As President Trump wisely uses an executive order to protect free speechagainst college-campus thought police, news from Cambridge in England reminds us that leftist lunacy isn’t confined just to American universities.
Cambridge University, a pillar of learning for more than 800 years, has rescinded an already accepted offer of a fellowship to Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor from Toronto. Jordan’s sins? Challenging the tenets of political correctness and criticizing an Orwellian proposal by the Canadian government that would criminalize the failure to use bizarre gender-neutral pronouns for those who want them.
In unpacking the multiple elements of this assault on right reason, one hardly knows where to begin. So, let’s posit that Peterson is distinguished in his field, and that he has a huge international following. He dares challenge the speech-controlling merchants of petty grievances who dominate academia, an affront apparently so appalling that critics take to the New York Times to spew breathless prose portraying him as an evil “custodian of the patriarchy.”
And, yes, Canada did institute a law that literally could lead to criminal penalties, including jail time, for repeatedly refusing to use a subject’s preferred pronoun gender or a gender-neutral (non)word such as “ze” and “zir” for “she” and “he.” In a series of lectures, Peterson criticized the proposal, since enacted, as the “dangerous,” “pathological,” freedom-killing abomination that it most undoubtedly is.
Almost as it to prove Peterson’s point that a sort of anti-free thought totalitarianism is on the loose, faculty and students at Cambridge erupted in protest at the idea that a free speech advocate could teach for two months at their bastion of higher thought control. The university caved, and disinvited Peterson from its campus….
[The full column is at this link.]
