Three people were hospitalized after a man entered a gender studies class on June 28 at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and started stabbing, the CBC reports. The university’s associate vice president of communications told the CBC that two students and a professor were attacked. He also identified the attacker, who is in custody, as a “member of the University of Waterloo community.”
According to the University of Waterloo’s student paper, the course was Philosophy 202: Gender Issues. A student in the class of about 40 people told the paper that a man between 20 and 30 years of age “asked the professor what the class was about,…closed the door, pulled two knives out of his backpack, and proceeded to attack the professor,” according to reporter Alicia Wang.
The university posted to social media roughly 30 minutes after the incident occurred, stating there was “no further risk to our campus community.” Those attacked are said to be hospitalized with “serious, but not life-threatening” injuries, a police spokesperson told CNN.
Professors reacted online to the news, connecting the incident to a rise in the targeting of schools and other academic environments by right-wing politicians and commentators. Jennifer Koshan, a law professor at the University of Calgary, recalled “coming of age” around the 1989 École Polytechnique shooting in Montreal, which was an anti-feminist massacre resulting in the deaths of 14 women, as well as 14 people injured. “It shaped my career choices, and I despair at the fact that although I'm nearing retirement, we still face this type of gender-based violence,” Koshan tweeted.
“Remember that right-wing culture war and transphobic propaganda is never just about discourse, debate, or the ‘potential for violence,’” Jeremy Johnston, an assistant professor at Canada’s Western University, tweeted. “It’s about actual violence.”
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