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The value of their mea culpas approach, if not collide with, zero

More to the point, our honoured protagonist in this affair, Lindsay Shepherd, also scaled the apologies low on the down slope. With the clarity and directness now established as her hallmark, she wrote: “Moral of the story: A university must be repeatedly publicly shamed, internationally, in order to apologize…. Even then, ambiguous about free speech.”

Apologies, as a priority tactic in damage control, are getting quite a workout these days — from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey to Charlie Rose — not that I am attempting to conflate the open bathrobe gambits of Weinstein and Rose, or the crotch expeditions of Spacey, with the Wilfrid Laurier shenanigans. That would be like dragging a Hitler speech into equivalence with a three-minute clip from TVO’s The Agenda. An utterly unthinkable operation we all agree.

Forced apologies come perilously close to a contradiction in terms, the point of an apology being the willing recognition of a genuine wrong and sincere regret for having caused it. Rather than, as in Laurier’s case, a desperate hope to pacify angry donors and reel back the good will of an outraged and astonished public.

Forced apologies come perilously close to a contradiction in terms

May I summarize the points so far by saying that my positionality on their apologies is problematic and my problematics on their positionality is profound.

The real mess here, however, is that they are choosing not to see the full problem at all: that their dealings with Shepherd are but a particular of a general phenomenon, a parable, if you will, of a collapse in the understanding of the university, what education is, and how it is being delivered.