Mick Hartley

Peter Boghossian talks to the Times' David Charter about his letter of resignation from Portland State University:

After ten years trying to do the job he loved, Peter Boghossian describes writing his resignation letter as brutal. He always felt that it was his professional duty as an assistant professor of philosophy to apply the same spirit of rigorous interrogation that underpins his own discipline to the “dominant moral orthodoxy” on campus: wokeism.

He ruffled feathers. He was repeatedly investigated by his university’s “global diversity and inclusion office”. He really upset many of his fellow academics by writing spoof research papers and placing them in social science journals to highlight questionable academic standards in fields such as gender studies.

Boghossian — the name comes from his paternal grandparents, who emigrated from Armenia to the United States — was thrust into the national spotlight this week by his letter accusing Portland State University in Oregon of becoming a “social justice factory” where students are “being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues” rather than think for themselves.

The attack reverberated across academia and seemed to sum up much that is going wrong in an era when the clash of ideas seems to have been quashed by a conformity of thought.

“That letter truly was the hardest thing I ever wrote, and I’ve written a ton of stuff,” says Boghossian, 55, in a phone interview from his home in Portland. “And then when I hit ‘send’ I never felt so free. I wasn’t going to be complicit in the system any more, a system that was ostensibly set up to help people but has betrayed the public trust. I just couldn’t bear it any more.”…

He defended his use of Twitter to stir debate in a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education, saying: “Extramural criticism is one of the few avenues left now that academic journals have become echo chambers that reinforce and promote specific ideological lenses.”

Boghossian says that he tried to engage with his campus critics but to no avail. “I invited my colleagues from the women, gender, and sexuality studies department to join me on stage . . . and then again at an on-campus public event days later. They declined or ignored the invitations.”

He says that non-engagement with critics is one of the defining traits of wokeism. “I teach the arguments for the existence of God. But I’m an atheist, I don’t believe those arguments. So I try to bring in people who believe those arguments. That’s what education should be…..

“I love teaching but slowly the university made it impossible for me to do the thing I was hired to do,” he says. “I don’t teach maths, I teach reason. I teach ethics, I teach critical thinking, and there will be issues that come up in those classes that some people simply won’t like. If you’re teaching accounting and you put the number 54 in a ledger, nobody’s going to tell you they’re offended about that. But philosophy should challenge your thoughts, that’s what Socrates did, that’s what all philosophy has been, it has been a history of examination and challenging and questioning. But the university didn’t allow me to do that.”

His new crusade is to promote “cognitive liberty”, the freedom for students to reach judgments based on the battle of ideas rather than measure them against the moral certitude of wokeism.

“The problem is you have people who don’t see the university as a symposium, as a place where people come for a dialectic and a conversation, they view the university as a kind of church,” he says. “And they have the right answers to moral questions. And anybody who doesn’t agree is a heretic who needs to be silenced. That is an injustice to our students.”

Boghossian's spoof articles are in the fine tradition of Alan Sokal's celebrated hoax paper ""Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". For instance, "The conceptual penis as a social construct", which was published in Cogent Social Sciences:

Abstract: Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.

These maverick tendencies got him into trouble before. From January 2019:

The leading academics Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have defended a hoaxer who sought to expose politically correct “nonsense” in social sciences.

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy, faces losing his job at Portland State University in Oregon after he helped create spoof academic papers. These lampooned scholarship in various fields, including the studies of gender, homosexuality and obesity.

He and two collaborators dashed off 20 papers, each deliberately ridiculous and spiked with what the authors later described as “a little bit of lunacy”. Seven were accepted by peer-reviewed journals. One, titled “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity feminism as an intersectional reply to neoliberal and choice feminism”, was a rewrite of chapter 12 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf with feminist “buzzwords switched in”.

“Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”, was published under the fake name Helen Wilson in the journal Gender, Place & Culture, which is owned by Taylor & Francis, the British publisher.

Its author described an investigation of the “rape-condoning spaces of hegemonic masculinity” that are public dog-walking parks, which had involved examining “10,000 dogs’ genitals”.

The paper suggested that men should be trained, like canines, to prevent “rape culture”.

“Fat Bodybuilding” showed morbid obesity as a healthy life choice. Another advanced the theory that “it is suspicious that men rarely anally self-penetrate using sex toys, and that this is probably due to fear of being thought homosexual (“homohysteria”) and bigotry against trans people (transphobia)”.

Dr Boghossian and his colleagues said that they were shocked by the ease with which the papers were accepted. “We wanted to see if these disciplines that we called ‘grievance studies’ are compromised by political activism that allows for the laundering of prejudices and opinions into something that gets treated as knowledge,” he added.

The university are probably very glad to see him go.