Our rotten, rotting universities
By Jordan Peterson | Published by the National Post
There has been a spate of articles written lately — and indeed of books — by academics who have become disaffected by the happenings in our much-vaunted institutions of higher education. The most vocal and well-known of these include luminaries such as Jonathan Haidt, at Columbia, Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, and Steven Pinker, at Harvard. In Canada, Gad Saad at Concordia is likely the most effective and well-known of such critics, although Bruce Pardy, David Haskell, Julie Ponesse and Janice Fiamengo also spring quickly to mind. Many others currently operate and communicate behind the scenes, and in an increasingly organized manner.
I have for several years been participating, for example, in an email list known informally and satirically as the Dissident Herd of Cats, which now comprises about 50 participants from universities all across Canada and the U.S., with a handful of journalists thrown in just to keep the mud slinging. I believe that all the aforementioned Canadians are either part of that group or closely associated with it. A more recently acquired member, Professor Leigh Rivers, has recently published a couple of columns in this very newspaper detailing his experiences at the still-hard-science (for now) Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, where I also served as an active professor in a different discipline for almost twenty years. Most of the discussion in that email group was private talk, in the beginning, as we found our feet, but the participants have become increasingly likely to identify themselves and to speak and write publicly and damn the consequences. All the people involved have determined despite the cancel culture and reputation-savaging that is part and parcel of the parasite strategy that the situation is so dire that even the risk of career has now become a moral requirement. This is something akin to war.
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Image credit: Anilsharma26
