Earlier this month, Jordan Peterson, the most famous cultural export from Canada since Marshall McLuhan, announced that he was resigning as a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He’d achieved Canadian fame a few years ago for pushing back against forced speech at the university. After an appearance on British television in 2018, he shot to worldwide stardom for defending empiricism — specifically, the once uncontroversial notion that men and women are biologically different — against a host who kept reinterpreting his remarks to be the opposite of what he was clearly saying.
Peterson explained in his announcement that he could no longer supervise white male graduate students in good conscience because they face “a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers.” The “diversity, inclusivity, and equity” programs of racial and ethnic quotas — “DIE” mandates, as Peterson aptly calls them — are stacked against white men. As for his university colleagues, all of them “must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant.” They play along even though few believe in placing race and gender ahead of merit and competence. This, wrote Peterson, “is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture.”
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