STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): Dangerous people are indoctrinating your children, that's according to a leading conservative who’s warning parents in a new video about sending their kids to America’s liberal colleges.
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JORDAN PETERSON (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO): Well, increasingly, and this is not only the case of universities, people are being taught by ideologues, not by educators. And ideologues have a very simple way of looking at the world. They reduce it to a few principles like inequality and unfairness and power. Those would be the fundamental principles at the moment that are operating on the radical left, and they're on an ideological campaign and that’s increasingly the case in elementary, junior high, and high schools as well. Mostly because the faculties of education are full of people who are radical. So -- and this is well-documented. Even the Chronicle of Higher Education came out a month ago with a blistering piece on faculties of education, describing them as academically suspect and ideologically possessed, which I think is exactly right.
DOOCY: Well, we've talked a lot about that on this program, but the question is, for parents who are thinking about sending their kids to college someday or already have, is, is this effort, rather than these professors and what not being educators but being ideologues, where'd that come from? Is it concerted across the board thing? Or is it just happening by accident?
PETERSON: No, no I think part of it's still a hangover from the 1960s, I would say, and perhaps even a bit of a hangover from the Cold War.
DOOCY: What do you mean? You mean the people from the '60s and '70s are now --
PETERSON: And the ethos that was broadcast so widely in the 1960s. And there was a lot of stress in the ‘60s, especially because of the Vietnam War and the consequences of the ongoing Cold War, and we're still sort of suffering from the aftermath of that ideological battle. But I also think the universities made a dreadful mistake expanding their humanities purview to include disciplines like women's studies and these ethnic studies disciplines, which aren't disciplines. They're pseudo-disciplines at best, and they have very, very low academic standards, and they're corrupting the rest of the enterprise. And so -- and that's not a good thing.
DOOCY: What do you mean corrupting the rest of the enterprise?
PETERSON: Well, you need to have standards in education. And the fact that disciplines emerged that had no real methodology and no method of proof, no philosophical background, no real history, meant that -- and that they became degree-granting enterprises, and that they emerged to produce political activists, which is exactly what they advertise on their websites, means that you've got a fifth column of ideologues operating behind the scenes, and they spend almost all of their time engaged in political activism.
