Outspoken psychologist and author Jordan Peterson is a man of principle living in a world where morality is no longer fashionable – if it ever was.
Peterson disagrees with the direction academia has taken the social sciences. He recognises that if he does not train his university students, undergraduates and graduates in the principles of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE) then he sentences them to failure in the real world because he would be teaching them to become unemployable.
DIE has 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.”
“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.”
Clearly, the university has the utmost respect for Peterson’s academic prowess, so why did he resign from his dream job?
“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.”
Surely Peterson could have stayed? But he didn’t, and his reasoning is very simple: he cannot adequately prepare his students to succeed in a world where political agendas have corrupted the social sciences that he teaches.
“How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?”
Peterson has the strength to stay true to his convictions even when holding onto them makes him a social pariah in modern academia. Although he does not say it outright, surely he hopes his best students will also have the courage of their convictions to make principled decisions.
Peterson is a martyr to the cause of drawing attention to the self-defeating nature of DIE on a hiding to nowhere.
“…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.”
He notes that staying alive academically requires unethical behaviour displayed by some “craven colleagues” who lie to obtain research grants and 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.”
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.
The BFD.The loss of objectivity means that virtually anything goes in the requisite introspective search for bias.
“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 deck is stacked against him (the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation) but Peterson will go down fighting.
He slates diversification “where race, ethnicity, ‘gender’, or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping) and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research and employment.”
It’s not just in academia, it’s in professional colleges, Hollywood and the corporate western world: all led astray by “aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity”.
“And if you think DIE is bad, wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores. Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you?
“Why the hell don’t you banish the human resource DIE upstarts back to the more-appropriately-named Personnel departments, stop them from interfering with the psyches of you and your employees, and be done with it? Musicians, artists, writers: stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition. Stop censoring your thought.
“Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.”
National Post