Police in Waterloo, Canada are investigating a stabbing attack during a university class as a hate crime.
Three people were hospitalized on Wednesday, after a man burst into a classroom at the University of Waterloo with two knives, stabbing a professor and two students. On Thursday, police named the suspect as 24-year-old Geovanny Villalba Alemán. University administrators say Villalba Alemán was a recent graduate from the school. The class he allegedly targeted was part of a philosophy course on gender.
“The accused targeted a gender studies class and investigators believe this was a hate-motivated incident related to gender expression and gender identity,” police announced in a statement.
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University course listings describe the Philosophy 202 course that Villalba Alemán attacked as a course that “will examine the construction of gender in the history of philosophy through contemporary discussions. What is gender? How do we ‘do’ gender? How can we ‘undo’ gender—and do we want to?”
Gender studies have been the subject of growing international ire on the right, particularly from anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ activists and politicians. Hungary (often held as a model for the international right) has banned gender studies courses in colleges, while Florida mulls a similar law under Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Villalba Alemán’s publicly available social media reveals him to be a recent University of Waterloo graduate. On June 16, he posted photos of himself holding a diploma from the school and wearing graduation robes. “#uwaterloograd,” he posted.
On LinkedIn, he wrote that he graduated with a physics degree, and that he worked at an on-campus Tim Horton’s.
In a Thursday afternoon press conference, Waterloo Regional Police Chief Mark Crowell said Villalba Alemán asked the class’s title before lunging at the professor with knives. The professor, as well as a 19-year-old and a 20-year-old student were hospitalized with “serious but non-life-threatening injuries,” police said.
Police said some of the class’s approximately 40 students rushed to intervene, while others escaped and called 911.
Jackson Yan, who was studying in a nearby room at the time of the attack, told the student paper the Imprint that a student ran from the classroom and screamed for nearby students to run.
When police arrived on the scene Villalba Alemán unsuccessfully attempted “to blend in, to hide in plain sight” among other students, Crowell said, but “officers quickly identified him and placed him under arrest once he was identified based on the description provided.”
Villalba Alemán was charged on Thursday with three counts of aggravated assault, four counts of assault with a weapon, two counts of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, and mischief under $5,000. Villalba Alemán was an international student from Ecuador. Police said there is currently no evidence that he planned the attack with anyone else.
The attack has drawn comparisons to a 1989 university massacre in Canada, in which a gunman systematically killed 14 women and himself at Montreal’s Polytechnique engineering school. In a suicide note, the killer wrote that he hated and wanted to kill feminists.
In a statement, the University of Waterloo said it was committed to continuing its courses on gender and social justice.
“We are horrified, saddened, and outraged by the attack on our campus community yesterday, in which a professor and two students were stabbed during a Gender Issues class,” the university said in a Thursday statement
“Gender Issues is a cross-listed class in Philosophy and in the Gender and Social Justice (GSJ) program. Our thoughts are with our colleague and students who were injured, the students in the class who witnessed the attack, our students in Gender and Social Justice and Philosophy, and the entire University of Waterloo community. We stand in solidarity with the many teachers and scholars across the world whose ideas expose them to violence and hate. We are committed to continuing to teach and research topics in gender, social justice, and beyond.”
