The Graduate Students’ Association at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario shut down the school’s Veritas Cafe after its operator posted a job listing that jokingly stated it was looking to hire “a new slave.”
“I need a new slave (full-time staff member) to boss (mentor) around Veritas Cafe! We are an independent cafe (yah me) located on campus at Wilfrid Laurier University (parking sucks),” stated the ad, which was posted on Facebook by operator Sandor Dosman on November 22.
“We sell wake-up juice (coffee, espresso drinks), confidence booster (beer), dancing liquid (alcoholic drinks), life fuel (paninis, wraps, soups, salads and desserts),” it continued.
Pretty clearly a joke, right? Well, the GSA didn’t think it was a very funny one. In fact, it found it so not funny that it actually closed the entire cafe on Monday — leaving Dosman and ten other employees without jobs right before Christmas.
Dosman told the Toronto Star that he had run the cafe for four and a half years and is “still in shock” over what happened.
“It was just black and white, ‘You are done,’” Dosman said. “Now I’m out of the job and I have no idea what I’m going to do next.”
According to The Record, Dosman was escorted off of campus by two security officers after his firing.
As ridiculous as it may seem, the university is actually standing behind the GSA’s decision — explaining in a statement that it coincides with “the importance that Laurier places on being an inclusive, welcoming and respectful community.”
Dosman was escorted off of campus by two security officers after his firing.
Now, to be fair, the GSA has also stated that it does plan to reopen the cafe in January, and Dosman told The Record that he expects that “they’ll probably hire some of [his] staff back.” That’s certainly good news — but it doesn’t make the fact that the Veritas Cafe was closed in the first place any less ridiculous.
As one of the school’s ethics professors, Byron Williston, wrote in an open letter criticizing the closing, “I suppose it’s a sign of the times, especially on university campuses whose student bodies — undergraduate and graduate — seem to have been taken over by the terminally thin-skinned and self-righteous. Perhaps you should direct your moral outrage at some of the many real problems in the world rather than behaving like petty bullies.”
#related#Professor Williston is absolutely correct. Even if you didn’t like Dosman’s joke, there was still absolutely no reason whatsoever for the whole cafe to have been closed down over it, even if it will be for just a short period of time. It’s not like he was trying to hurt anyone. He was, as he told the Star, simply trying a new, fun approach to get more people to apply for the job. (Note: Dosman also told the Star that the approach did seem to work — for the first time, dozens of people applied for the position.) And even if you think he was terribly wrong, there is still no justifying how the GSA punished the rest of the workers by taking away their opportunity to earn money over a posting that they had nothing to do with. These were innocent people working a low-paying job who had that job yanked from them right before the holidays.
That certainly sounds like something that the social justice-y crowd should be fighting against, not responsible for — but when a blind adherence to social-justice dogma becomes the total focus of all decisions, that unfortunately can mean that logic has to take a back seat.