Translating deep thinking into common sense
Dissenting Academic? How Universities Can Expel You
By Walter Donway
September 12, 2021
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A professional philosopher whose specialty is epistemology—specifically, critical thinking and moral reasoning as used by non-philosophers, including prisoners—has quit the faculty of Portland State University. In an open letter to the provost, he charges that the university has “transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice Factory whose only inputs [are]…race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs [are]…grievance and division.”
“Morally fashionable papers—no matter how absurd, could be published.”
Dr. Peter Boghossian, a Portland State professor of philosophy for a decade, is already well-known for his series of academic papers, with colleagues, submitted as a hoax to peer-reviewed publications in gender studies and other postmodernist journals. Most notorious perhaps is a paper that passed academic peer-review to be published as “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” His goal, said Boghossian, was to “demonstrate that morally fashionable papers—no matter how absurd, could be published.” (For more details, see “Are Grievance Studies a Scientific Hoax?”)
He employed this strategy not once but a couple of dozen times with results covered by the Wall Street Journal and other national publications. For the hoaxes, he has been widely attacked, and investigated and punished by the university, but also has won powerful supporters. Harvard professor of psychology, Steven Pinker, said the project made him ask “Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?” [“PoMo,” of course, is postmodernism.]
“But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible.”
Dr. Boghossian’s resignation letter of September 8, 2021, however, focuses on the atmosphere for teaching and critical thinking at schools like Portland, the faculty view of the university’s mission, and how dissenters, including himself, are treated.
Dr. Boghossian’s career in teaching, now some 25 years, began with a Ph.D.-thesis on using the Socratic Method with penitentiary inmates to reduce recidivism. Since then, his website states, he has applied his methods not only in universities and prisons, but in hospitals, schools, seminaries, Fortune 100 companies, and other businesses. At Portland, he has invited a wide range of public speakers with divergent, often unpopular ideas “to create the conditions for rigorous thought”—offering his students tools for reaching their own conclusions in the face of ideas with which they emphatically disagree. He wrote in his letter of resignation:
From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds….
I never once believed—nor do I now—that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible.
In the long letter to Provost Susan Jeffords, Boghossian wrote that students no longer are being taught to think but “trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.” And the faculty and administration, he wrote, “drive the intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions.”
He wrote: “This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.”
As a result, a culture of “illiberalism…has now fully swallowed the academy …”–
- Students refuse to engage with different points of view.
- Faculty who raise challenges during “diversity trainings” are “accused of microaggressions.”
- Professors are accused of bigotry for assigning foremost texts by philosophers who are European and male.
Unlike his colleagues, Prof. Boghossian went public, asking his questions out loud. He began networking with students groups who shared some of his concerns. He brought speakers to the campus to explore ideas of the “critical theorists…[whose] conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology…”
Retaliation took many forms:
An anonymous complaint by a former student led to a Title IX investigation (federal law to “protect people from discrimination” in any activities supported by federal government). There was no due process. Prof. Boghossian did not have access to the accusations, could not confront his accuser, and could not defend himself. But students told him they were interviewed by Title IX investigators who asked if they knew anything about Prof. Boghossian beating his wife and children. The rumor became extremely widespread.
The investigation did not find enough evidence to move ahead. It recommended that Prof. Boghossian “receive coaching” about diversity and inclusion. The investigator nevertheless told him that he no longer could render his opinion on “protected classes” or teach about them in a way that made his own opinions known.
These experiences persuaded Boghossian that corrupt scholarship was the force driving and justifying these radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts and from basic civility on campus. His response was the strategy of exposing the lack of standards, the sheer absurdity, of what was being published in journals dealing with identity and other postmodernist ideology.
It was not long before the swastikas began to appear in campus bathrooms with Boghossian’s name under them. And then on his office door. Along with a bag of feces. The university acted only against Boghossian, not the perpetrators of these acts. He accelerated the strategy of hoaxing the academic journals. One article in 2019 had argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and that men should be leashed the ways dogs are leashed. Formal charges were filed against him by Portland State for “research misconduct”—specifically, that the journal editors who reviewed the articles were used as “human subjects” in research for Boghossian had not received clearance from the human subjects committee.
The physical attacks continued:
Disruption by a tenured professor of a public discussion Boghossian was conducting with Christina Summers and two evolutionary biologists.
A fire alarm triggered during another public discussion with Boghossian.
Speaker wires yanked out to end a panel discussion arranged by Boghossian.
The harassment went on for years. He did not get tenure and never was protected by the university.
He reports that the university took no steps in any of these cases to stop or even address the behavior. The harassment went on for years. He did not get tenure and never was protected by the university. It has taken its toll, Boghossian admits.
And so, he has resigned, succinctly summarizing his reasons:
“While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas.”
Should Boghossian, in battling academic political correctness, have resorted to hoaxing academic journals? Did that tag him as a publicity seeking professor? He did so, recall, only after years at Portland State observing new faculty dogmas that only could be driven, and rationalized, by the preposterous “research” on political positions as synonymous with racial, ethnic, and sexual identity. And the assumption that politics equals victims.
Boghossian became convinced that the “peer-reviewed” journals had no standards of truth, only a credo of adherence to postmodernist jargon. And so, he did a scientific experiment. Indeed, the Portland State University’s committee on human experimentation confirmed that this was scientific research. Only problem: Boghossian didn’t get their permission. The experiments demonstrated that the “peer reviewers” of postmodernist journals would approve any nonsense clothed in the postmodernist jargon.
Postmodernism’s sole way of dealing with dissent based on observation, facts, and logic is politics: specifically, the marshalling of those who believe (the party) against opponents. Remember, for postmodernism it is all about racial, ethnic, sexual, and economic collectives and their relative political power. Chief among those powers is expulsion of those not party loyalists.
Prof. Boghossian’s epistemology—reason and logic, open debate, respect for dissent—collided with Portland State’s postmodernist dogma. Literally, both could not survive. Reason allows compromises (trade-offs)—if persuaded by reason. But there can be no compromise between reason and postmodernism’s commitment to false ideas..
Postmodernism exists because of its power to expel dissent. If you are not politically correct, you are expelled—as undigestible or much worse—from the politically correct digestive track. Boghossian’s life was made intolerable by attacks ignored by the administration. As Portland perhaps intended, Boghossian, in the end, resigned. He could not be granted the reality—that he was expelled as intellectually unacceptable.
Because of Boghossian’s intellectual integrity, it took 10 years to excrete him from the Portland State digestive tract in a way that the media could report as “resigned,” not “fired.”
It crucial to postmodernism and the American university to protect, for now, the image of free and open scholarship. Prof. Boghossian resigned from the university. His choice.
It is a strategy now perfected. You or I or any opponent of postmodernism—political correctness—can be expelled in a politically correct way. Just create a campus and climate of opinion that invalidates reason: with bureaucratic investigations, required “coaching” on identity politics, guerrilla warfare (yanking speaker wires), indignities such as spitting and bags of feces, and—above all—the message, at first, incomprehensible, that the upholder of campus civility—the administration, will do nothing.
For most of us, the protection is that our voices and opinions do not threaten the cultural dogma. Only if we succeed do we become a target.
But given the cogency and eloquence of Boghossian’s letter of resignation, instantly made public, I do not think we have seen the last of him.
Not by a long shot.
Fight on, fight on, my merry men,
Let none of you be ta’en.
I’ll lay me down and die awhile,
Then rise and fight again.—John Dryden
Cheers, Peter Boghossian. We await the great second act.
Editor’s Note:
Walter Donway is an editor of Savvy Street. His new novel, “Retaking College Hill,” is a literary philosophical thriller about a battle to “take back” an Ivy League campus from the forces of postmodernism. He says he did not know about certain incidents in Prof. Boghossian’s persecution at Portland State University, like the bag of feces, when he made up such incidents for the novel.
About the Author: Walter Donway
