Jordan Peterson might be best known as a cultural commentator, but he’s also a long-time professor that has taught psychology at the University of Toronto for years.
Now, however, that’s all over; furious at what he called the “appalling wokeism” of the school, he resigned and walked away from his year’s-long employer, likely for good.
But he didn’t just walk away in silent resignation, as many have done when their employers go woke. Rather, he wrote an op-ed in the National Post in which he lambasted to the school’s wokeness and explained his reason for leaving.
To begin, Peterson explained that he is now a professor emeritus and that though he had originally envisioned staying at the University of Toronto for many years to come, he no longer would.
It was then that he got into the meat of his argument and explained what’s so wrong with the school, going reason by reason and explaining how the woke atmosphere on the school pushed him out. Here was his first reason and explanation:
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?
Peterson then continued, advancing onto the second reason why he left the school. It’s much the same as the first one, but from a slightly different angle:
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.
He then goes into details on the utterly absurd training the university forces professors to take, namely the oft-used but generally useless implicit assumptions test, which is supposed to manage the vague concept of “implicit bias.” But, despite being useless, and generally recognized as useless by anyone with half a brain, it’s sticking around so Peterson is leaving.
Additionally, blasting apart how the DEI ideology infects the hiring sphere and creates the impression that students are unqualified, Peterson says:
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.
Then he goes into examples of how the woke mind virus has infected many brains, especially in leftist areas, and how the world’s focus on diversity rather than merit is bringing pillars of society and culture crumbling to the ground.
The end-effect, as he puts it, is that “We are now at the point 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.”
Finally, after more devestating critiques of the woke movement, Peterson leaves his readers with a warning, saying that those who go along with it any longer will reap the whirlwind:
And all of you going along with the DIE activists, whatever your reasons: this is on you. Professors. Cowering cravenly in pretence and silence. Teaching your students to dissimulate and lie. To get along. As the walls crumble. For shame. CEOs: signalling a virtue you don’t possess and shouldn’t want to please a minority who literally live their lives by displeasure. You’re evil capitalists, after all, and should be proud of it. At the moment, I can’t tell if you’re more reprehensibly timid even than the professors. 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.
He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising.
Peterson is right. You can either go along with wokeness or oppose it. Those who go along with it are just hoping the privilege tiger eats them last.
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.
This story syndicated with permission from Will – Trending Politics