Portland State Prof Who Exposed ‘Grievance Studies’ Corruption Faces University Discipline
Could potentially lose his job for getting journals to publish absurd papers in the areas of gender studies, women’s studies, and more.
Last October, we brought you the story of three academics named Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, who wrote absurd papers in the areas of gender studies, women’s studies, and more.
They then submitted the papers to journals which, to their amazement, published many of them.
Here’s some background from my post in October:
They published their first-hand account of what happened in Areo Magazine:
Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
Part I: Introduction
Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.
We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.
We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research. Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, our aim has been to reboot these conversations. We hope this will give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, “No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.”
The work they submitted was truly over the top:
There is the paper that’s LITERALLY A RE-WRITE OF SECTIONS OF MEIN KAMPF.
8/n pic.twitter.com/8D5qKigBjn
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 3, 2018
For the sin of exposing the left, Professor Peter Boghossian is now being targeted by the IRB (Institutional Review Board) of Portland State University.
Portland State University has determined that @peterboghossian committed a “human subjects” ethics violation for his involvement in the Grievance Studies probe. Further charges of falsifying data are currently under review. https://t.co/ec5zqwbQxK
— Mike Nayna (@MikeNayna) January 6, 2019
We’ve known all along that Portland State University would eventually crack down on @peterboghossian for his participation in our grievance studies probe, and now that process is well underway. They’re setting a dangerous precedent with this.https://t.co/CnlLSlVEmU
— James Lindsay (@ConceptualJames) January 6, 2019
Can I get some retweets on this guy. @peterboghossian is at risk of getting canned by Portland State University because he pissed off the intolerant left. Not sure what’s next but start some social media movement. This is a good and decent cause…https://t.co/nHJV292Ug8
— Dave Collum (@DavidBCollum) January 6, 2019
In the video below, Boghossian explains that the IRB exists to approve research projects and studies. He gives the example of wanting to do studies involving human or animal subjects as instances which would require an IRB approval.
He speaks on the phone with his colleagues Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay and suggests that the rules will be manipulated in some way to find him guilty of an ethics violation which would mean he would lose his job.
He also says he wants to film his meeting with officials, a request we learn at the end of the video was denied. Watch the whole thing:
Make no mistake, this is all about politics. The ‘Grievance Studies’ project embarrassed the wrong people, and now someone has to pay.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Good for these three warriors! Show the absurdity of the Left by appearing to be sympathetic with them.
Speaking of sympathy, he should set up a funding site, bypassing the usual ones. That will prevent them pulling the plug in an act of political correctness.
This par for the course in leftist academics. A University of Washington professor was pushed out when he innocently pointed out that a climate change study produced by other professors at UW were cherry picking their data. Instead of doing a regression analysis of glacier size over years, the professors merely picked an abnormally high glacier size year and compared it to an abnormally low glacier size year. This is not how you do science.
“He also says he wants to film his meeting with officials, a request we learn at the end of the video was denied.”
Problem: It is unlawful in Oregon to record an in-person communication without the consent of all parties involved.
2017 ORS 165.540 Obtaining contents of communications,
2017 ORS 165.535 Definitions applicable to obtaining contents of communications
I say do it anyway or at least record the audio. Put it on the web and it will go viral like the Lindsey Shepherd video at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Not completely true.
Every state and the USSC have laws and rulings stating that public employees can be recorded while they perform their official duties.
This is usually used against law enforcement, but I’m guessing people drawing a paycheck from Portland STATE University are not working for a private institution. See:
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-police-officers-and-public-officials
for some references.
Hm. Wonder if ‘record’ covers ‘streaming by Facebook live’ or similar ilk.
If he knew all along they were going to come after him, I expect he has a plan for fighting back. I hope it’s as entertaining as the fake papers story was in the first place.
Hopefully his plan involves a massive lawsuit, a 50′ sailboat and a chart of Tahiti.
As has been stated over and over, the Socialist-Democrats (and all others on the Left) have no sense of humor and can stand absolutely no criticism of any sort.
Having some experience with IRB committees, I’m very interested to hear why an IRB would be interested, and have adjudicative power, over a series of spoof articles that don’t involve any actual human subjects.
‘Shut Up”, they explained
I am assuming that he did not include them on his CV.
He exposed modern leftist research on campus and in government for the travesty that it is – Start with the conclusion they want and then create research that backs up that conclusion. Now he’ll pay for it.
Consider the opposite where client “scientists” submitted peer reviewed research that proved massive warming and ocean rise in 30 years which was published in the Journal of Nature. It only took one scientist five minutes to show that their calculations were off by an order of magnitude. Their response was just like SNL’s Rosanne Rosanadana: “Never mind.” They are still out there “working” but Professor Boghossian is on the chopping block.
BTW, that’s the real SNL not the poor excuse for late night comedy that people are exposed to today.
Regardless of his fate, the moronic students who attend this crap will pay the eventual price when no one will hire them. Their only future is to join another university to teach the same BS to a new generation.
That’s a huge problem for me. I wouldn’t hire them, sounds like you wouldn’t either. But there are enough of their ilk out there who’d happily raze a monument or two to build a new building to let these ‘graduates’ ply their trade. Heck, we’ve even got a couple in the congress at this very moment.
It probably won’t happen in Oregon, but the taxpayers who fund these schools ought to rise up and say ‘enough’! Let people attend these types of classes on their own dime.
Plenty of non-profits and government organizations who will hire these certified idiots. After all, they come pre-indocrtinated, no more training needed.
So will Apple, Google, etc.
And liberal Congresscritters as paid staffers
One way or another, the taxpayers will be paying these loons for life
This is apparently a state run institution of “higher learning”. As such, it is subject to constitutional mandates concerning the first amendment with regard to freedom of speech, unlike a private university.
Any action taken against this professor is “state action”, and must not run afoul of the first amendment guarantees of freedom of speech.
It will be interesting to see how the administration tries to avoid the clear implications their actions have for the first amendment.
The paper in question was clearly a legitimate expression of the author’s opinion about the state of modern education.
His opinions have been validated by the brutal and misguided reaction to them by the targets of his paper.
Christ, at Hopkins we have to kill volunteers before IRB would even notice, and even then, IRB told NIH to go Eff themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/20/us/johns-hopkins-death-brings-halt-to-us-financed-human-studies.html
Portland State is on a 24/7 mission to make themselves relevant, which they fail to do just about 24/7. The irony here is that by making more of an issue of this incident, they will only succeed in perhaps reducing their appearance to that of a third tier state school. This is the stuff you cover up and pray to God no one finds out about. But no one has yet accused SJW’s of being quick-witted. The true sting will come when they start to get mocked by Portland Community College students.
The Journals published the submissions because they verified their beliefs. In a make believe delusional world, make believe research is reality. Pointing out that their fake world is buttressed by fake studies is more than embarrassing.
They should be thanking them for exposing holes in the peer review system and particularly in these pseudoscience fields.
Instead, we get zealotry and heretic trials.
Perhaps the IRB was concerned about failure to obtain proper consent from the subjects of the dog park experiment.
Furthermore, for each experimental subject, actual or fictitious, there must be proper document trails for the IRB.
In addition and perhaps worst of all, the publication of the papers is prima facie evidence that Professor Boghossian has failed to maintain collegial relationships with the many PSU faculty members in the grievance studies disciplines, and highly triggering to their many dedicated undergraduate and graduate students.
Left out “creating a hostile work environment.”
Thou shalt not question mortal gods. It is proscribed to be skeptical of the logic and merit of diversity or color judgments (e.g. racism, sexism, genderism) for social progress.
The academic Deep State strikes back!
“Portland State”? Like “Memphis State”, this academic institution of higher (“dude”) learning is adding to the general population’s geologic…uh…geometric…mmmmmm…geomorphic (?) misnomeristic misidentificationalisms.
American post secondary education and the university research complex used to be the envy of the world. Now it exists to simply show the world that there is absolutely nothing the Left destroys once they touch it as well as how there is nothing remaining in the world that they Left is willing to allow to be unsullied by their toxic thinking.
A repeat of the Sokal hoax, and then some – brilliantly trolling Post Modern journals – revealing how shoddy their pretense of academics really is.
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/weinberg.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/
Obviously, Minitrue (The Ministry of Truth) must immediately take steps to squash this wrecker and purveyor of untruespeak. Since he is too vocal to be silenced, he must first be destroyed, reduced in stature to insignificance, and then ‘corrected’ from the history books.
Seriously, the only thing that could have been better is if that group had managed to get a random paper from the Postmodernism Generator approved.
http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
I’m amazed they haven’t a coed claim rape yet.
The public “education system” of America is no more. It has been stolen and changed into a left wing socialist indoctrination center.
James Watson, Co-discoverer of DNA and Nobel Prize winner has been similarly targeted by the left. The Stalinists and their allies exert tremendous control over our universities where they spend public funds to indoctrinate our youth in Marxist idiocy. The taxpayers need to root out these Marxists and remove them from their positions of power.