Feb
27
DEI: A Cancer in Academia and Beyond
“He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising.” — Jordan Peterson, paraphrasing the Bible
You’ve heard of Jordan B. Peterson, right?
He’s the Canadian psychology professor who has become somewhat of a celebrity/pariah in recent years, mostly because he is outspoken against things like political correctness and identity politics. One journalist for the New Yorker even called Peterson “one of the most influential — and polarizing — public intellectuals in the English-speaking world.”
Peterson’s controversial views developed in response to the “woke” pressures put on professors and researchers, making things increasingly difficult not just for him but for the students and graduates “tainted” by their association with him. He writes about this and about the impact of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” (DEI; or as Peterson prefers, DIE) mandates in academia and elsewhere, in his recent article explaining why he no longer works at the University of Toronto. (He has, however, been honored with the “Professor Emeritus” title — quite rare for someone not even sixty.) As is often the case, it was difficult to narrow it down, but I have chosen a couple excerpts to share below.
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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….
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.
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 a friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.”
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As you can see, Peterson pulls no punches.
I highly encourage my readers to read the entire article, where he also touches on Hollywood, the corporate world, and reproduces a telling quote by Vladimir Putin. (Note: The article originally ran in the National Post, but I found the Independent‘s format easier to read.)
