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Long Read of the Weekend: Jordan Peterson, “Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto”


The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.

Just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on DIE grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. And perhaps that’s the point. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.

And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”

Just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on DIE grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. And perhaps that’s the point. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.

RTWT @ Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto | National Post

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Richard January 21, 2022, 10:46 AM

    This, in my opinion, is entirely based on Envy. The proponents of D.I.E. understand that they will never be able to compete against the talented, bright, disciplined and able. Therefore, whatever has been produced by the aforementioned, must be annihilated.
    I was always quite impressed by Peterson and his resignation is that university’s massive loss. Not that it will matter to the dullards who remain employed there, however. It’s a pity universities are not required to be self-sustaining. But then how would these parasites go?
    I don’t know when, or if, the slide into Ignorance will end. To me, it’s just more evidence of Entropy exerting its immutable influence.
    Maintaining excellence requires great effort. Without it, mediocrity becomes the only possible aspirational goal.
    Hopefully, Peterson will continue to be the voice crying out in the wilderness.

    • Kevin in PA January 21, 2022, 12:42 PM

      Envy.
      That is the key. It is the root of communism.
      Envy in its truest form – You have something that I don’t have and if I can not have it, I will do everything in my power to destroy it!
      And those who would promote this nonsense will assert it all in the name of “fairness”.

      The great shame in all of this is, as Peterson points out, that the less ethical members of his esteemed academia will perpetuate the lie to keep their position. Thus accelerating the decent into dystopia.

      • John Venlet January 21, 2022, 1:20 PM

        The great shame in all of this is, as Peterson points out, that the less ethical members of his esteemed academia will perpetuate the lie to keep their position.

        Kevin, this is also very true for those currently employed in the medical establishment. Many physicians, nurses, and medical administrative community are perpetuating the lies about The Gain of Function Flu (GoFF), and effective ways to combat said GoFF in order to retain their licenses, and employment. Or, if a doctor is willing to buck the party line, they’re found out and ordered to undergoe a psych eval, and lose their licensing. Like this doctor in Maine.

  • Richard January 21, 2022, 10:49 AM

    But then how would these parasites go? Where, obviously, not how. Good grief!

  • Julia Atkins January 21, 2022, 11:54 AM

    I never understood either the absolute contempt by his opponents on either side or the strange worship around his every word. Peterson was a great influence for me as well as many others when we emerged from the nihilistic wandering of our youth. There are many things I agree with him on, and faults that I see from his critics that are reasonable. But I still appreciate and value this man.

    • James ONeil January 21, 2022, 2:05 PM

      Yep, yep, YEP! I think most of the yea buts from both sides are that he can and does influence people, even, in ways the yea butters disagree with.

  • Gordon Scott January 21, 2022, 12:43 PM

    Jordan Peterson’s influence on the culture is amazing. This professor, who had the courage to defy the screeching harpies at UofT, the wrote a giant best seller, and went on an 140-city, sold-out lecture tour. After wrapping that up, he discovered his wife was far more ill than they realized. While dealing with her near death, he accepted an increase in his anti-depression medication.

    He’d been taking that medication for some time. But the increased dose triggered something bad, and when he tried to get off, things got horrribly, horribly worse. This can happen with these meds–it’s very rare, but it does happen. He wound up on an odyssey through hospitals in Toronto, New York, Russia and Serbia, seeking help. I can’t imagine how he survived. What was it like to wake up in a hospital in Russia and have no idea how you got there?

    He did survive. He wrote another book while still suffering the horrible effects. And he continues to fight.

  • David Spence January 21, 2022, 1:40 PM

    Last two paragraphs are repeats.

    • Chris January 21, 2022, 2:00 PM

      Yeah David, I realized that myself. I thought maybe I hit the scroll button or something. I haven’t had any Friday libations yet, so I knew it wasn’t the reason.
      CIII

    • Vanderleun January 22, 2022, 9:51 AM

      Fixed. Thanks. Sometimes me get the tunnel vision for the “PUBLISH” button.

  • gwbnyc January 21, 2022, 2:49 PM

    he sounds so alone.
    makes me ache some.

  • gw January 21, 2022, 9:25 PM

    The left has been brilliant in its decades long takeover of the “experts” pipeline – the universities. Condition those experts philosophically, disseminate them into positions of influence, give them strong incentives to persuade the general populace, change perception, and allow policy changes to occur that will completely empower the state indefinitely.

    • Gordon Scott January 22, 2022, 8:12 AM

      What amazes me, gw, is how petty, vulgar and midwit those experts are. It reminds me of an “only white people can be racist” seminar I had to attend about 26 years ago, when it was just becoming fashionable. The presenter went off on some such crap, entirely based on opinion, no facts in evidence at all. I spoke up (back then you could, and keep your job) and said, “That’s it? That’s all you have? Just some ‘I’m black and you can’t question me’ made up bullshit? I am out of here.” Two people followed me, and three more told me later they wish they had left with me.

  • Dirk January 22, 2022, 8:44 AM

    Hmmmm, life’s about choices. While I don’t follow this fella, appears he did the right thing, for all the right reasons.

    Now he’ll make a living writing self help books! Will make millions from the sheep who simply don’t have the tools to cope!. You know the men who think their girls, and the girls who think their men.

    Most here were blessed to grow up in an era, of men being men, doing manly things, and women being women, doing I doing woman things.

    Just as god made it.

    VI

    • Vanderleun January 22, 2022, 9:53 AM

      “Give me some men who are stout hearted men…”

      • Dirk January 22, 2022, 10:31 AM

        As I sit in my recliner sorting my day out, listening to “Etta James”, I’m smiling as I watch your clip, GV.

        Those were the days of wooden ships and Iron Men!.

        The music takes me places I’ve never been, an era, a time, a place I’ll not ever have the opportunity to enjoy. The Stereo systems such that I can hear a drumstick hit the floor, killer gear, na, it’s the music, the woman the music, the soul she injects into, her music warms me to the one.

        Gotta go, my golden retriever “ Daisys” demanding a rematch, to our early on the floor wrestling match. She’s strategically located directly between the speakers, so she can catch ALL the music.

        The Rematch shall begin after I fill my pockets with her doggy treats. May the best Dog win!

        VI

        • Vanderleun January 22, 2022, 2:16 PM

          Lookin’ good, VI. Git Er Done!