In Ontario and in Alberta, university decisions about balancing free expression and protection from harm will be an important test of recent university policy shifts pertaining to free expression.
The manosphere may not strictly be centred on misogyny, but in young men’s search for connection, truth, control, and community at a time where all are increasingly uncertain and ill-defined.
Why did Vintage Classics make the baffling decision to ask controversial psychologist Jordan B. Peterson to write the forward to an abridged edition of ‘The Gulag Archipelago?’
Free speech may protect offensive speech, but we degrade this central right when we see it as simply the right to offend, regardless of the impact on others.
Though the cultural origins of free speech are progressive, there is nothing actually liberal about the current crop of free speech warriors in the Canada and the United States.
Kanye West is making headlines for his support of Donald Trump and remarks about slavery being a choice. The rapper has also signalled he’s a fan of controversial Canadian professor Jordan Peterson.
Social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró’s work reminds us of the urgency to bring all psychology into the orbit of liberation. Doing so allows a necessarily ambitious conception of liberation.
Most Canadians are more than happy to support free speech, believing it to be the foundation of democracy. But for speech to be free it must be aligned to freedom itself.
Jordan Peterson is now a right-wing darling for his views on everything from transgender people, the #MeToo movement and political correctness on campus. But he’s not saying anything new.
In such a polarized age, universities and colleges should uphold the core values of liberal education by asserting, through their policies and practices, the reasonable, rational middle ground.