By Peter Boghossian
Wednesday, September 08, 2021
Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland
State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to
the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.
Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,
I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor
of philosophy at Portland State University.
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach
at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the
Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The
Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and
traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my
classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics
to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.
I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their
worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. 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. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for
rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own
conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.
But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of
intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free
inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and
victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think.
Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.
Faculty and administrators have
abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive
intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of
offense where students
are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.
I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully
swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed
students refusing to engage with different points of view. Questions from
faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were
instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional
policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of
bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to
have been European and male.
At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I
believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What
is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student
learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through
which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural
appropriation” is immoral?
Unlike my colleagues, I asked these questions out loud
and in public.
I decided to study the new values that were engulfing
Portland State and so many other educational institutions — values that sound
wonderful, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but might actually be just
the opposite. The more I read the primary
source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected
that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights
based on evidence.
I began networking with student
groups who had similar concerns and brought in speakers to explore
these subjects from a critical perspective. And it became increasingly clear to
me that the incidents of illiberalism I had witnessed over the years were not
just isolated events, but part of an institution-wide problem.
The more I spoke out about these issues, the more
retaliation I faced.
Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student
complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX
investigation. (Title IX investigations are a part of
federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on
sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial
assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations
against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me
from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were
interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if
they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation
soon became a widespread rumor.
With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so
I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my
accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the
investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences
of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient
evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination &
Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”
Not only was there no apology for the false accusations,
but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to
render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my
opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd
charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the
threat of these investigations.
I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of
scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the
traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There
was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers — no matter
how absurd — could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the
theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university
community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.
So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled
peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The
Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship,
which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises
were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately
thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the
flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.
Shortly thereafter, swastikas
in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two
bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on
my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university
remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.
I continued to believe, perhaps naively, that if I
exposed the flawed thinking on which Portland State’s new values were based, I
could shake the university from its madness. In 2018 I co-published
a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in
journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we
argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and
proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that
certain kinds of “scholarship” are based not on finding truth but on advancing
social grievances. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not
rigorous.
Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers
that they published an anonymous
piece in the student paper and Portland State filed
formal charges against me. Their accusation? “Research misconduct”
based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our
intentionally deranged articles were “human subjects.” I was found guilty of
not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects.
Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at
Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor
disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff
Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June
2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during
my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an
activist pulled out
the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer
James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No
one was punished or disciplined.
For me, the years that followed were marked by continued
harassment. I’d find flyers around
campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby
while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were
telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more
investigation.
I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken
a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an
increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.
This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and
the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always,
and without fail, been initially
condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this
lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that
the freedom to question is our fundamental
right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also
our duty.
Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this
duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that
supports it. 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.
This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated
to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of
living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal
education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?
Sincerely,
Peter Boghossian
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