I am sure the 59-year-old psychology professor and critic of the “radical postmodern left” doesn’t need his University of Toronto salary. I imagine he can live a pretty comfortable life on speaking-fees alone.
What does Peterson’s decision to leave his post tell us about the state of academia, if anything?
Here is Inside Higher Ed:
Peterson has gained millions of fans as a YouTube personality, self-help writer and podcaster over the last decade, preaching the patriarchy, his “12 rules for life” and all-meat diets, among other topics. Many fans also appreciate Peterson’s criticisms of what he calls “compelled speech,” such as being expected to use someone’s preferred gender pronoun, and other ills of the “radical postmodern left.”
Yet as Peterson’s star has risen in some circles, many academics have questioned the rigor of his analysis—including when it comes to gender (many of Peterson’s followers are young men). He was widely criticized, for instance, for telling The New York Times in 2018 that “the cure” for young men who feel rejected sexually by women and act out against them—so-called violent involuntary celibates, or incels—is “enforced monogamy.” Peterson, elsewhere an ardent defender of free speech, later threatened to sue the feminist philosopher Kate Manne, of Cornell University, for some of her criticisms of his thoughts on gender. One of Peterson’s former colleagues at Toronto, Bernard Schiff, a professor emeritus of psychology, also wrote a 2018 op-ed in The Toronto Star calling him “dangerous.”
Peterson’s op-ed cites two major reasons for his retirement: concerns about his students, and concerns about higher education’s embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Regarding his students, Peterson says that “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,” because they are white and male. DEI mandates, Peterson continues, 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.”
Peterson also says that he can no longer work with students in good conscience, lest they be denied jobs (that they presumably wouldn’t get anyway if they’re white men, by Peterson’s logic) due to their affiliation with him.
“I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions,” he says.
Read the entire piece here.
Peterson’s point about potential graduate students is an interesting one that conservative professors must confront at one point or another. If these professors exercise their academic freedom to embrace views that are controversial in the academy (even thought they are usually NOT controversial at all in mainstream America), it could hurt their graduate students when those students finish their degrees and encounter hiring committees who champion the left-of-center orthodoxy of the academy. Though Peterson may not be the best case study here, I think this is an issue we seldom talk about.