I hadn't been exposed to Peterson's prose before. As the man himself says:
> Only an individual accustomed to dining on very thin gruel or simply spoiled meat would find any nourishment in statements with such content and of that quality.
Granted, he thus describes the disclaimer by an institution of one of its tenurees' dismissal of efforts toward greater diversity of representation. That would be a reasonable thing for Peterson to complain about, if the sex-blind, colorblind meritocracy in which he so fervently believes could be shown in fact to exist.
As it is, Peterson neatly both describes and exemplifies the quality of his own written effort, which combines the worst qualities of purple prose and library paste. It's honestly a shame. Bad ideas expressed well can at least be interesting; even good ideas, expressed this poorly, would still fail to sustain the reader's attention.
> That would be a reasonable thing for Peterson to complain about, if the sex-blind, colorblind meritocracy in which he so fervently believes could be shown in fact to exist.
Isn’t that the ideal we should strive for in academics and the workplace?
This whole piece reminds me of those classmates in college that had no clue what they were talking about, so they used big words and overly effusive language to sound smarter than they actually are.
And while a pure meritocracy is what we're looking for in higher ed, at this moment we haven't found a way to separate the people from the process; we haven't found our orchestral blind auditions. Most tenured faculty positions are garnered through years of work at a university, and those years of work means years of human interactions and politicking. So, those "mandatory workshops" are necessary, because there's still very much a human element to the whole damn thing; and until we can remove the humans from the process, we'll need ways to learn how to better interact.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] thread> Only an individual accustomed to dining on very thin gruel or simply spoiled meat would find any nourishment in statements with such content and of that quality.
Granted, he thus describes the disclaimer by an institution of one of its tenurees' dismissal of efforts toward greater diversity of representation. That would be a reasonable thing for Peterson to complain about, if the sex-blind, colorblind meritocracy in which he so fervently believes could be shown in fact to exist.
As it is, Peterson neatly both describes and exemplifies the quality of his own written effort, which combines the worst qualities of purple prose and library paste. It's honestly a shame. Bad ideas expressed well can at least be interesting; even good ideas, expressed this poorly, would still fail to sustain the reader's attention.
Isn’t that the ideal we should strive for in academics and the workplace?
And while a pure meritocracy is what we're looking for in higher ed, at this moment we haven't found a way to separate the people from the process; we haven't found our orchestral blind auditions. Most tenured faculty positions are garnered through years of work at a university, and those years of work means years of human interactions and politicking. So, those "mandatory workshops" are necessary, because there's still very much a human element to the whole damn thing; and until we can remove the humans from the process, we'll need ways to learn how to better interact.