Pray for Jordan Peterson in the woke lions’ den
by John Tethys, TCW:
THE knives are out for Jordan Peterson again. Having vilified him in the media and hounded him from a leading professorship, his opponents are now trying to destroy his right to practise his basic work of clinical psychology.
Peterson was a respected, if not widely known, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto until he spoke out against two developments. First he objected to a federal amendment to add gender identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act; second he complained about his university’s plans for mandatory anti-bias training. He also stood up for masculinity, which he argued was under attack.
Soon protesters began disrupting Peterson’s lectures. As the storm grew, so did his international celebrity. His 2018 book 12 Rules for Life and world lectureship tour promoting the book catapulted him to an extraordinary level of celebrity for a mere ‘professor’. Melanie Phillips described him as ‘a kind of secular prophet . . . in an era of lobotomised conformism’ and Cathy Newman greatly increased his profile in a disastrous Channel 4 interview.
Peterson was attacked by the combined might of the woke North American academic establishment. The liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic began a prolonged campaign to destroy him. Cambridge University feebly and egregiously rescinded their invitation to him to be a visiting lecturer in the school of divinity in face of bullying by staff and students.
As his life became more difficult, Peterson was trapped into resignation from his tenured Toronto professorship. In his resignation statement he said that qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. He commented that this was partly because of diversity, inclusivity and equity mandates but also that his students were unacceptable precisely because they were his students. He said he was an academic persona non grata because of his unacceptable philosophical positions.
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