A letter to Dr. Jordan Peterson from a disappointed fan:
Dr Peterson, the following is an unedited transcript of the email exchange I have had with Acton since being accepted as a Peterson Fellow. I’m confused. Your message of responsibility speaks to me deeply and it does not seem very “responsible” to ask someone to uproot their life, move across the country, lose a year of wages, go into $65,000+ in debt, all for a program that refuses to answer basic questions about your level of involvement. The Acton MBA seems like a wonderful standard program but Fellows applied for this because of YOUR NAME, not because of Acton. If you just signed off on this as a branding deal I’m profoundly disappointed. I’m flummoxed that you haven’t mentioned it once in a public interview that I can find in the past months, not even your recent Q&A.
I spent well over 20 hours working on my submissions for this Fellowship. I’m so sad this time seems to have been wasted.
Perhaps you really are selecting for those “most comfortable with ambiguity” and they will get a chance to work with your team on the revolutionary online university project, I hope that’s true, and I wish I could have been a part of it. I can not and will not risk my family’s future for something that appears so outwardly unprofessional and sketchy. I hope you understand that I have personally contacted more than a dozen Fellowship Recipients who were fully accepted and rejected the offer for the same reasons I have. We are very unhappy and disillusioned. We are some of your most devoted fans. We deserve answers and an apology.
I am not even a little bit surprised. Peterson has always been a charlatan. His “self-authoring” program is total psychological snake oil