This article discusses gendered violence and recent hate crimes. Readers looking for may access different resources through this website.
The aftermath of the University of Waterloo stabbings in June 2023 makes us believe safety and protection on campus is dead.
A university campus holds a plethora of opinions and beliefs, but it’s no place for ideologies that manifest as hate and violence.
Nearly two years after the incident at Waterloo, the now 25-year-old former student who stabbed two students and a gender studies professor was recently sentenced to 11 years in prison.
The attacker, Geovanny Villalba-Aleman, struck after asking and confirming the professor was instructing a gender studies class. Since then, many universities and professors have banned class schedules from being publicly shared.
While the courts and judges debated whether the act was committed with intent of terrorism or hatred—as premeditated crimes are more aggravating than impulsive ones—it won’t change the lasting consequences it still reaps today.
Though this was an isolated incident at Waterloo, the fear it instilled in professors and students of the 2SLGBTQ+ community a concerning e-mail from a Kingston local regarding their troubles with “toxic femininity” and “powerful women.” These events warranted shifts in the classroom and communications about lecture times and locations.
It’s devastating to see subjects with rich content and value to society be silenced from fear. Getting gender studies into Canadian university classrooms—from when it was first taught as Women’s Studies in the 1970s—hasn’t been easy. It’s a privilege for students eager to study it and a hard-earned reward for faculty who’ve spent years researching and studying the field.
Allowing hateful individuals to invalidate decades of work as “indoctrination” doesn’t uphold academic freedom—the right to teach, conduct and publish research, and engage in speech free from reprisal and discrimination. We must keep fostering a caring and inclusive environment if we want to keep enjoying freedom of speech.
And on university campuses, classes like politics, philosophy, religion, and gender studies expose students to a range of values they don’t necessarily hold. However, it’s crucial to understand the difference between espousing beliefs for indoctrination and bringing awareness to them in pursuit of higher knowledge. Without this diversity in values and beliefs, we risk living in isolated echo chambers, failing to learn collaboration, unity, and critical thinking.
Gender-based violence on school premises has happened before, including the anti-feminist mass shooting that killed 14 women in Montréal’s École Polytechnique in 1989. These shocking and blatant crimes show us hate and ideology can lurk in the background, secretly breeding into an agenda to harm people. There’s still no way to protect ourselves from it.
With hate and violence reaching new levels, we’re left to evaluate if safety and open dialogue can be balanced—if there’s a way to promote expression without sacrificing the voices and visibility of targeted groups.
Safety initiatives can always be in place, but locks on doors won’t stop people from harbouring harmful ideologies or worse, acting on them.
Learning to co-exist with differing views is a fact of living, and a healthy and critical value we must be reminded of. As educational institutions, universities must do a better job of teaching the value of respectful dialogue—if we don’t learn it where it’s most salient, we never will.
—Journal Editorial Board
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