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As so many other idealistic young people, particularly those espousing any tolerance, let alone support, for conservative ideas, have been anonymously ground underfoot at universities for decades.

This without having learned the precise nature of the accusations against her, other than that they came from one or more of her students in a first-year “communications studies” course, apparently upset in some way about a class discussion she led on the use of non-gendered pronouns.

A discussion Shepherd set up by using a clip from TV Ontario — the province’s educational television station, for gawd’s sake — featuring Peterson, who opposes non-gendered pronouns, and another academic who supports them.

The audio tape reveals Shepherd’s interrogators unwilling even to listen to her side of the story as, her voice breaking but her dignity and counter-arguments intact, she fearlessly stands her ground.

What happened to Shepherd was grotesque and absurd, like something out of a novel by Franz Kafka, most famously in The Trial, in which the victim is persecuted by an unmovable bureaucracy, unable to defend himself because the precise nature of what he is being accused of is never made clear.

The belated, apologies to Shepherd by WLU’s president and the lead professor in Shepherd’s interrogation, while better than nothing, failed to address the substantive issue.

That is that this was an obvious case of workplace harassment and bullying of a subordinate by superiors, for which those responsible should be subject to serious discipline.

Shepherd, who describes herself as a “leftist”, but not one who believes in shutting down opposing views, wasn’t fooled, tweeting in the wake of the apologies: “Moral of the story: A university must be repeatedly publicly shamed, internationally, in order to apologize (oh, but keep the task force & investigation). Even then, ambiguous about free speech. Also, make sure to secretly record all meetings or they won’t take you seriously.”