This much about Lindsay Shepherd is impressive: the size of the bubble of entitlement that surrounds her. She feels entitled as a 23-year-old to a job in academia before even graduating while other masters in arts graduates toil without jobs and in obscurity.She feels entitled to being shielded from pushback after belittling her peers and seniors.She feels entitled to millions of dollars from a lawsuit all the while building a national brand.Shepherd is the Wilfrid Laurier student who in November secretly recorded a disciplining session with her professors who accused her of crossing a line in her duties as a teaching assistant. She tearfully pushed back, released the recording to media, where she was propelled by mostly older white journalists, and found support among so-called free speechers, who hailed her as a hero, a resister of the perceived degradation of higher learning.Read more:Opinion | Free speech fear-mongering is the elite equivalent of ‘It’s OK to be white’ postersTeaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd suing Laurier in case that raised academic freedom questionsOpinion | I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerousThis week, Shepherd sued her university for $3.6 million. Her statement of claim, untested in court, alleges harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence and constructive dismissal. The suit claims “attacks” on her “have rendered her unemployable in academia resulting in her abandoning her previous ambitions of obtaining her PhD or even teaching at a university as a masters graduate.”There’s something chicken and egg-ish about this claim. Is Shepherd unemployable in academia because she won’t do her PhD or is she not doing a PhD because she’s unemployable? One can argue about whether Shepherd’s introduction of gender-neutral pronouns in a class on technical writing and grammar, which then led to at least one student co ...
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