‘PRONOUN PROF’ AT U OF T DENIED FEDERAL FUNDING
TORONTO • University of Toronto psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson has had a federal research grant application denied for the first time in his long and distinguished academic career.
And he’s certain that the rejection from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the government agency that supports post-secondary research, is linked to the controversy surrounding his stand on gender-neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “zher,” and the modern notion of gender as being fluid.
That his application was also rated so poorly is telling, he said, meaning that if the proposal had just missed the mark, it might have been a credible critique, but the proposal failed abysmally.
Julia Gualtieri, spokeswoman for the council, said in an email Monday that grants are awarded through a merit review process, and that “past funding is not a guarantee of further funding.” Names of the peer review committee members will be publicly posted once all applicants have been fully notified, she said.
Peterson sparked a freespeech furor last fall with YouTube videos about the dangers of the then-looming (and now law) federal Bill C-16, which included “gender identity” and “gender expression” in the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code.
He was immediately warned by the university “to stop repeating these statements” because they were purportedly inciting fear in the transgender community.
And at the time, Peterson said he knew he was most vulnerable to attack in two areas — his grant funding and his licence as a clinical psychologist.
“I think that (the controversy) provided someone with a convenient opportunity to make their displeasure with what I’m doing known,” he told Postmedia in a recent phone interview. “I can’t shake the suspicion.”
Nothing else has changed, he said: As usual, he has three top-calibre graduate students working with him; and his “citation counts,” the number of times a work is cited by peers, are rapidly rising and have always been high.
Indeed, it’s the graduate students’ loss of income that Peterson feels badly about, though he’s already working on alternate ways to raise funds for them.
“Almost all of it (the grant money) is used to pay my grad students their supplement so they can get their PhDs,” he said. Another chunk would have gone to pay research subjects. There was also a small budget for the students to travel to present their data.
Much of the five-year, $399,625 grant was for continuing work on research the SSHRC has previously approved and funded; the last time, in 2012, was for the largest amount ever awarded to a psychologist.
The application, which runs to 41 pages, was for continuing research in three areas: the technical investigation of the structure of personality, particularly improving the mechanisms by which personality is measured; assessing personality and political beliefs; and for online interventions for people to improve performance at school and work.
Well before Peterson erupted on to the public consciousness last fall with his YouTube videos questioning the current push for genderless pronouns and gender equity, he was recognized as a respected scientist.
He taught at Harvard University for six years.
His so-called “h-index,” for instance, is considered exceptional.
The h-index is the result of physicist Jorge Hirsch’s attempt to measure the quality of scientists, not just the number of times he or she was published.
In other words, both productivity and impact are measured.
According to Hirsch, after 20 years of research, an hindex of 20 is good, 40 outstanding; Peterson’s score is 49. His total citation count is almost 8,000.
“By multiple measures,” he said, “even if the ideas (in the grant application) were not of the highest calibre, and they were, I have the track record to show I’m more than capable of producing, including my ability to disseminate my ideas into the broader community.”
In fact, he’s indisputably a great communicator: His education videos have been viewed by eight million people, and he’s popular on Twitter.
The rejection has “zero impact on my income,” Peterson said. “It’s all the same to me … But it’s cut the legs out from under my graduate students.”
The rejection, he said, “is a seriously bad sign” that the vetting process may be becoming politicized.
But Gualtieri defended the merit process as “a transparent, in-depth and effective way to allocate public research funds.”