IT'S ONLY GOTTEN WORSE.

Eight years ago, when I said goodbye to higher education, my complaints were within the normal bounds.

The legislature has not chosen to fund the universities adequately, nor has it corrected the ham-handed pension reform that has driven about one-fifth of the faculty and staff, along with the institutional memory carried therein, into retirement.

The university has not chosen to properly staff the academic departments, nor has it recognized that making increased demands on the fewer remaining faculty in the absence of any merit money is unlikely to yield enthusiastic participation on committees or a harvest of high-quality publications.

And the subtle denigration of mainstream white guys as less desirable hires or as majors continues.

But I no longer have the opportunity in meetings or other forums to argue against those follies.

Nor need I be complicit in them any longer.

These days, I put it more pungently: too many administrative fads, too much special education, too much affirmative action.

Now comes Toronto's Jordan Peterson, with a platform larger than mine, and presumably not having been placed in a position of having to transfer all his data and programming to new platforms, pulling the pin at a younger age than I was back in the day.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be.

For instance, what was "subtle denigration" back in the day is now something worse.

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked.

The continuance of his complaint calls for further scrutiny.

My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

It's possible that climatology students who study with professors known to be skeptical of The Narrative on climate change might have trouble getting hired, as might students writing under behavioral economists generally; and once upon a time the salt water economics departments shied away from Chicago graduates, or Minnesota graduates except in theoretical econometrics.

In Professor Peterson's view, the denial of coherent beliefs is going to destroy the research enterprise.

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

Yes, and the political economy of the grievance studies departments combined with the aesthetic preferences of the English departments to make higher education in real life a more sour and crabbed place than even the most pointed of academic novels dares portray.

Mike LaChance, who provides a roundup of Twitter reactions, concludes, "These progressive policies are destroying higher education as we knew it."

We might not know what we have until it's gone.