University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson is suing Wilfrid Laurier University and three faculty members for $1.5 million in a defamation suit.
Peterson and his attorney Howard Levitt filed the lawsuit when Wilfrid Laurier disciplined a teaching assistant after she showed her students a video from Peterson’s wildly popular YouTube channel. Levitt already filed a $3.6 million lawsuit against Wilfrid Laurier on behalf of teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd.
In the lawsuit, Peterson and Levitt assert that the faculty members made defamatory claims about Peterson in order to discredit him, which were captured on a recording secretly made by Shepherd. Among these defamatory claims was a comparison of Peterson to Adolf Hitler. Not surprisingly, the faculty members also questioned Peterson’s academic credentials, even though Peterson has been a professor at the University of Toronto for 20 years and was a professor at Harvard for a decade.
Ironically, one of the faculty members Shepherd recorded was from Wilfrid Laurier’s Diversity and Equity office, and claimed that the mere act of showing Peterson’s video in class made the environment toxic for students.
Hopefully, Peterson’s actions will send a message to university officials in Canada (and the U.S.) that unfairly maligning academics over their political beliefs comes with a hefty price tag.
Peterson and other academics, such as Bret Weinstein of Evergreen State College, who stand up against their students and employers on issues relating to freedom of expression often face mass campaigns to discredit them. Some professors, such as Nicholas Christakis and his wife, Erika, who resigned as residential community heads at Yale University, have faced such intense persecution that they choose to leave their positions rather than face continuing controversy.
Conservative students are already making headway in this area. College Republicans settled with the University of Washington for $122,500 after the university unfairly charged the group exorbitant security fees to host a conservative speaker on campus. A similar free speech lawsuit filed by College Republicans against UC Berkeley is currently working its way through the courts.
