Inside the fight between free speech and hate speech on Canadian campuses

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At universities across the country, contempt among right wingers is brewing—and lefties are swinging back –

Between the hours of 1 and 2 p.m. on Thursdays, Jordan Peterson briefly assumes the guise of an ordinary, tenured professor at the University of Toronto. His psychology classes, in a dimly lit auditorium on the second floor of midtown Toronto’s Sidney Smith Hall, are of the usual academic breed: a PowerPoint slideshow, a series of readings, and a half-empty lecture hall. In a class of roughly 150, only about a third show up, and of those that do, most spend the majority of the time scrolling endlessly through Facebook.

Nonetheless, Peterson fights hard for their attention. During his lectures, he paces around the room, his voice fluctuating in tone and dynamic as he waxes theoretical on a string of elaborate hypotheses. He likes to sporadically lock eyes with individual students in the first few rows, approaching them swiftly and raising his voice to get his point across. In one moment he’s dissecting the philosophy of Carl Jung, and in the next he’s reciting the contents of a dream he had the previous night (an incoherent recollection about posing as a Vitruvian man when suddenly the room fills with snakes). “Your mind is a very strange space,” he once told his audience, mid-ramble. “The minute you give it an aim, a genuine aim, it’ll reconfigure the world within keeping that aim—that’s how you see to begin with.” Most of his students let the statement pass, immersed in their social media pursuits.

Read full article here.

Jacob Lorinc – THIS – May 8, 2017.

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