Can Jordan Peterson save us from the ‘degeneracy’ of modern universities?
Canadian professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is working on a plan to destroy the “indoctrination cults” he says modern university humanities programs have become.
Peterson’s profile as a notable conservative has been on the rise since he began pushing back against Canadian hate crime laws which he believed were totalitarian for policing speech.
The public intellectual is now working to create his own crowd-sourced university which could provide an alternative to the “Postmodern neo-Marxism” he says is rampant on traditional campuses.
Mic tech writer Jack Smith explains the plan in a recent piece:
Now Peterson is working on, and accepting donations for, an online university. This was a plan he teased out over the past year; now he’s begun development on its first “module,” according to recent interviews. The institution would revolve mostly around the humanities and the great books of Western civilization. It would also be, as he’s said in his lectures and interviews, “autonomous and self-improving, a minimum of administrative overhead, extremely low cost, widespread availability, crowd-sourced in its structure and autonomously self-improving.”…How will Peterson create a crowd-sourced university? Based on one of his lectures, a thousand students might come up with 10 multiple choice questions. Then, a statistical model would figure out which questions are the best, and other students could vote on them. Through the apparently unpaid work of thousands of students, the process of making tests becomes self-generating and self-improving.Peterson’s model of online learning, however, isn’t exactly radical, or new. Companies like Coursera, Khan Academy and Udemy offer online classes centered on video lectures with peer reviews self-appointed accreditation.
It’s a good time for an alternative to the old school university model, which is increasingly designed to coddle rather than educate.
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