The case of a Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant who was at the centre of a controversy over a video she showed students was an avoidable case of “institutional failure,” the school’s president says.

Lindsay Shepherd’s situation brought the school under the microscope of national attention last month.

Shepherd had played a video of a university professor arguing against the use of gender-neutral pronouns for a communication studies class.

Playing the video led to Shepherd being called in for a meeting with her supervisor and other school staff, which she recorded. During the meeting, she was told that presenting the professor’s views without context, explanation or rebuttal was similar to disseminating the views of Adolf Hitler without discouraging them.

After the recording of the meeting surfaced online, Shepherd’s supervisor and Laurier president Deborah MacLatchy publicly apologized to her.

MacLatchy also ordered an independent review to establish the facts of the case. That review has been completed, she said Monday in a statement in which she called the meeting “very regrettable” because no formal or informal complaint was ever lodged about the video clip.

“The meeting never should have happened at all,” she said.

“There was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepherd in showing the clip.”

MacLatchy also took issue with the conduct of the people in the meeting with Shepherd, saying it doesn’t meet the school’s standards. She said university policies and procedures were not followed properly through the process, which she blamed on a lack of training.

The school plans to increase the amount of training given to teaching assistants and to faculty members who supervise them.

The controversy was often framed as a battle between protecting freedom of speech and protecting students from hate speech.

MacLatchy took issue with both claims, calling complaints that Laurier was stifling free speech “unreasonable and unfounded” while saying using a policy against gendered and sexual violence as a reason to call Peterson’s comments inappropriate “was misapplied and was a significant overreach.”

Laurier will conduct a full review of its gendered and sexual violence policy and how it is applied on-campus, MacLatchy said, while supports for LGBTQ students have already increased based on recent cases of harassment.