After the events of the past few years, I don't think it's tenable to cast the problems Peterson highlights as occasional and obscure. Look at FIRE's speech code analysis: most universities have administrative restrictions on free inquiry. Look at Heterodox Academy's work on ideological bias: social science is 90% left, with something like 30% (from memory) calling themselves "radical". Look at the current replication crisis, which arises in part from fabrication of ideologically convenient results.
I simply cannot agree with your assertion that Peterson et al are cherry-picking and that academia is fundamentally sound. These pathologies are too common and too widespread not to constitute some kind of systemic issue. I find your arguments unconvincing. Instead, I believe that a correction is long overdue.
Disciplines that reject reason, empiricism, and rigor, that claim all truths are equally valid, and that hold the only valid goal of pedagogy is tearing down power dynamics --- these are indoctrination, not inquiry, and the public should not fund this activity.
> no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia
Academia really does apply extreme social and political pressure to unorthodox thinkers. Look at the campaign against Rachel Fulton Brown.
> use Peterson and his theories to justify
It's become common lately to argue that we shouldn't acknowledge certain facts because unscrupulous people might use them to justify something bad. This position is not tenable. The truth always gets out, and when it does, those suppressing it lose all of their influence and credibility. It's far better to acknowledge facts and work with them.
None of what you've said looks like evidence to me. I see arguments and anecotes.
The fact that unscrupulous people lean on Peterson to villify the left is not my concern. My concern is that Peterson seems to engage exclusively with those people, and he himself doesn't appear to see any variance amongst people in the various groups he targets (leftists, academics, feminists, antifa, etc).
I don't find those arguments persuasive. I do want people to be able to discuss controversial things. But I just don't believe in grand conspiracies behind the scenes. Just because there are lots of liberals in social science doesn't mean academia is some unfair conspiracy overall. Let me give a couple of examples that I think run into your examples, one in physics, one in business.
A ton of modern physics theoretical research is basically math that doesn't lead to verifiable results, and this leads to very valid questions about wasting our time. I think an argument can be made that physics in this area, in a sense rejects empiricism, because people's entire careers are going to be research that can't be verified. Of course people strongly want verifiable claims. I understand that not all of physics is that way. Would you ban this area for public funding? Probably not, but I think it fits in your description.
I'd venture that business colleges have a lot more conservatives than liberals and it's probably hard to be a far leftist in business (like a practicing communist!). Just to continue on business, I think a lot research about the effectiveness of different management strategies is not well supported by research, it's more anecdotal - the research about the genius of Jack Welch, well we didn't know about all that unaccounted for financial management that lead to GE being removed from the DOW. That's not to say there there is not good scholarship, in business, I think there is.
I do strongly support verifiable research, but some areas are hard to directly verify, especially dealing with humans and society, leading to hard to evaluate results. Writings about literature, analyzing texts in different ways, well that's all pretty subjective.
I simply cannot agree with your assertion that Peterson et al are cherry-picking and that academia is fundamentally sound. These pathologies are too common and too widespread not to constitute some kind of systemic issue. I find your arguments unconvincing. Instead, I believe that a correction is long overdue.
Disciplines that reject reason, empiricism, and rigor, that claim all truths are equally valid, and that hold the only valid goal of pedagogy is tearing down power dynamics --- these are indoctrination, not inquiry, and the public should not fund this activity.
> no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia
Academia really does apply extreme social and political pressure to unorthodox thinkers. Look at the campaign against Rachel Fulton Brown.
> use Peterson and his theories to justify
It's become common lately to argue that we shouldn't acknowledge certain facts because unscrupulous people might use them to justify something bad. This position is not tenable. The truth always gets out, and when it does, those suppressing it lose all of their influence and credibility. It's far better to acknowledge facts and work with them.