required before one can call something a pattern of behaviour? What’s the motivation of this student club? An evening of Devil’s Advocacy and JAQing off?
@4: I decided that fairly early on — yes, WLU and her supervisor both handled the situation improperly, but she was either clueless or disingenuous, and this is more of the same.
Really? I thought the flip side of free speech was shutting people up because you don’t like what they have to say. Which is what happened at Laurier.
“Flip side” in the sense of bargain or social contract, I think.
I regretted my irritable tone almost as soon as I posted my comment at #6. Sorry, Steve Watson.
Clearly, Shepherd seeks to use her moment of fame to launch herself into the ranks of the free speech grifters*. How very tiresome.
*I am newly delighted with this phrase and the clever analysis that goes with it, from a recent piece in GQ of all places.
And I no sooner posted the above than I clicked “next” and discovered that you’ve already talked about it. I shoulda guessed.
Subsidizing and providing platforms for crackpots is not ‘heterodox’ or a demonstration of free speech principles.
Announce a neo-Nazi/flat earther/anti-vaxx spox, then cross your fingers and hope that some over-caffeinated hipster trash will show up and smash some windows for your YouTube posting.
I do have some sympathy for the presumably naive student(s) who thought this was a good idea… We tried to set up something similar as members of an undergrad student union. Ours was related to a completely diferent topic, but motivated by the same sort of ‘let’s invite debate over some controversial topic’ idea. We tried to get in-house profs to participate and most of them were having none of it; I’ve since come to understand more about why they did so as I’ve grown older and more experienced. But I can certainly understand how the line between ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘inflammatory’ (as YNNB so pointedly put it) might not be as obvious to everyone as some of us might like to think. For better or worse, it also seems to be getting more difficult for faculty or admin to justify shutting down, or even advising against, student-driven events of just about any sort :-/
That’s just it, isn’t it – the line between ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘inflammatory’ is not as obvious to everyone as some of us might like to think. It would be nice if that situation could change.
Mind you, for some positions on some controversial topics there isn’t really anything but “inflammatory.” You don’t get academic types or serious public intellectuals arguing for plain old racism now – you get people sidling up to it via indirect routes. If you want a respectable representative of the “keep all the darkies out!!1” position you’re not going to find one; it’s the Steve Bannon types or nothing.