The prominent Canadian academic and author of the bestseller “Twelve Rules for Life,” Jordan B. Peterson, has announced his resignation from his professorship at the University of Toronto, quoting diversity, inclusivity and equity mandates (DIE) as the main reason for his decision. In an article written for the National Post, Peterson gives a detailed and equally disturbing account of his experience in academia distorted by radical woke policies.
In the article, republished in a podcast on Youtube, the renowned professor claimed that the appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing both education and business. He states that well-trained and hard-working White male students have little chance of being offered academic research positions, despite their achievement and grades. Even though qualified minority candidates have today every chance of getting into academic positions and face no discrimination, quotas have been brought in to positively discriminate on their behalf.
Peterson claims that today there are simply not enough qualified BIPOC students to meet diversity targets (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of color), and academic hiring committees are aware of this, even though the topic is taboo. Yet, quotas are being fulfilled even at the expense of sidelining deserving White candidates, which had resulted in producing “a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job.” When this is then coupled with abolishing objective testing of academic results, the entire concept of university studies is fundamentally compromised.
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The Canadian author laments the fact that today all academics must include their own diversity and equality plans in order to obtain research grants. And, while doing so, they must “all lie,” while teaching their students to do the same. They agree to undergo anti-bias trainings conducted by unqualified administrative personnel, lecturing them in an accusatory manner about their alleged sexual and racist biases. Yet, everyone goes along with these demands since they know that refusing to submit to such trainings would automatically disqualify them from their desired positions or grants.
In his article, Peterson also sheds some light on the origin of the now pervasive accusation that the curriculum is systematically drafted to hinder the success of minority candidates and graduates. He says that many university students, as a result of the distortion created by diversity quotas, are struggling to follow the curriculum. They often cannot handle even first-year topics. Yet, instead of admitting their own limitations, they were handed an escape route out of this predicament: brand the content of your studies racist, and you will be excused from reaching the required standards of learning.
He also claims that academics and professionals are all terrified of their woke colleagues to the extreme. This is because, explains Peterson, “the DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.”
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This ideology is now everywhere, from universities, to the media, multinationals to the film industry. Race, gender, sexual preference has now, at the behest of the radical left, become the defining trace of each person, and is treated as a qualification that is taken into account when someone is going to study or is seeking employment.
The Canadian author also points to the fact that woke practices are undermining the pillars of the economy and capitalism. Employers, by forcing them to attend diversity and anti-bias trainings, are implicitly accusing their employees of racism and hostile attitudes towards minority groups. Yet, Peterson calls this patronizing corporate attitude “insulting, annoying, invasive, high-handed, moralizing, inappropriate, ill-considered, counterproductive, and unjustifiable.” He claims that this “sheep-like” attitude, the uncritical acceptance of woke policies, is already undermining enterprises’ financial viability and productivity, and creates a blindness in company leaders to the fact that this ideologically-driven agenda is absolutely antithetical to free-market enterprise.
Rather unexpectedly, Peterson references Russian President Vladimir Putin and ones his observation, with the Russian leader tying what is happening today in Western academia and business is just an off-shoot of Marxism that has caused havoc and tragedy in the Soviet Union. Peterson quotes from Putin’s famous Valdai Discussion Club meeting speech, where the Russian president says, “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 — all this was proclaimed progress… By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.” Putin said. Peterson says he agrees, saying that current woke policies are “even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
Peterson concludes what can be described only as, resignation speech with the proverb, “He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind.” The Canadian academic warns that the wind is rising.
