dagny-hashtaggart:

fycanadianpolitics:

Peterson, who rose to fame in right-wing circles after his outspoken refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns, says he wants to use artificial intelligence to scour university curriculums for what he “calls post-modern neo-Marxist course content.”

“We’re going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be designed to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them,” he told CTV’s Your Morning in August.

“I’m hoping that over about a five-year period a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West. So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.”

Peterson has not responded to As It Happens’ request for comment.

In a speech posted to his YouTube page on July 9, Peterson elaborates on what type of courses he aims to target with the website.

“Women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go and the faster they go the better,” he said. “It would have been better if they had never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell.”

“Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worse offenders are the faculties of education.”

In another video, he compares the project to “nonviolent warfare.”

Peterson’s plan doesn’t sit well with some of his colleagues.

The University of Toronto Faculty Association told As It Happens it is “alarmed” by Peterson’s plans to “place under surveillance certain kinds of academic content.”

“Instructors of the potentially targeted courses believe that their autonomy as educators may be under threat. The proposed website has created a climate of fear and intimidation,” UTFA said in a written statement. […]

So, aside from the obvious point about how he sounds like a character from Southland Tales, what struck me was:

“to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them.” (emphasis mine)

I don’t agree with this idea that one should shield oneself from opposing viewpoints, but if people want to do that, they should be able to. But when you start talking about giving parents resources to prevent their (legally adult) children from being exposed to viewpoints the former don’t agree with, well that starts you down a pretty despicable path. I’ve heard Peterson brought up as an advocate of academic freedom; I think we can consider that notion soundly torpedoed.

Yeah, the man himself seems pretty scary.  Thankfully, his proposed website sounds toothless at worst and unintentionally hilarious at best:

So, one of the thing that is going to happen, for example, in the next month or so, I have been working with a programmer who has volunteered his services and has already produced this, he has produced a website that enables people to enter text that will then classify the text as postmodern or non-postmodern and so you will be able to enter a course descriptions from universities – the course description, the professor’s name, the discipline, and the university. It will tell you the degree to which the description is postmodern and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to take that and become a social justice warrior, if that is what you think your education should be about, or if you should avoid that like the plague that it truly is … I’d like to knock enrollment in the postmodern disciplines down by 75% over the next five years.

(source)

So this is, what, like a program that warns you not to take courses that have “feminism” or “Foucault” in their course descriptions?  How many college students can there be who would trust such advice yet are incapable of generating it on their own?

Putting non-course-description text into this thing is definitely gonna become a meme

(via dagny-hashtaggart)