Article content continued

During the meeting, Shepherd was accused of the equivalent of “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler” by not first denouncing Peterson and his views, was identified as “transphobic” and told she was not to show any such videos again and that “one student/many students” had complained about her.

The news clearing Shepherd of wrongdoing – and revealing there never was a complaining student — came in an announcement posted Monday on the Wilfrid Laurier University website by university president Deborah MacLatchy.

MacLatchy, who is the only person who will see the full report from Toronto lawyer and investigator Rob Centa, was unequivocal.

The meeting at which Shepherd was browbeaten “never should have happened at all,” MacLatchy said in the statement.

“No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video,” she said.

“This was confirmed in the fact-finding report.”

MacLatchy didn’t say how, in the absence of a complaint, the interrogation of Shepherd came to be in the first place.

But the logical inference is that if there was no complainant, one or another of the professors may have taken the matter into his own hands, and invited Joel to sit in on the meeting to lend it an air of bureaucratic formality.