Lefty Academia in Attack Mode Against Prof. Peter Boghossian

Peter Boghossian 

Rod Dreher sets the scene:

Peter Boghossian is one of a trio of liberal college professors who pulled off an awesome hoax last year: they placed a number of fake research papers in peer-reviewed academic journals. The papers were designed to demonstrate that you could write any idiotic thing in so-called “grievance studies” fields, and get it published as long as you took the politically correct view, and used the correct jargon.

Jesse Singal at New York magazine reports:

Of the 20 articles the trio submitted, seven were accepted (after various revision and editing processes, as is the norm with papers accepted by academic journals). One was a feminist-oriented revision of a Mein Kampf excerpt; another, ostensibly based on hours of observation, argued that “dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured” — that one won recognition for excellence by the feminist geography journal in which it was published, Gender, Place, and Culture. 

Left-wing academia has not been amused. Now they are attempting to take him down.

More from Singal:

Portland State University appears poised to sanction Boghossian, an assistant professor there, for research misconduct as a result of the hoax. Boghossian, in his university’s view, failed to get Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for his research and fabricated data...

Here is a video clip that was just posted of Boghossian and his co-authors that was originally filmed in October discussing the investigation and what it means:


There's more.

According to Singal:

[A] group of 11 PSU professors and one grad student published an anonymous letter in the Vanguard student newspaper, accompanied by a weird and menacing-looking image of Boghossian with a Pinocchio nose, in which they accused him of various misdeeds both related to the hoax — “When supposed scholars repeatedly engage in fraudulent behavior violating acceptable norms of research in any discipline, we have to start asking what the purpose is.”

“We have opted to communicate our concerns through a collective identity rather than individually,” explains the final section of the article. “Boghossian has not only indicated his less-than-collegial attitude through his hoaxes, but has actively targeted faculty at other institutions. None of us wish to contend with threats of death and assault from online trolls.” The linked-to website contains no evidence that Boghossian has “targeted” anyone (his name doesn’t even appear); nor is the rather astonishing claim that to respond to Boghossian under one’s own name might mean risking “assault” defended anywhere. It’s simply unusual for academics to so vehemently attack one of their own while revealing their titles but not their names, but it seemed to neatly capture the tenor of this debate at PSU, a very left-leaning campus.

Note: It must be kept in mind that lefties do not hold back against using any tactics. They won't stop until they gat him.

F.A. Hayek understood their methods when he wrote in The Road to Serfdom:

Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule.

-RW