Abstract
The Social Sciences and Humanities are in crisis across North America. The reasons for this are manifold—dwindling enrollments and revenues, students lacking basic skills needed to thrive in university settings, administrative bloat, and the campus culture wars. Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, is a polarizing personality who rose to prominence by focusing relentlessly on merely one aspect of this burgeoning crisis, the campus culture wars. As a fierce critic of feminism, “cultural Marxism,” Marxist humanism, postmodernism, political correctness, and so on, he advocates de-funding any and all programs that have a predominantly Left-leaning faculty in charge. His critique of contemporary cultural trends and Liberal Arts education is not entirely without merit, but is riddled with exaggerations, distortions, and gaping omissions that mark him as a traditionalist conservative, rather than a “classical Liberal,” which is what he claims to be.
Note: Portions of this chapter have been reproduced with permission from Eidos: A Journal for the Philosophy of Culture, Burston, D. Authority, Tradition and the Postmodern University. Vol. 2, 3(5), 2018, and others from Psychotherapy and Politics International, “It’s hip to be square! The myths of Jordan Peterson”. Psychother Politics Int. 2018; e1475. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppi.1475.
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Notes
- 1.
For the document in question, see Bill C-16, An Act to Amend the Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, Statutes of Canada, chapter 13, assented to June 19, 2017, http://www.parl.gc.ca
- 2.
Of course, the instrumental view of postsecondary education that I am describing here is not new. On the contrary, it was already quite prevalent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as such, was roundly criticized by Nietzsche and Adorno. In an insightful article entitled “Authoritarian Populism Contra Bildung: Anti-Intellectualism and the Neo-Liberal Assault on the Liberal Arts,” Jeremiah Morelock discusses the various ways in which this “pragmatic” approach to university life—which is completely at variance with the ideals of a liberal education as understood by John Dewey, for example—fosters the decline of intellectual community, impacts all sectors of the university, and ultimately plays into the hands of authoritarian populism (Morelock 2017).
- 3.
The term “reaction formation” is Freud’s, of course, and Peterson would probably prefer to use the Jungian descriptor entandiodromia, which denotes a compensatory swing in the opposite direction when the (individual or collective) psyche has gone too far in one direction, and is profoundly “out of balance.” Needless to say, I don’t find this explanation for right-wing populism particularly persuasive. In any case, Peterson’s complaint that too many men have become “soft” or incompetent (as males) in recent years bears a striking resemblance to the ramblings of a much earlier Jung enthusiast, Philip Wylie, whose book Generation of Vipers, first published in 1942, was a fiercely misogynistic attack on the role of “Momism” in American culture (Wylie 1955).
- 4.
James Innes-Smith, November 6, 2018, ‘“Trump Hasn’t Turned out to be the Disaster His Enemies Predicted’: Jordan Peterson at Cambridge.” The Spectator USA.
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Burston, D. (2020). Jordan Peterson and the Postmodern University. In: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34921-9_7
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