Jordan Peterson & The Art of Breaking Chops
How administrators of public servants can be masters at legal work-arounds
In the field of education there are countless misapprehensions the public often hears, repeats and propagates. The most common one is the public’s understanding of tenure.
That’s that thing where teachers can’t get fired, right? That’s when, after a couple years, you can do whatever you want and nobody can fire you, right?
This misconception gets repeated so often it has passed for collective knowledge, like the sun rising in the east every morning. So, once more:
Tenure is not a lifetime of guaranteed employment.
Tenured teachers can get fired. Tenured teachers do get fired every day. Tenure is merely the guarantee of due process before a teacher is recommended to the board for termination. Tenure gives a school employee an opportunity to make a case for why they shouldn’t be fired. Tenure is designed to protect teachers from some of the arbitrary whims of their supervisors. It can protect a teacher from getting fired for teaching controversial subjects, for conducting controversial research, or for simply drawing the ire of an administrator for any number of reasons. Tenure forces the administrators to show solid documentation for why they believe the teacher should be dismissed.
A tenured teacher can be fired with documented evidence that they violated one of the “three I-words:” Insubordination, Immorality, Ineffectiveness.
Insubordination. (The teacher repeatedly refuses directives from a supervisor that the teacher is contractually obligated to perform. For example: a teacher refuses to go outside for bus duty).
Immorality. (The teacher engages in behavior that violates the cultural/social norms of the community in which he serves. For example: a teacher carries on a sexual relationship with a student. A teacher promotes illegal or antisocial activity to his students.)
Ineffectiveness. (The teacher’s pedagogy does not result in students reaching state standards, uses outdated or unproven teaching strategies, or does not seem to employ any strategies at all. For example: a teacher consistently performs poorly on observations, even after coaching and support from administrators. The teacher puts text up on a board and has students spend the period copying the text into their books while he puts his feet up and does a crossword puzzle.)
There is a broad spectrum of behaviors that can be proven to fall under these three categories if an administrator is thorough enough and documents the tenured teacher’s performance.
It is not impossible to fire a tenured teacher. But it is difficult. Which is why anyone who has any experience in a school environment can testify the myriad ways in which some administrators (not all) can find “work-arounds” to getting rid of a teacher they don’t want in their building. Wildly inconvenient schedules. Miserable teacher duties, (such as lunchroom duty) late-day exam proctoring. They may nitpick every move the teacher makes during classroom observations to try and skew the observation toward “ineffective.” They may stock his classroom with the school’s most behaviorally challenging students. All of these are done to motivate the teacher to leave on their own accord. And if all that fails, the poor observations leave a paper trail for such an administrator to build a termination case.
Why would they do this? For all the reasons that make us human. Sometimes an administrator doesn’t like the teacher because the teacher is “weird.” Sometimes the teacher doesn’t “fit in” with other teachers in his department. Sometimes the teacher is a vocal social justice liberal. Sometimes the teacher is a MAGA conservative. Sometimes the teacher is a Karen. Sometimes the teacher is a white “dude-bro.” Sometimes parents complain about the teacher too much. Sometimes the teacher fails too many students and impacts the school’s data.
For all those reasons and more, tenured teachers don’t have it made in the shade. They can still be gotten. There’s a layman's term for what I described above. It’s called “breaking chops.” Some administrators who have to deal with licensed, protected employees can get very good at breaking chops.
I was reminded of this phenomenon after news broke that the College of Psychologists Ontario (CPO) investigated and sentenced Jordan Peterson to mandatory social media training. The CPO is a governing body of psychologists tasked with “monitoring and regulating the practice of psychology.” As a regulatory body, they wield the power to revoke the licenses of psychologists who are found to violate its Standards of Professional Conduct.
The training prescribed to Peterson, to be taken at his own expense, would be conducted by social media/marketing experts that would sign off on Peterson’s satisfactory “progress” after he completed the training. The aim of the training (presumably) is to teach Jordan Peterson the proper things for a psychologist to say on Twitter. The investigation was prompted, according to Peterson, by a small cadre of complainants who screen-shotted specific tweets they took issue with and submitted them to the CPO as evidence that Peterson was violating the governing body’s Standards of Professional Conduct. A link to the body’s standards is here.
Like the teaching profession, it seems this governing body has found a way to break chops. Unlike the teaching profession, where termination and licensing procedures move bottom up (local school districts initiate a case of license revocation), it seems the clinical psychology profession handles licensing decisions top down.
It should come to the surprise of no one, to learn that the CPO’s Standards of Conduct does not make any mention of mean tweets. Most of the wording around personal behavior comes with very tight framing: the conduct needs to take place while “providing psychological services” or “in any professional context.” Jordan Peterson hasn’t practiced one-on-one clinical sessions since 2017, when he determined that his fame would make it unethical to do so. What’s more, none of the complainants who submitted Jordan’s public utterances were ever under the care of Dr. Peterson.
To anyone with a shred of common sense, who is not blinded by their own hatred for Peterson, this is clearly a case of two entities getting together to find a way to hurt Jordan Peterson. It’s not a complicated set of dots to connect.
Complainants: We don’t like Jordan Peterson. Hey CPO, do you see what he said here?
CPO: We don’t like Jordan Peterson either. He is richer, more famous and more sought after than any of us. Plus, he says things we don’t agree with. Let’s find a way to disrupt his life somehow. (A.K.A “break his chops”)
What’s the play here? For the CPO, the worst case scenario is that Jordan Peterson has to take some Saturdays out of his life (and money out of his wallet) to take this dopey training, where he’ll learn how to better communicate on social media despite having 3.7 million followers on Twitter. The best case scenario? Peterson refuses to submit to the training. This then allows them to claim insubordination, so they can move forward with the revocation of his license (which is what they really want).
Let’s be clear. These trainings that employers put employees through serve a dual purpose, both of which are reasonable. One purpose is to cover themselves in the event that an employee’s actions generate a lawsuit. Think: when an employee opens a phishing scam and leaks private information to a third party. Tech training on how to avoid phishing scams seems appropriate. A second purpose is when a company wishes to see an employee succeed, but the employee has committed some sort of misstep. An ill-advised joke in the break room, an insensitive remark to a coworker, false information put out over the company’s social media. The training is intended to correct the employee’s behavior before having to go through the drastic measure of firing the employee.
Anyone with eyes can see that none of these purposes are driving the CPO’s decision on Jordan Peterson. But a certain subset of people on Twitter are pretending this is just business as usual for the CPO.
Case in point: the following exchange I witnessed on Twitter between a progressive podcaster and an anonymous account that recognized in the CPO’s decision what I recognized as well: a power-play intended to either greatly inconvenience Dr. Peterson, bring him to heel, or take away his ability to practice should he choose to re-open in the future.
“I think you’re right in [sic] the money, 2016 or 17, he shut down. Most people in his profession don’t garner the same attention, which is why in labor some of these “clauses” are unevenly applied. This is targeted. This isn’t “oh shit who’s this guy we just discovered being naughty”
“Maybe every so many years people get reviewed? I dunno. I don't read minds of people who run professional associations in other countries.”
“C’mon Dave, this is getting Al Capone for tax evasion. You’re wise enough to know when a bureaucracy wants to break balls it finds a way. Many of us enter into professions and sign onto things we never think will be used against us.”
“Al Capone did in fact evade taxes. Not sure your reply is the win you think it is. This guy shut down his clinical practice years ago to become a cult leader for incels. Him losing this accreditation has zero impact on his life.”
“That’s all they could get him on, is my Capone point, and it was laughable. I wondered that same thing, though, about the fact JP no longer practices, is it worth the fight? At the same time though, if he’s not practicing, then why is this governing body bothering with him?”
“Probably because that's their job? He's an embarrassment to the good and well meaning people in the field who do still practice.”
“It’s their job to make sure 60 year olds are using Twitter properly? You may find him an embarrassment. I don’t fall over him like he’s some sort of guru, but 1000s of people claim to have been helped by him. That doesn’t count for anything?”
“There are code of conduct clauses in these things. Your problem is with the people who put those codes in, not with me. You seem to be reading their minds. Use your telepathic power to give them what for.”
Maybe people get reviewed? I don’t read minds? This is clearly someone who knows a governing oversight body is being petty and unfair, but doesn’t have the intellectual honesty to admit that they don’t care because the target is someone he doesn’t like. For the record, the progressive podcaster above absolutely does read minds. He goes on ad nauseam about “dog whistles.” If that’s not reading minds, I don’t know what is.
And just to underpin how completely full of shit some people are on this issue with Peterson: they would never give the benefit of the doubt to, say, a real estate agency that got called out for steering minorities away from white neighborhoods. They would never say “I dunno, maybe they thought they were showing houses their clients wanted to see?” No. They would rightfully call it for what it was: steering. And they’d be right. But a governing body that suddenly decides to investigate the Tweets of a member who hasn’t practiced in 5 years–that’s just an organization doing its due diligence?
Spare me.
The larger issue, larger than Jordan Peterson, is the idea that professional oversight committees can weaponize pretty broad and ill-defined “codes of conduct” against professionals who run afoul of their personal values, and from a labor perspective, that’s a tenuous place to be. The CPO is certainly not the only organization that boasts a code of conduct intended to regulate members’ behavior.
The American Bar Association routinely oversees disbarment cases. However, its professional standards are all pretty much couched under the phrase “in conduct related to the practice of law.” The American Institute of Architects also has a governing body that investigates the conduct of architects under their licensing purview. Similar to the ABA though, the AIA handles complaints “filed by an AIA member, component, or anyone directly aggrieved by the conduct of a member.”
“Related to the practice of law.” “Directly aggrieved by the conduct.” These are telling stipulations: ones that, in my estimation, are careful not to overreach into the personal musings and social media posts of the professionals they’re supervising. Even the CPO stipulates the behavior they monitor is conduct undertaken “in any professional context.” Appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast to promote your book is not a job description of a clinical psychologist.
Similar to online debates about “cancel culture,” it needs to be said. Yes, Jordan Peterson will be fine, licensed or unlicensed. This isn’t about one person. This is about the manner in which our employers can use legal cover to harass, intimidate and even terminate our employment in unjust ways. What sort of unjust ways? Oh…let me think…(and I’m just spitballing here, just throwing out a crazy, unrealistic hypothetical)…how about if some schoolboy snitches online decide they don’t like what you’re saying and contact your employer about it?
If you’re a practicing psychologist whose name isn’t Jordan Peterson, how willing would you be to express an unpopular opinion on your personal social media account, if they have the power to take down a colleague with triple the resources you have? If you’re a licensed architect, how could you withstand the full force of the AIA coming down on you because of something you said on a podcast? At some point we need to be able to set aside our petty feelings about someone we don’t like, so we can clearly see when a powerful regulatory body is breaking our chops.
Editor’s note: In a previous version of this story, it was erroneously stated that Jordan Peterson had 3.5 million followers on Twitter. In fact, Peterson has 3.7 million followers. I regret the error.