Hi Andrew. The problem isn’t just that he radically misrepresented a text 20 years ago. It’s that this misrepresentation appears to be foundational to his entire worldview. He repeats it in 12 Rules for Life, and has repeated it onstage in countless lectures, and almost no one in his audience has ever gone to the trouble of checking his sources, apparently.

It’s also important to note that he might have never even been given an official offer by Cambridge in the first place. This thread (from another faculty member) lays out how Peterson asked for a fellowship (something that’s generally unheard of in academia—there are open calls for these sorts of things), and might have had his request approved by some personal friends in the department, only to have those plans fall apart when University higher-ups caught wind of it: https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/1109179439164862467

This isn’t how academia is supposed to operate. Academics are supposed to write peer-reviewed articles and receive appointments based on the merit of their work, not the cult following they built by telling a credulous audience what they want to hear.