Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sat down for a lengthy discussion with author and mathematician Dr. James Lindsay, where they delved deep into how each of them has seen firsthand the woke takeover of the American university.
Lindsay described how he began his career aspiring to become a math professor, only to have his shiny view of the university system shattered by the realization of how much power the bureaucracy had in what is supposed to be a student’s education. At the University of Tennessee, where Lindsay first taught, he was appalled to learn he was only permitted to fail one student at a time, he said.
The experience left Lindsay disillusioned, but determined to expose the American education system and restore it to its roots as an intellectual hub of debate and discovery. Following a brief stint as a massage therapist, Lindsay, his wife, and a friend hatched an ingenious plan to prove just how perverted the university ecosystem had become.
“[We] had this wild-brained idea to write as many fake academic articles for feminist theory, gender studies, you know, all of these kinds of woke postmodern journals that put them in the highest ones we could get and see how many we could get published,” he told Peterson.
Lindsay’s experiment had a remarkable success rate, with the group writing 20 fake papers using various “woke” jargon, with seven being published in highly accredited peer-reviewed journals.
Lindsay detailed one particularly memorable pseudo-intellectual paper he wrote that developed the concept of the “progressive stack” in education. The idea was that the more privilege that a student had, the worse they were to be treated by their more historically oppressed classmates.
“We’re going to rank all the kids and we’re going to put, you know, your roster for the class will be ordered according to privilege,” he said.
The paper suggested humiliating the “privileged” students by ignoring their questions, segregating their seating, and even requiring them to wear chains. Lindsay’s team pretended to justify such measures by saying it was “critically compassionate” of the “privileged” students to accept this fate.
Not only was the paper published and peer-reviewed, but to Lindsay’s surprise, he was told that he did not take the twisted concept far enough.
“And the peer reviewers wrote us back and they said, ‘Don’t use compassion,'” he recalled. “They said it would threaten to ‘recenter’ the needs of the privileged if you’re compassionate with them.”
Peterson responded, “They figured you were on their side, and they showed their true colors.”
Lindsay and Peterson, a clinical psychologist, longtime educator, and current professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, traded stories about their experiences in witnessing the decline of the university system. Lindsay recalled his utter shock at a supposedly respectable scientific institution he said was corrupted by progressive messaging to the point it lost sight of the goal of scientific advancement.
In 2016, four professors from the University of Oregon, a school with half a million dollars in funding from the National Science Foundation, rather than focusing on their field of glaciology and climate change, wrote “about needing to bring feminism into the science of glaciology in order to successfully combat climate change,” according to Lindsay.
“They went on to say that unless we take paintings done by women of glaciers and study those as well, besides the satellite photographs, then it’s not a comprehensive science,” he said. “It shuts out all these other perspectives, other means of knowing, that if we don’t include indigenous perspectives and mythologies about why ice is the way that it is and why it moves, then we are obviously being colonialist and masculinist.”
Peterson noted that 75% of the research papers in the University of California state system go unread due to their not meeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion criteria.
“That’s an astonishing number,” Lindsay replied.
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