Controversial guest lecture will go ahead tonight at Laurier despite calls to shut it down
Posted Mar 20, 2018 04:36:45 PM.
Last Updated Mar 20, 2018 08:35:25 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A high intensity situation is unfolding at Wilfrid Laurier, as a far right journalist with connections to White Supremacy will give a guest lecture Tuesday night.
Posters promoting the speaking event by Faith Goldy are being ripped from the walls around campus and torn into pieces. But the student group that invited Goldy to talk says her opinions will not go unchallenged.
The lecture was put together by TA Lindsay Shepherd and a new club all about the open exchange of ideas Shepherd is president of. She says they intended for the lecture to be a debate on immigration, with Goldy advocating against open borders. Five academics were invited to argue against Goldy tonight, but Shepherd says they all declined.
“It speaks to this culture of guilt by association,” says Sheppard. “Like you can’t be on stage with someone because if you do, you’re legitimizing their views.”
Shepherd says they’ll open the floor for questions, so that Goldy’s ideas can be tested against logic.
“Let’s not pretend that people don’t have these ideas. Let’s actually confront them. Let’s test them for their evidence,” she says. “Do you not have faith that students in this university can actually critically think and decide what they think is a valid argument or not?”
Alex Levant is a professor of Communications Studies at Laurier, and says allowing these opinions to have a platform at the unviersity is dangerous.
“Show me a Nazi that’s about free speech,” Levant says. “People are terrified. I do not feel safe among neo-Nazis … We have members of our community who are directly targetted by these people, including myself.”
Goldy was fired from The Rebel Media for appearing on an American neo-Nazi podcast. Shepherd says she knows Goldy’s ideas are unpopular, but the expression of opinions should not be limited.
Goldy will speak at the Paul Martin Centre a 7:15 p.m., while a counter demonstration is planned at The Quad on Campus before the talk.
“We dont want Nazis on our campus,” Levant says.
