Date: January 19th, 2022 7:45 PM
Author: ,.,;,;,.;,.;,.;,,,,;,.,;
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:
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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?
Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto
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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.
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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.
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More On This Topic
We are pushing the complex systems upon which we depend and
which are miraculously effective and efficient in their often thankless
operation to their breaking point, writes Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson: Open the damn country back up, before Canadians wreck something we can’t fix
Jordan Peterson, the academic cancelled by Cambridge, tells
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Jordan Peterson returns to Cambridge where he was a victim of cancel culture in 2019
Banaji’s continued countenancing of the misuse of her research
instrument, combined with the status of her position at Harvard, is a
prime reason we still suffer under the DIE yoke, with its baleful effect
on what was once the closest we had ever come to truly meritorious
selection. There are good reasons to suppose that DIE-motivated
eradication of objective testing, such as the GRE for graduate school
admission, will have deleterious effects on the ability of students so
selected to master such topics as the statistics all social sciences
(and medicine, for that matter) rely upon completely for their validity.
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Furthermore, 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. That, combined with some recent legislative
changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy”
(but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything
ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have
likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended
entirely on trust and privacy. Similar moves are afoot in other
professional disciplines, such as medicine and law. And if you don’t
think that psychologists, lawyers and other professionals are anything
but terrified of their now woke governing professional colleges, much to
everyone’s extreme detriment, you simply don’t understand how far this
has all gone.
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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?”
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And this is everywhere — and if you don’t see it, your head is
either in the sand or shoved somewhere far more unmentionable. CBS, for
example, has literally mandated that every writers’ room be at least 40
per cent BIPOC in 2021 (50 per cent in 2022).
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.
Need I point out that this is insane ? Even the benighted New
York Times has its doubts. A headline from August 11, 2021: Are
Workplace Diversity Programs Doing More Harm than Good? In a word, yes.
How can accusing your employees of racism etc. sufficient to require
re-training (particularly in relationship to those who are working in
good faith to overcome whatever bias they might still, in these modern,
liberal times, manifest) be anything other than insulting, annoying,
invasive, high-handed, moralizing, inappropriate, ill-considered,
counterproductive, and otherwise unjustifiable?
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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? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling
nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely
antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely
targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see
that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just
as the artists and writers are doing) that you are generating a
veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind,
cowed and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege?
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And it’s not just the universities. And the professional
colleges. And Hollywood. And the corporate world. Diversity, Inclusivity
and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering
about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther
than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of
Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When
they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who
mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough.
Enough.
Finally, do you know that Vladimir Putin himself is capitalizing
on this woke madness? Anna Mahjar-Barducci at MEMRI.org covered his
recent speech. I quote from the article’s translation: “The advocates of
so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to
some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags,
as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that
their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to
some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917
revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels,
also said that they would change existing ways and customs, and not just
political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and
the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values,
religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total
rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved
ones — all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely
supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as
today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions
other than theirs.
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“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are
witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western
countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices — which we,
fortunately, have left, I hope — in the distant past. The fight for
equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism
bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past
— such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or
universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The
classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender
or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling
and how many characters of what color or gender should be in a movie.
This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
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This, from the head of the former totalitarian enterprise,
against whom we fought a five decades’ long Cold War, risking the entire
planet (in a very real manner). This, from the head of a country riven
in a literally genocidal manner by ideas that Putin himself attributes
to the progressives in the West, to the generally accepting audience of
his once-burned (once (!)) twice-shy listeners.
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.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5011432&forum_id=2#43811845)
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