Ontario College of Psychologists cannot find ‘social media expert’ to publicly re-educate Dr Jordan Peterson

The professional licensing board of the Ontario College of Psychologists (the College) determined that due to his social media posts on these topics, Peterson was not qualified to retain his license as a clinical psychologist in the province and that he must undergo a course of re-education. Yet it has been revealed that "there was not a single available 'social media expert' available at hand to take on the task" of re-educating Dr. Jordan Peterson.

By the time Peterson was investigated by the professional body, he had already been struggle-sessioned out of his tenured professorship at the prestigious University of Toronto for refusing to comply with the policy of using students' "preferred pronouns." But Peterson's social media posts were the point of contention for The College, which received complaints from people who had seen Peterson's posts and lamented that he was legally permitted to practice psychology.

The College put him through public shaming and an expensive, lengthy trial, complete with appeals, before determining that his fate was to be re-educated. Peterson said that he would submit and that, for the sake of the public, the entire undertaking would be recorded and broadcast on YouTube. He was told he would have to pay the re-educator himself, that the length of the re-education was not up to him but up to the re-educator, that he would have to pay for every scheduled session the re-educator determined he should have, and that he had only three months from the meting out of the judgment to get underway.

Only when the time came, there was no one willing to take the job, or perhaps no one who met all the necessary criteria. It's entirely unclear because, as Peterson points out, The Ontario College of Psychologists wouldn't tell him who this re-educator was. In fact, he said, "the very lines in the document that contained the identifying information of the experts (names, email addresses, professional standing, and telephone numbers) had been redacted..."

Peterson posits that this was done, "no doubt to protect their fragile and hoping-to-be anonymous selves against the reactions of the legions of reactionary trolls I would unleash in my indefensible efforts to defend myself." When Peterson asked for those names to be revealed, the college told him that "due to some (conveniently undescribed) administrative confusion, the names were presently unavailable," Peterson writes in the Post.

However, the problem remains that in order to be re-educated, a re-educator must be contracted. In light of the lack of anyone capable or willing to do this, Peterson was offered a settlement in which he would just pay the college's legal fees. But this is not a settlement that appealed to Peterson, especially when it is the college, not himself, that appears to be unwilling or unable to go along with the very punishment they handed down. The College offered to somewhat indefinitely extend his three-month time limit to begin re-education.

"Note also," Peterson writes, "that since it is now early October, the college only has about seven weeks to straighten out the mess they created around themselves, without violating their own rules, and to repair me one way or another, in the hopefully permanent manner they are devoutly hoping to manage. Or, what is more likely — the rules of engagement apply to me, but not to them. Thus, I have three months to become re-educated, but they have infinite time to organize the process. And there would be little more convenient in this stickiest of situations than kicking the proverbial damned can a little farther down the road."

Part of the problem with finding someone to take on the task could have to do with Peterson's questions to The College as to how the qualifications of the "social media expert" would be determined. He had asked: "By what standards do you accredit your ‘social media experts’? Is that a regulated profession? Are these experts also versed in the complexities of clinical psychology? How else can they improve the professional activities of a psychological practitioner? Is there any concrete, published and peer-reviewed evidence that the tender lessons they purport to provide actually produce an improvement in the behaviour of those they 'educate?' By what objective criteria are you going to measure my improvement, in that regard? Are there standardized tests of such progression? How were those standards established, if they exist?"

Perhaps The College had not considered the rigor to which a so-called social media expert tasked with the re-education of Dr. Jordan Peterson would be put to. If The College cannot provide this professional, and Peterson does not agree to an alternate, financially punitive settlement, it is unclear what the result of the years-long fight will be other than a massive waste of money and humiliation for the professional body that took the word of social media denizens, not testimony from clients or colleagues, as a reason to discipline one of their members.