Jordan Peterson’s students expelled for speaking out

The site launched with a Netflix-like offering of video-based classes that has grown to include topics like the “Boy Crisis,” “Brain Plasticity,” and Peterson’s own flagship offering on German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The courses are roughly eight-hours long, are reinforced with AI-generated multiple choice quizzes and are taught by a largely male, often right-leaning group of writers and academics. 

While some of the site’s claims about working towards becoming an accredited school or ideological diversity felt thin, users spilled into the internal social media site to introduce themselves and share their excitement about what, for many, was a first shot at higher education.

Many users accepted his position on education in good faith: “I was just really excited about the vision of democratized education,” said Dusty May Taylor, one of the site’s early adopters, over a video call from her home in B.C.

“Letting everybody have access to learning and expand their horizons? I just thought that was so lovely, and I really took it at face value, like, ‘Oh, we’re all idealists here.’” 

Over the next few months, the feed flourished into a microcommunity, forging new norms and rules in the erratic way of new social media sites. Users posted snippets of poetry, AI-generated images heroes of ancient Greece and Star Trek characters, and musings about dating. Art was shared on ‘Bob Ross Mondays’. 

But now, some of Peterson’s biggest supporters are reeling after they say they were expelled from his online academy for asking too many questions. In particular, when the site announced a sharp price increase in late 2024 (the site now lists a one-year subscription at US$599) users hopped on to ask why they were paying more but waiting for features. Jokes were made. Memes were posted.

Shortly thereafter, several of the site’s most vocal participants say they found themselves expelled, suddenly unable to access their accounts, their money refunded. (In an email, Mikhaila Fuller, Peterson’s daughter and the site’s CEO, said the platform’s had roughly 47,000 users. Of those, she said 15 have been removed for “causing trouble in a narcissistic manner.”) 

It’s a description several of those involved dispute. Instead, they say Peterson, the self-help guru who wrote the bestselling book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” had taught them to ask questions and to push back against authority — to slay their own dragons, in Peterson-ian parlance. They joined his online community for the sort of unrestrained discussion they claimed was no longer possible on other platforms. So, in this online bastion of free speech, was it suddenly not so free? 

The social aspect was baked into the Peterson Academy concept from the beginning. The internal feed, now known as the Quad, looks like a pared-down Twitter, and was pitched as a forum for no-holds barred debate at a time when content moderation — or the lack thereof — had become increasingly thorny on mainstream platforms.

It was a predictable move from Peterson, whose rise to fame had been fuelled by a fight with the Ontario College of Psychologists over what he has described as free speech rights. (The college, on the other hand, disagrees with Peterson’s right to say, among other things, that a plus-size model was “not beautiful” while still working as a psychologist. The courts sided with the college.)

Peterson explained his thinking in an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast last July, in which he said that most social media companies get overrun with bad actors because there was no barrier to participation — something he felt would be fixed with a fee to join.

An upfront cost would mean users had “a little bit of skin in the game,” and help forge a community that was “responsible, achievement-oriented and upward-striving,” he told Rogan.

For Dusty May Taylor, it felt like a chance at redemption.

As a child, she says she’d fought to stay at the top of her class, but that what she describes as a “seriously difficult” childhood weighed her down. She didn’t finish high school on time. Her hopes of a scholarship faded.

She managed to work herself into a good job but life was hard, and last year, particularly so. She got divorced. Her older sister died unexpectedly. Then she heard about the launch of Peterson Academy. 

“My friends were like, ‘This would really benefit you. Meet some like-minded people. Like, feed your brain,’” she said, when they’d told her they were chipping in for a year’s subscription. “I was just really excited.”

The academy’s courses support a Peteresonian ideology, where the only history is Western, and experts are largely white and male.

But as May dove into introductory courses on neuroscience and Shakespeare and the history of Western music, it felt like opening a door to a new world. “I could finally learn about all these things, these references that are being made in culture that I had not been privy to,” she said. 

“You pick up bits and pieces,” she added. “You don’t really know what people are talking about.”

She also delighted in the Quad, where for what felt like the first time, she found people who wanted to talk about the courses, but also the books they’d read and the projects they hoped to finish.

Then one day, users logged in to find a new banner on the website. Members either had to pre-purchase a subscription for the next three years at their current rate, or pay the new annual price which was 20 per cent higher.

Up until this point, users had been open-minded about the fact that many promised features, like exams or essays for courses, interaction with professors, or even a block button for the social page, had yet to appear, says Jeffrey van Leeuwen, another participant based in the Netherlands. Suddenly they felt less accommodating.

If, as Fuller, Peterson’s daughter, said in an email, there are 47,000 people signed up for the academy, that’s somewhere north of US$20 million from first year subscriptions alone, even if you adjust for half having signed up for early bird pricing, as Peterson had previously claimed. “Now the message was, ‘In order to keep going, we need more money,’” said van Leeuwen. “So people were pointing at that and saying, ‘Okay, what changed?’”

While the Peterson Academy sells its association with Jordan Peterson, Fuller, 33, is listed as CEO. According to her own website, she’s managed her father’s brand since 2018. She’s probably best known for creating the all-meat diet she credits with easing a range of ailments, including depression, which she then introduced to her father, who made it famous, despite skepticism from nutritionists.

Things took a turn when Fuller, using her own profile on the site, weighed in about price, van Leeuwen said. “I mean this with love,” she began, before diving into her employment history that, she said, began in Grade 2 which included shovelling snow, raking and a paper route. Claiming that she “didn’t come from money at all,” Fuller added that anyone unable to afford the increase “should probably change jobs and/or work harder.”

Pushback was immediate. Taylor pointed out that it’s a fair chunk of change to have to gather in a short period of time. She acknowledged the tendency of those on the internet to get “riled and uneasy.” Still, she added, “it would be really good to have clear communication and some understanding” about the reasons behind the price increase. (Fuller has not responded to requests for specific posts that demonstrated “narcissistic” behaviour, and it’s not possible to view most of the posts from deleted users, aside from some replies. The Star has viewed screenshots provided by Taylor and van Leeuwen and replies still visible on Fuller’s post on the Quad.) 

About a week later, Taylor says she was scrolling through more reactions from the community when her screen suddenly refreshed and she found herself logged out. A few hours later, she says she received a refund with no further explanation. “Aside from the stress of feeling that Jordan Peterson’s daughter had digitally guillotined me,” she would write on her blog, she’d lost access to her new-found community. 

Users scrambled to find each other through other channels or snippets gleaned through their digital interactions, she said. “We can’t pretend that our digital community is not real community at this point.”

Van Leeuwen made podcast episodes with some of his fellow students who’d been banned, and then posted the link to the Quad. He knew that he courted banishment himself, but felt an obligation to keep speaking out, ironically, because of Peterson. Van Leeuwen said he left mainstream education as a young teenager but had managed to claw his way into a successful career as a technical project manager, a trajectory he credits to Peterson’s bootstrapping example. 

“His name is on the door,” van Leeuwen said. “His reputation of fighting what is wrong, trying to fight people that are trying to censor him or change his words, that is, in my view, admirable.” 

Which is why it was painful to have his own questions squashed as “drama,” as Fuller’s statement had put it. (“We welcome anyone to join PA who is on the platform looking to learn and improve themselves, and debate and disagreement is encouraged,” she wrote in an email to the Star, “but we don’t tolerate people who harass and bully other students and stir up unnecessary drama.”) 

The morning after van Leeuwen posted a link to his podcast in the Quad he tried to sign into the Peterson Academy site, only to find he’d been denied. It was not unexpected, but still came with the feeling of closing a book he wasn’t quite finished with, he says. 

A month later, he still hopes the decision to expel students was Fuller’s and that Peterson himself doesn’t know. (The Star did not receive a reply to an email sent to Peterson’s representatives.) Still, he extends to Fuller the same opportunity for change that Peterson’s work offered him. 

“Maybe naively, but if we can go back to the situation, there’s doesn’t even need to be apology,” he said. “What I care about is the restoration of what was.”