Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, is being threatened with official sanction or firing for the valuable and novel experiment he and two others began in 2017.
In what has come to be known as the " grievance studies hoax," Boghossian submitted a number of obvious, ridiculous fake papers to academic journals that focus on gender, race, and sexuality. When seven of their 20 papers were peer reviewed and accepted for publication (four were actually published before the hoax was exposed by the Wall Street Journal), he had proven how corrupt and worthless some academic subjects and journals really are.
The human subjects of Boghossian's real experiment were the peer reviewers who let through papers on such impressive topics as "Fat Bodybuilding" and "Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks." (That one was honored by the journal Gender, Place and Culture as "excellent scholarship.") Boghossian and his comrades also managed to get a feminist journal to republish a modified passage straight from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Boghossian, the only person involved in the hoax who holds an academic position, now faces retaliation from the academic system whose partial corruption he helped expose.
The accusation against him — perhaps technically true but ridiculous in its application — is that he experimented on human subjects without approval from an Institutional Review Board. IRBs are typically used to prevent dangerous science experiments on nonconsenting human subjects, not to retaliate against those who expose academic fraud. And of course, the retaliation itself further illustrates the fraud and indicates a cover-up in the works — a warning to others who would point out such fraud.
Needless to say, we do not believe that Boghossian deserves to be fired or even punished, even if he in fact failed to obtain a required approval. He has performed a public service. But more important than his fate is the lesson that the broader world should take about the rigor and sincerity of so-called "grievance studies" programs that are steeped in anti-intellectual postmodern thinking.
Far too many academic positions have been taken up by nihilists who no longer believe in truth as a concept, let alone seek it. This alone makes them unfit to teach others. The sole focus in some quarters has become the use of pressure and intimidation to make people think a particular way or suffer adverse consequences. This is the exact opposite of the intellectual life.
As Boghossian put it in one interview on his project, "We have created an environment where a sincere person cannot ask a question about a dominant moral orthodoxy — in a university system."
The toxic anti-intellectual environment of the modern university matters because it is leeching out into the broader political sphere. It is partly responsible for the nation's increasingly sharp political divisions. As the modern world develops alternatives to the traditional university experience, and as parents of future students catch on, it's up to the universities to reform themselves now, before it's too late.
Change it, or lose it.