‘A Stunningly Corrupt Enterprise’: Jordan Peterson Blasts Academia, Resigns As Tenured Professor At University of Toronto

Canadian psychologist and bestselling author Jordan Peterson announced that he is no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto.

In an article for The National Post, Peterson — who recently sat down with Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro in the inaugural episode of “The Search” — pointed to the school’s obsession with “Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity,” which he abbreviated simply as “DIE.”

“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,” Peterson said. “But that career path was not meant to be.”

Peterson voiced frustration that his “qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students… face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers” thanks to diversity mandates.

“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,” he wrote. “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 pointed to other trends destroying academia “and, downstream, the general culture” — including the end of objective testing and “grievance studies” disciplines. He also observed that colleagues must bow to diversity mandates by crafting “DIE statements” to obtain research grants.

“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,” he mourned. “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.”

The problem extends far beyond the University of Toronto.

Peterson said that the accrediting boards for Canadian graduate clinical psychology training programs “are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a ‘social justice’ orientation.” Also referring to Canada’s “conversion therapy” ban, Peterson said that the practice of clinical psychology is effectively “doomed.”

Peterson admonished executives, professors, and others capitulating to wokeness and permitting its advance in Western culture.

“And all of you going along with the DIE activists, whatever your reasons: this is on you,” he warned. “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,” he continued. “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.”

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