Peterson cites two main reasons for his resignation. The first involves his otherwise bad conscience regarding graduate students. For one, his white cis-hetero grad students are unlikely to land academic jobs due to the explicit discrimination that white males face in the academic job market.
I can attest to this fact, having served on hiring committees that set aside top-notch candidates who happened to be white males in favor of far less qualified and sometimes utterly unqualified comers whose membership in “marginalized” identity categories was their most distinguishing qualification. Adding insult to injury, academic job applicants must now submit “diversity” statements in which they swear allegiance to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), or diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE), despite the ideology’s discriminatory function and, in the case of those from “dominant” identity categories, the likelihood that it diminishes their own prospects.
The second reason Peterson gives for his retirement is generalized disgust with the DIE ideology and its erosion of academic standards. Peterson simply wants nothing further to do with the woke hegemony and has come to regard continued association with the university as tantamount to complicity with the woke regime.
In addition to academia, Peterson also pans Hollywood and the corporate world. The selection of actors in Hollywood is based on identity rather than excellence. The same goes for screenplays and the granting of awards. In every respect, the criteria for success have been utterly corrupted by DIE ideology.
Peterson also calls out the corporate world for its compliance with wokeness. Why, he asks, do capitalist companies accede to woke dictates? I’ve given my own explanation for this elsewhere. Wokeness serves as a demarcation device, a shibboleth for identifying cartel members and distinguishing them from the nonwoke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments.
In addition to these objects of Peterson’s ire, we might also bemoan the woke infiltration of the media, professional sports, the music business, the fashion industry, advertising, book publishing, live theater, museum curation, and even religious belief and expression. Wokeness, in fact, is a religion in its own right. It has pervaded nearly every aspect of culture and society, subverting, displacing, and rendering obsolete and anathema the once cherished values of nearly all our institutions.
Where academia is concerned, the water has long since gone under the bridge. The West has been undergoing a ghoulish cultural revolution for several years, replete with struggle meetings and self-criticism sessions. Academia not only generated this cultural revolution, but was the site first ravaged by it. Higher education is long gone, and Peterson’s retirement from it is somewhat anticlimactic. Nevertheless, given his intellectual prominence, Peterson’s resignation represents a high-water mark for the ravages wrought by DIE ideology on our society.
