Lindsay Shepherd is a graduate student and teaching assistant in communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Teaching first-year students about pronoun use, Shepherd showed a short clip from a television debate about gender-neutral singular pronouns — and specifically, about whether speakers and writers should be required by law to honor the pronouns that other individuals choose for themselves. As Shepherd tells it, she was not taking sides; she was presenting a debate and inviting students to comment. Later, one or more students complained. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on what followed.
Part of what followed: a meeting in which two faculty members and a staff member questioned Shepherd and opined about what happened (and about much else). The recording of that meeting offers a deep experience of the Kafkaesque. No one will tell Shepherd who or how many students complained, or the nature of the complaint or complaints. Shepherd’s presentation of a current debate about language is deemed by her interlocutors to have created a “toxic climate.” Shepherd is told that she has targeted “trans folks” and committed an act of “gender-based violence” and transphobia. Even as a faculty member tells Shepherd that there are “two sides” to every story, it’s clear that he and his colleagues have already made up their minds about what happened.
What might be the most extraordinary moment: “Your role as TA is not really to be teaching about the politics of grammar; it’s to be teaching grammar.” And yet teaching grammar includes teaching the use of singular pronouns, which, in English, are gendered — which is to say, political. Someone then asks Shepherd if she’d be willing to stick to “more traditional” matters in grammar. And yet a “more traditional” presentation would likely prohibit any consideration of gender-neutral singular pronouns. As I said, Kafkaesque.
Lindsay Shepherd describes herself as “a reasonable leftist.” The conclusion she has reached about her university, as presented on her Twitter page: “Confirmed: WLU is a mental institution.”
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December 19: An investigation has exonerated Lindsay Shepherd of any wrongdoing. From a statement issued by Wilfrid Laurier president Deborah MacLatchy:
There were numerous errors in judgement made in the handling of the meeting with Ms. Lindsay Shepherd, the TA of the tutorial in question. In fact, the meeting never should have happened at all. No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video. This was confirmed in the fact-finding report. . . .[A specifically Canadian context for this controversy: Bill C-16. See also a recent post by Geoffrey Pullum, unrelated to events in Canada: “I’m on the same side as my non-binarist and gender-neutral and transsexual friends,” Pullum writes, but he thinks of singular they with a personal name for antecedent as ungrammatical.]
There was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepherd in showing the clip from TVO [TVO: TVOntario, an educational television station] in her tutorial. Showing a TVO clip for the purposes of an academic discussion is a reasonable classroom teaching tool. Any instructional material needs to be grounded in the appropriate academic underpinnings to put it in context for the relevance of the learning outcomes of the course. The ensuing discussion also needs to be handled properly. We have no reason to believe this discussion was not handled well in the tutorial in question.
