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Dr. Jordan Peterson in a January 2018 interview with Britain’s Channel Four. Screen-grab

CALGARY, Alberta, January 9, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A University of Calgary sociology professor who tweeted that he punishes students who invoke University of Toronto psychology professor and cultural commentator Jordan Peterson with failing grades now says it was a “joke.”

“I regret that it implied that I don't take seriously my students' right to free expression,” he tweeted.

Ted McCoy is a sociology professor whose research interests are listed as including “Social Inequality and Social Justice,” among other topics. Rebel News first reported that on the morning of January 7, he tweeted, “I heard it rumoured students will fail my class if they cite Jordan Peterson and I'd like to clarify that this is absolutely correct.”

McCoy has since deleted the tweet, but Rebel News saved an archive of the original page here.

By Tuesday evening, McCoy changed the settings on his Twitter account to prevent the general public from reading it at all. It is now public again.

“Ironically, Professor McCoy teaches a class called ‘Self-Regulation’ which examines how individuals and groups create, maintain, and follow non-legal codes of conduct and, in turn, regulate themselves and society,” Libby Emmons and Barrett Wilson note at the Post Millennial. “Apparently McCoy is too deranged by his jealousy-fuelled fever dreams of Jordan Peterson to apply the lessons of his course to his own online behaviour.”

Peterson has amassed a strong following of conservative fans in recent years for his hard-hitting assessments of issues from abortion and transgenderism to sex education and motherhood. He is a particularly fierce critic of academia, which he contends is largely dominated by “post-modernists pushing progressive activism” who indoctrinate rather than teach young people.

These and other stands have won Peterson no shortage of enemies on the Left. McCoy’s now-retracted threat echoes actions others have actually taken against Peterson fans, from a high-school debate judge in Utah to professors at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University. Leaked documents also reveal that Google employees have privately referred to Peterson (among other right-of-center public figures, including observant Jew Ben Shapiro) as a Nazi.