Jordan Peterson resigns his full professorship
And he certainly doesn’t go out with a whimper:
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)… My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata…
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…
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…
Oh, you know what? Just click on the link and read the whole thing, because nearly every time I cut out a sentence it feels as though I’m cutting out something important.
Peterson is unafraid of the truth and of the consequences of telling the truth, traits that seem to be rather rare these days. In recent years he also has had the advantage of having built an enormous following by dint of his intensity, courage, hard work, and brilliance.
This is absolutely worth reading in its entirety. And of forwarding to friends in academia.
One might well argue (and there is really no evidence against such a position) that North American colleges and universities have degenerated so abysmally that, with very few exceptions, they are nothing but day-care centers for petulant, entitled and ignorant cry-bullies as well as CultMarx madrassas for the indoctrination of partisan activist SJWs, and much of this madness is funded by the long-suffering taxpayers (even private schools, such as the Ivies with tens of billions in their endowments, receive millions form the government for research of often dubious value). One might also wonder whether there are any other systems, organizations, and institutions in our moribund republic currently healthy and functioning at least passably well.
“every time I cut out a sentence it feels as though I’m cutting out something important”
Yeah, Peterson’s like that. I think it comes from his clinical experience, from having had to choose his words with extreme care for maximum impact on people whose grip on reality is rather loose. This implies that he regards us, his audience, in the same way. I wish I could think that he’s wrong, and be offended, but I’m pretty sure he has made a solid diagnosis.
I subscribed to his podcast last summer, and it is very good listen with tons of content to catch up on. He had an episode with Dennis Prager about PragerU and it seemed obvious that Jordan was ready to move beyond the need of a structured university to constrain his teaching and research.
Defund the uni.
Over Peterson’s year and a half(?) health recovery, I’ve expected such a Rubicon statement – neigh, resignation. (What he has said before is that he’s liked by colleagues and has strong student interests and evaluations, and therefore would be welcomed back to teach at UT.)
It’s become too common, too widespread, and too necessary for anyone of integrity to part ways with academe (pace climatologist Judith Curry, although in her case it was the absence of serious new science to pass on to future experts in her field that led her to resign and move from Georgia Tech to working with her husband in Nevada).
It’s going to get worse before it gets better. The bottom is nowhere in sight.
It’s when expert failure results in tragedies that become overwhelmingly condemned, and refunding and extirpating the menace become paramount.
Along the way, interest among foreign students in coming to the US will have to dry up, resulting in administrative crisis.
Can this happen without kinetic warfare? Without civil strife like 2020? Via some sort of decentralized, post-campus, digital age anti-eduxrat reform movement perhaps?
Neo, thanks for the link!
JP is right of course, and he makes the connection with communism that even Putin sees as self destructive.
I think the solution is to stop the government backing of student loans. Imagine trying to convince a lender that you’re a good bet for a degree in black studies or any other of the “studies” programs. But should you have the grades you might be able to get a loan to pursue a STEM degree.
Once the money dries up then the massive administrative apparatus of the large universities will have to shrink. That will kill most of the idiocy happening on campus.
After all they can’t give scholarships to everyone.
Imagine trying to convince a lender that you’re a good bet for a degree in black studies
Once more with feeling. Almost nobody majors in any of the victimology programs. The most popular would be women’s studies, in which fewer than 2,000 baccalaureate degrees are awarded each year. These are patronage programs for favored political interests. Students are not interested. State legislatures should get to work on statutory law which debars state schools from maintaining certain instructional programs and administrative offices.
A much more serious problem would be corrupted occupational programs and bullsh!t occupational programs. You got three begging for the guillotine right now: teacher training in its current incarnation, social work, and library administration. No prisoners, baby.
“Once more with feeling.”
OK.
Preach it, brother!
For me, the highlights among highlights of Jordan Peterson’s piece are the two paragraphs he quotes from Putin near the end.
I haven’t yet made my way through the entire Putin piece …
https://www.memri.org/reports/russias-new-conservative-ideology-counter-liberalism
… but I intend to.
Art Deco wrote:
“A much more serious problem would be corrupted occupational programs and bullsh!t occupational programs. You got three begging for the guillotine right now: teacher training in its current incarnation …”
Regarding the occupational part, I was inspired by a Kay Hymowitz piece in City Journal …
https://www.city-journal.org/williamson-college-of-the-trades
… to start donating to Williamson College of the Trades in Media, Pennsylvania. They have what’s probably a unique three-year vocational&academic program that’s been very successful. Waaay too many young Americans are going to four-year colleges, and Williamson provides a model for a viable and useful alternative.
(I also routinely donate to Hillsdale College, while stiffing my two undergrad alma materi, Grinnell and Carleton, and grad school, the University of Chicago. The alumni rags from the latter three are fonts of diversity-babble.)
Regarding teacher training, Heather Mac Donald’s 1998 “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach” …
https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-johnny%E2%80%99s-teacher-can%E2%80%99t-teach-11928.html
… is a classic among classics, a must-read.
Re: Peterson’s statement:
“Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough”
My father was Dean of the school of Earth Sciences at a small technical college in New Mexico. He was visited by an official of the federal education establishment in the early 70’s, who stated “You’ll have your federal funding cut off if you don’t hire a “minority” (at that time, African-American) professor with a PhD.”
My father quietly replied, “Well, we’ve tried. Currently, there are only 13 African-American PhDs in Earth Science in the country, and they’re all gainfully employed elsewhere. What do you suggest I do?”
The federal official left without a reply.
I just going to reproduce what I said a day ago.
Peterson at his best. I’ve lived under the academia hell he portrays. As a result, and from teaching students who were admitted only on the basis of their BIPOC status, I now have to admit some “racism” of my own.
Moving to a new state means finding new health providers. I carefully review all potential dentists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, and most importantly, candidates for my PCP. I’m sorry to say any of those who are BIPOC and who have graduated within the past 5 years from their medical school I will not consider at all. 10 years ago I taught those same students as pre-med undergraduates, and I know 95% of them cannot do the work because they were admitted to college solely on the basis of their BIPOC status, not on their academic potential. As a result they are simply passed on in undergraduate school, and as Peterson indicates probably the same thing happened in med school. To fail such a person is a “racist” act which would get any faculty member hauled up to the Dean or President and grounds for firing would be initiated.
The DIE ideology instead of erasing racism, is going to have the reverse effect of increasing racism….but maybe that’s the point.
physicsguy:
Recently I joined a medical clinic. I was assigned a white male physician’s assistant. He was fine. It did occur to me afterward that for the reason you stated, I would have been less happy if a black or hispanic doctor had been assigned to me.
How does one gracefully decline an assigned doctor without getting into trouble?
It’s heart-warming when a person takes action based on principle. Unlike what’s (not) happening with the Beijing Olympics.
“…there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough…”
Ask Denzel Washington & other established proven black actors about the diversity requirements in Hollywood & how it’s diluting the talent pool & salaries & advancement opportunities for the really good 2nd/3rd tier talent.
SSDD…Affirmative Action is disastrous.
Peterson speaks scathingly of his colleagues moral cowardice and rightly so. In driving out its real teachers, the upper ‘education’ system is ensuring its eventual unsustainability.
Paul Nachman offers an insight, because they deal directly with external reality, trade schools are most resistant to ‘woke’.
“I think the solution is to stop the government backing of student loans. Imagine trying to convince a lender that you’re a good bet for a degree in black studies or any other of the “studies” programs.” Yawrate
It would certainly be a small step in the right direction. However,
stopping the government backing of student loans would depend upon having the political wherewithal to both do that and when the left regains power, prevent it from being reversed. Which would require a huge paradigm change in American society’s cultural and political realms.
Stan Smith…
Had the same conversation with a church official once who lamented that our congregation had few POCs in it…less than the % of our county.
I invited him to jump in my car & I drove him to where the bulk of the POCs lived in our county…15+ minutes, a major interstate highway crossing and a huge SES gap away. I asked if we should get a bus or wouldn’t it be easier for the wider church to simply plant a new congregation where I had parked along the side of the road.
He just repeated his claim that we should have more POCs since I knew where they lived. Sometimes you can’t fix stupid.
@Huxley:
You don’t, Citizen Huxley. You don’t.
@JG:
“He just repeated his claim that we should have more POCs since I knew where they lived. Sometimes you can’t fix stupid.”
Jaysus wept! What a retard! You’d think that someone interested in Christianity and Christian worship would notice that Blacks like to go about the mechanics of this (shall, we say) Differently. One Size does not fit all. And when it suits *them*, they’re perfectly happy with Freedom of Association and sticking to themselves.
Anyway you can’t make retards understand that mixing everybody together *reduces* Diversity, the very thing that retards worship all Baal-like. It really will have to end with bullets and bayonets.
Mind you, Peterson is now rich beyond dreams of avarice and will continue to make bank.
I suspect that while he was employed by the university, he had to kick back some of his earnings to them. And there were perhaps contractual limits on what he could and could not engage in business-wise.
He’s a bit mentally unstable… Your Discount Bin Messiahs tend to be, though. Still he’s been a gateway and brought some people over to the Dark Side even though he’s really more positioned as a Gate Keeper to stop them going further to the Right. Useful. No Saviour.
Messiahs don’t normally expound at length about their adolescent sexual fantasies around their female cousin being immolated in a nuclear holocaust. Bit weird, the Old JP when you actually go dig into his oeuvre.
For the rest, good luck to him and a pox upon Leftists.
j e on January 20, 2022 at 1:16 pm:
“… they are nothing but day-care centers for petulant, entitled and ignorant cry-bullies as well as CultMarx madrassas for the indoctrination of partisan activist SJWs … ”
great phrasing – love it.
Expanding one of Neo’s cuts a bit, Peterson said, “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?”
I read his column yesterday, and began wondering about the fates of the students of other persona-non-grata professors, of which there are a growing number.
Are they really unemployable in today’s world?
Almost certainly in academia, which is what many of them would have been anticipating. Highly probable in the corporations and even small businesses that are now so woke they can’t even object to being looted and burned down in the name of Social Justice.
In particular, I considered what might become of the graduates of the newly-announced University of Austin, along with those of the long-established colleges like Hillsdale and a few others.
What kind of parallel academic and business world is employing them?
Will we ultimately create totally separate economic and social structures for leftists and conservatives?
(Our political nomenclature is so awkward now; the left is not “liberal,” and the conservatives are not “rightists” in the original sense).
Historically, that has never worked out well even within a single country, and yet we are “progressing” (sarc quotes intended) to that situation world-wide.
Just name Prof. Peterson Chancellor. Watch it get better.
Hey, I’m like you Neo. I love language and words. When someone has the gift of putting them together, as does Peterson, it always seems destructive almost vulgar to rip them apart to edit or summarize. Bullet points can be incredibly useful. But they are never beautiful.
@AesopFan:
“What kind of parallel academic and business world is employing them?”
Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein must have several residences each, all needing Pool Boys.
Peterson is a yuuuge public figure, but he’s likely never drawn students of the intellectual calibre desired by the billionaire class DGAF mavericks for brain work.
“What kind of parallel academic and business world is employing them?” — Aesop.
Not a total answer, but we know that customers, executives, managers, and taxpayers are always openly or secretly asking: What have you done for me lately?!
If the response from the insipid woke cadre is “well, not all that much actually”, eventually they will be terminated and replaced with more capable people – even if some of those people are from India or China [see: https://americanmind.org/salvo/import-americans/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=200824248&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_62NWkPYoCIAku6cs93uyvN015w4s9L1T7emEVZb4Ec96h-cSLKBJj-snjtpI_9YVAYXMoGY5tw8oHg6n4lTpIvcC_DQ&utm_content=200824248&utm_source=hs_email ]