Jordan Peterson’s new online school promises to dispense with ‘woke nonsense.’ I enrolled — and here’s what I learned

As anyone who has watched him on one of his many YouTube videos knows, Peterson speaks with a gravelly intensity and here, he has centre stage. The reaction from many of my fellow online students is gushing. “I have tears in my eyes,” one person posts in the video’s comment section. “Thank you for your work Jordan,” writes another. “I got goosebumps and a hungry brain to feed.” I start counting every time Peterson says “axiomatic.” (An average of once every six minutes.) The in-person audience sits impressively still.

Peterson Academy, his eponymous new online school which promises to dispense with “woke nonsense,” is officially open for business. A beta version of 18 on-demand video courses on everything from nutrition to neuroscience was soft launched to early enrollees in late August, with the full version set to roll out Sept. 9. The cost to subscribe is $499 US — roughly $670 CAD — per year. 

This is, in theory, an attempt to make higher education accessible to the masses. “What if we could make getting a degree 95 per cent less expensive?” Peterson mused on his daughter’s podcast almost a year ago. “Why wouldn’t it be good to provide everybody, at least in principle, with access to the best lectures?” 

But it’s also clear that for Peterson, a man who has made a career talking about the competing appeal of chaos and order, that’s not the whole story. “I think it’s funny,” he said in a promo video for the academy posted to YouTube a month ago. “I got cancelled at the university,” he said, referring to his decision to part ways with the University of Toronto over what he called its “appalling ideology” and diversity targets, “so I can try to return the favour.”

The new school is a business venture, a thumb of the nose to his previous employer — and the next evolution of the man who is one of Canada’s biggest digital exports. So when early enrolment became available, I signed up to kick the tires. But after a week, the promised benefits to students remained a little unclear.

It’s been now almost a decade since Peterson  rocketed to national consciousness — and controversy — by arguing that being forced to use pronouns like “ze” and “zir” was a violation of free speech. He emerged as part public intellectual, part internet celebrity and fully against political correctness. Suddenly there was the bestselling book, “12 Rules for Life: Antidote to Chaos,” which urged readers to seize responsibility for their own lives . There were the speaking tours and lucrative crowdfunding. There was official merchandise. 

Then somewhere around the beginning of the COVID pandemic, he dropped out of the public eye for almost a year. In a video in the fall of 2020, he revealed he was back in Toronto after spending months in and out of hospitals overseas for withdrawal and neurological symptoms caused by benzodiazepines, which are drugs used to treat conditions like anxiety and insomnia. 

As he returned to public life, he seemed to widen his focus to take aim at a growing list of far-right targets, like climate ”extremists” and trans ”butchery.” After receiving complaints over tweets about, among other things, a “not beautiful” plus-size model , the College of Psychologists of Ontario ordered him to undergo a coaching program on professionalism in public statements. (Peterson’s attempt to appeal  was shut down by the country’s top court this summer.)

According to CJ the X, a Toronto writer and artist who puts out philosophy content on his YouTube and Patreon accounts and is currently at work on a five-hour exploration of Peterson’s career, the general perception even among a lot of Peterson’s fans is that he’s hardened in recent years. “He comes across as more cranky and more partisan and more inflammatory,” he said.

Peterson also parted ways with U of T, writing in the National Post in 2022 that he’d resigned from the full-time, tenured position.  There were a few reasons, he wrote. Chief among them was the “appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture.”

But, he said, there was still a place he could teach more people and with less interference: the internet.

When the email pinged into my inbox that I was now able to join the first wave of Peterson Academy users, I logged on and immediately checked the internal social media feed. Users from New Jersey, British Columbia, and the Philippines tumbled in to announce their arrival. Peterson said on social media that 25,000 people had pre-enrolled for the beta version of his academy, and while that number was impossible to verify, there were a lot of people excited to be there. 

“Looking forward to celebrating a new age of ‘out of the box’ education, challenging my thinking and rising up to a new world,” read a comment from a user in Toronto.

Peterson has always had a way of making a certain group of young people feel seen by taking seriously their struggles to find a place in the world. “I feel like he made morality feel really relevant,” CJ, the Toronto artist, puts it. “In a world where we are kind of soaked in the thought that morality is all subjective and religion is all bull——, it’s exciting to have someone go, ‘you know, those are things that feel really meaningful.’”

The Peterson Academy site itself would be familiar to anyone with a Netflix account, with glossy trailers set to soaring music for each eight-hour course and glamorous close-up photos of professors. Some of the courses are straight lectures, like Peterson’s, while others feature two instructors in conversation, or an unnamed interviewer there to ask questions. Video production would put most universities to shame; each course is shot in front of a small audience in a bright white room. As they speak, important definitions or quotes swoop onto the screen, illustrated by images of people or buildings that  look both vaguely historical and AI-generated. 

I discover you can “enrol” in any course you want with the click of a button, which seems to mostly mean saving it to a list of your favourites, so I add Peterson’s course and one The Art of Storytelling to my queue. Though it’s still possible to click around and watch any video I want, and while users enthusiastically discuss in the comments, there’s no way to directly engage with professors. 

One of the academy’s key selling points is that it’s free of what is described as the “idiot intellectual propaganda” of a typical university. But it’s hard not to see many of courses rooted in a traditional Peterson-ian world view in which the clock started in ancient Greece, the best books are Penguin Classics and postmodern (leftist) thought has gone a little too far.

In addition to Peterson’s flagship course on Nietzsche, the first batch of 18 courses include Introduction to Nutrition (ideally, eat meat), The Boy Crisis (girls and boys hit each other “about equally”) and The Greatest Leaders in History: Heroes (seven military men plus Margaret Thatcher). The majority of the instructors are men.

Antoine Panaioti, an associate professor of philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University, is the first to admit that he’s the sort of left-wing academic distrusted by conservative critics like Peterson.  He agrees access to higher education is a problem, but counters that the best way to address it is to find ways to make tuition cheaper.

As someone who has written a book on Nietzsche, he says, based on the first of Peterson’s lectures, the scholarship here is fairly “shallow” and “not up to the standard” of a university course. There’s a simplistic reading of the philosopher, with his focus on individual self-determination, that’s become “something of a hook” for some more conservative movements, he adds. “The notion that the Peterson Academy, and in particular, Jordan Peterson’s lectures, would be devoid of ideology is farcical,” he says.

But not everyone involved agrees that joining the academy means co-signing Peterson’s vision. John Vervaeke is an associate professor in psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto who is teaching a course called Intelligence, Rationality, Wisdom and Spirituality for the Peterson Academy. On a podcast last year, he said he’d known Peterson as a colleague for a long time, and respected some of his ideas and freely criticized others, including his stance on pronouns. Still, the fact that he maintained a relationship with Peterson was a “challenge.”

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“I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” he said. “So I sort of just say, ‘well, OK, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to show up and interact with him as philosophically and scientifically honestly as I can.’”

In a phone call with the Star, he said Peterson invited him to teach whatever he wanted. “I said, ‘Look, Jordan, I’m not a Christian, not a conservative.’”

“He said, ‘I don’t care. I want you to give the very best possible course you can,’ and he’s been true to his word. I can only speak for myself, but I did not feel any pressure to toe any ideological line whatsoever,” Vervaeke said. “I think that speaks to the better angel of his nature.” Vervaeke has taped three courses, including the one already available, for which he was paid a fee — one he says is in line with other online platforms for which he’s taught courses — plus an undetermined future share in profits.

He said he’s proud of his courses and doesn’t like the way the academy has been advertised as an enemy of universities. He’d like everyone to come take his classes — not just people who are “anti-institution or libertarian by proclivity,” as he puts it.

“Many people are fatigued from the culture war, but (Peterson’s marketing) could have been more neutral, to my mind,” Vervaeke said. “But it’s his thing, you know?”

Peterson isn’t the first person to create his own online education program. There’s the MasterClass program, which encourages people to “learn from the best” through video classes from notable instructors for a $10 monthly fee. There’s also attempts by individuals, including Donald Trump, who launched Trump University in 2005 to help people learn real estate skills (though the school eventually was ordered to pay a $25-million settlement to students who felt its practices were deceptive). Andrew Tate, an influencer known for his misogynistic views, has Hustlers University, which is billed as teaching people to “break free from the matrix.”

But while one of the main goals of Peterson Academy is a noble attempt to help people become smarter and more knowledgeable, it goes one step further by arguing it would be a boon for jobseekers. Speaking on his daughter’s podcast, Peterson said that employers would be “damn fortunate” to get a list of those who’d graduated, and if they “had any sense” those employers would hire them, because the academy had done the “rigorous screening work” to make sure graduates were qualified.

But at the moment, the only thing I needed to enrol in the academy was to type in my credit card number. I added my name to my internal profile but there was no obligation to use my real identity. Each lecture I watched was followed by a 10-question multiple choice test, but it was optional. The tests themselves are AI-generated, and they’re currently lacking a certain human-level rigour. (I took the quiz after watching a lecture about Pericles, a politician from ancient Athens, and the answer to two of the 10 questions was, simply, “Pericles.”) The site says final exams will be coming soon, but it’s unclear what they will look like.

Scrolling through the internal social feed, it’s clear some users are keen on the school eventually being recognized as an accredited institution, which would certify that it meets certain quality standards and is allowed to award degrees or credits. One user described his education background as a “train wreck,” and said that while he’d been able to overcome “challenges” in adulthood, he’d always hoped to one day go back to school. Peterson Academy, he wrote, felt like he was finally getting that opportunity. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this platform feels like a second chance,” he wrote. “Especially when accreditation gets off the ground.”

In response to a media request about accreditation, Peterson Academy sent an auto-generated email saying it’s “actively pursuing” accreditation but that there is no time estimate. In the meantime, it is partnering with companies interesting in hiring students. “The education and testing on this platform is enough to indicate to companies that we have graduates that are far more qualified than the average college graduate.”

(On this point, Vervaeke, the academy instructor, notes he’s “wary” of the school making claims about getting jobs that “aren’t based on any kind of empirical evidence.”) 

There’s a particular gotcha moment that is often cited by critics of Peterson — when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and joked about how profitable his turn toward online provocateur had been, he said he’d “figured out how to monetize social justice warriors.” CJ, the artist from Toronto, says he sees that clip as mostly a joke, and that he doesn’t see anything inherently wrong with putting educational material online, or in trying to make money from it.

The problem is whether students are getting what they’ve signed up for. “On the one hand, it seems like exactly what I wish Jordan Peterson would do, and what a lot of people wish he would do, which is, like, be an educator,” he says. “And spend less time podcasting vaguely on culture war stuff and tweeting himself into oblivion.”

After a week of lurking on Peterson Academy, I was hoping to access its promised seven-day money back guarantee. After trying and failing to figure out how, I finally posted for the first time on the social feed myself, asking if anyone knew. The response from someone from the academy itself was swift and helpful. But someone else commented, too.

“Hope all is well with you friend. Maybe I’m wrong but I assume the reason you want your money back has to do with unfortunate real life issues. That’s the worst,” the post began. But if misfortune had not befallen me, the poster said they wanted to help.

“If I can help you see things more clearly I will. I am 40. I’ve been to community college, grad school, dozens of certification programs, I’ve taken open source classes online from MIT, and many other similar experiences. So far, my opinion is that Peterson Academy is superior to any kind of educational program I’ve ever been a part of.”