“That sounds like a guru scam,” my daughter said when I told her about Peterson Academy, Jordan Peterson’s foray into the world of online educat

Jordan Peterson versus higher ed

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2024-09-20 03:00:06

“That sounds like a guru scam,” my daughter said when I told her about Peterson Academy, Jordan Peterson’s foray into the world of online education.

She’s not the only person to be suspicious. On social media sites like Reddit, some people are questioning the wisdom of paying $499.99 to enroll in Peterson’s educational forum, which launched this month.

But Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has amassed an enormous following while pushing back against progressive ideology, has an easy retort: the cost of traditional higher education, which has doubled in the past quarter-century. Moreover, Peterson Academy’s offerings are quite different from other online schools, with professors from top tier universities and colleges teaching classes like “Post-Modern Philosophy,” “Evolutionary Inference” and “The History of Western Music.”

There is also the matter that the Peterson Academy is the latest venture that seeks to correct a stark ideological imbalance in education. Like the free online PragerU, not-for-credit courses at Hillsdale College in Michigan, and the University of Austin, which welcomed its inaugural class this month, these educational offerings are a response to entrenched liberalism within colleges and universities and in some secondary schools. As Steven M. Teles wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education in July, “the public’s impression that American higher education has grown increasingly closed-minded is undeniably correct. Indeed, concerns about the ideological drift of the university are no longer limited to conservatives, but now include some left-leaning faculty who worry that higher education has become, in the words of Gregory Conti, a political philosopher at Princeton, ‘sectarian’.”