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Jan. 12, 2019 - Tim Pool Daily Show
13:06
Professor Who Exposed Feminist Ideology In Colleges May Be Fired

Many people are concerned that Dr. Peter Boghossian could be fired for exposing the shoddiness of gender studies and feminist academic journals.As one of the perpetrators of the Sokal Squared or "Grievance Studies Affair" hoax he faces disciplinary action over hoaxing peer reviewed journals. Often what people call social justice gets conflated with an ideology called intersectional feminism and the two could not be more different. Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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A few months ago we learned of a massive hoax perpetrated against several peer-reviewed academic journals.
The incident came to be called Sokal Squared, or the Grievance Study Affair.
Three scholars wrote several studies, submitted them to many academic journals, and some of them got approved.
What was shocking about this is that they were all ridiculous and fake.
In one instance, they rewrote a section of Mein Kampf.
But changed some of the nouns into feminist nouns and actually got it approved by a gender studies or what they call grievance studies journal.
Now many people on the left, those who support intersectional feminism, said this is unethical and it's mean-spirited.
People who are critical of the intersectional ideology said no.
It's important that these people showed just how shoddy academic research gets published as if it's fact.
But there is an interesting debate arising.
Whether or not publishing these hoaxes was in fact human subject research.
But seemingly, like clockwork, one of the individuals who perpetrated the hoax is now facing disciplinary action.
That's Peter Boghossian, who's an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
So today, let's take a look at exactly what's going on in the aftermath of the Sokal squared hoax, and take a look at some of the arguments coming from those for and against what's actually happening to Peter Boghossian.
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Last week, it was reported that Peter Boghossian would be facing disciplinary action.
This story from the Washington Times.
Portland State University professor to face discipline for exposing shoddy scholarship.
A scholar whose carefully crafted fiction helped expose the rot within some sectors of the modern academy is now under fire from his home, Portland State University.
Although prominent academics throughout the West have risen to his defense.
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon, led a trio of scholars last year who submitted to leading publications what they called intentionally broken papers on gender, race, and sexuality.
Several of the absurd pieces were published.
Now Portland State University has initiated disciplinary action against Mr. Boghossian for what it calls a breach of the institution's ethic guidelines.
Among the renowned international scholars urging Portland State to forego such action is University of Oxford professor emeritus Richard Dawkins, who compared PSU administrators to the duplicitous pigs in George Orwell's animal farm.
My first response on reading of the punitive investigation into Dr. Peter Boghossian's brilliant hoax was to let out a howl of incredulous mirth, Mr. Dawkins wrote on December 14.
Do your humorless colleagues who brought this action want Portland State to become the laughingstock of the academic world?
Or at least the world of serious scientific scholarship uncontaminated by pretentious charlatans of exactly the kind Dr. Boghossian and his colleagues were satirizing?
It was Unclear Monday.
If Mr. Boghossian had been reprimanded or punished, the university declined interview requests and Mr. Boghossian did not reply to requests for comment.
The university, however, released a statement that appeared to indicate the matter had been resolved and noted that Mr. Boghossian remained on the faculty.
The Institutional Review Board completed its review of Dr. Boghossian's research and has communicated its deliberations and findings to him, said Mark McClellan, Vice President of Research and Graduate Studies for Portland State.
Mr. McClellan appeared to be referring to a November 27 report that the board sent to Mr. Boghossian that has not been made public.
The board repeatedly examined only the Dog Park paper, which purported to examine rape culture throughout the study of dogs in a Portland park.
It was published in Gender, Place, and Culture, and won an accolade for excellent scholarship.
Last year I did an interview with Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay, the perpetrators of the hoax, and we had a conversation about intersectionality as a religion, where I believe it was concluded between, at least we all agreed, it seems like intersectionality is a non-theistic religion.
One of the arguments presented is that it's not a religion, there's no god, to which they respond, well, Buddhism doesn't have a god either.
You can be in a religion and it could be non-theistic.
But the culture war response is completely obvious to what they did.
I'll admit, it's ridiculous that an academic journal would...
Publish a section of Mein Kampf!
That's gotta tell you how scary this ideology really is, and actually, how similar it can be to the Nazi ideology.
This idea of using racial identity for political reasons can become extreme and very dangerous, as they've shown us.
But some people have criticized what they did, not because they think it's for or against social justice issues, but because, effectively, sending out this hoax to other journals was using those editors as human test subjects.
Yesterday, a story was published in New York Mag by Jesse Singel, is a Portland professor being railroaded by his university for criticizing social justice research.
In the story, he says, It's impossible to understand this case without understanding a little bit about IRBs themselves.
That means Institutional Review Board.
The IRB system is, at root, an arrangement between research institutions, both universities and others, and the federal government.
To receive federal research funds, which are the lifeblood of many research bodies, those bodies must agree in return to follow certain ethics procedures, particularly with regard to any research involving human subjects.
That's what IRBs do.
Every research institution that receives federal funds has its own IRB, and most insist that any employee conducting research at that university It might sound simple, but it's endlessly complicated.
The IRB protocols used for social science research grew out of those used for biomedical research, and there are key differences between the ethical implications of, say, obtaining informed consent to give someone an experimental medication, and performing psychological experiments that might cause temporary embarrassment among its subjects.
One of the most common critique of IRBs is that they are far too risk-averse when it comes to their conceptualization of potential harm to human subjects.
And that they introduce unnecessary bureaucratic delays that stifle research and researcher ingenuity.
The story basically says that according to PSU, what Boghossian, Pluckrose, and James Lindsay did does fit the definition of a study, and thus it needed to be reviewed by an institutional review board.
They say it does not matter that the hoaxsters didn't attempt to publish their final results in a peer-reviewed journal.
Publishing in a magazine that's not peer-reviewed doesn't matter if they're reporting on their research, said Celia Fisher, director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education.
All that matters is that Boghossian is an employee at PSU, and that he conducted what the university deemed to be human subjects research, based on a plain reading of how the term is normally defined for that purpose.
Single mentions that if Boghossian had sought an exemption for human subjects research from an institutional review board, he likely would have been rebuffed anyway.
IRBs tend to be very, very conservative about any experiments that could have any impact on human beings.
It's an area where academia operates according to norms quite different from those of other fields.
Journalists, for example, would have no compunctions about exposing shoddy or unethical work on the part of a local business.
IRBs tend to be extremely careful about this sort of thing.
The assumption is usually that any small possibility of harm needs to be justified and, if possible, protected against.
In a case where an experimental subject could be exposed to negative public scrutiny, an IRB will go to great lengths to ensure their anonymity, even if that means withholding or blurring certain details from the study write-up.
What did we learn from the research conducted by Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian?
We learned that many of these grievance studies fields publish complete and utter nonsense, so long as it fits within a cultural linguistic.
If what you are writing sounds like intersectional feminism, it's likely to be published.
When Jesse Singel tweeted out the story, he said, There appears to be significantly less evidence this is a
witch hunt on PSU's part than many people think and are claiming.
That said, there seems to be an agreement that it would be way over the top to fire Bogosian for that,
but I'm not sure anyone has provided evidence that's really on the table.
It just seems to be a thing people are saying online after he suggested it in a video.
This case is yet another example of how internet outrage is a real powerful force that can seriously skew public understanding of issues and make it harder for reasonable people to poke their heads in and say, so, this is actually a bit more complex.
Bret Weinstein responded to this by saying, There's no conceivable way the Academy can admit that it
granted multiple scientific field-level authority to a childish, unfalsifiable political ideology.
What would that admission even sound like?
To cover the catastrophic breach of their obligation to the public,
the Academy must now obsess over alleged rule violations by, and supposed character flaws in,
the only author over which they have power, Peter Boghossian.
It is a desperate attempt to restore the curtain.
How do you go up against such a powerful institution?
Many of these colleges, this field of studies, gender studies, feminism, or grievance studies as they call it, are linked.
Many of these people know each other, they cite each other, that's how community works.
How do you challenge them without doing what they did?
If Peter Boghossian went to the Institutional Review Board, they likely would have just said, no, you can't do this.
It's human subjects research.
So he perpetrated a hoax.
And it showed that there is, at least, An exploit or a hole in how this system functions.
The one submission that requires the most highlighting is Our Struggle is My Struggle Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.
It was revealed to be a direct rewrite of chapter 12 of Adolf Hitler's 1925 book Mein Kampf with feminist buzzwords switched in, says the newspaper.
This was a rewrite of Mein Kampf that they read and thought that it sounded good.
That should be terrifying.
To anyone.
And this is probably one of the most egregious violations we've ever had uncovered.
Thanks to Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.
But as with most protests, sometimes you have to break the rules to actually make a point.
Sometimes you have to break the law to stand up against something that's unjust or wrong.
And in that, you do face the consequences.
If you want to go out and protest in a street and block traffic to make a statement, you'll be arrested.
I agree with your right to make the statement, but I also agree that there's going to be ramifications for that.
There's a cost to the action you're taking.
Not all rules are right.
Not all laws are just.
And sometimes you have to break those rules and break those laws to prove a point.
And it would seem like that's what Peter Boghossian did.
In fact, James Lindsay tweeted out in response to Bret Weinstein, I'll say it again.
The IRB and PSU should investigate Pete.
And what the results of those inquiries are may tell us something.
For good or bad.
This obsession on minutiae and rules is a distraction from the scandal at the heart of grievance studies.
And that's some of the point.
And there you have it.
Probably the most important takeaway from everything that's happening.
The disciplinary actions against Peter Boghossian are actually a continuation of this affair.
Now, I'm not going to say it's part of the study, but we're going to learn a lot based on how the institutions respond to what they did, and it's actually rather fascinating.
It's this crazy meta-research where the results of the research are not the actual results of the entire circumstance.
Whether or not Peter Boghossian is fired also tells us a great deal about the power of what they call grievance studies.
They published a section of Mein Kampf.
At that point, I think any reasonable person is going to say, these people are out of their minds, and they need a review of everything that's being published.
It calls into question everything they're putting out, which is unfortunate because it's not all bad research.
But when we can see how shoddy some of this academic publication is, how this field of study is publishing complete and utter nonsense on numerous occasions, not just the Mein Kampf thing, then you need to question all of it.
And this means we've got a multi-layered problem.
Young people spending money to go and learn nonsense.
Institutions that care more about maintaining the ideological narrative than actually pushing for truth.
And if we see punishment against Peter Boghossian, the willingness of the institutions to protect themselves from bad PR over doing something about the actual problems that are spreading from universities into media and into activists, And more worrisome to me is politics.
When we can see Democrats embracing this ideology, it's rather sad.
And this is something that leaves me and many others politically homeless.
I don't align with the ideolo- I don't align with the ideological identitarian left, but there isn't really a mainstream left that doesn't embrace identitarianism.
I don't want anything to do with that!
And I'm certainly not a conservative.
So to me, this is an extremely important issue, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
Do you think Peter Boghossian should be disciplined?
I think it's fair to say that, to a certain degree, yes.
But that's besides the point.
What's interesting is what James Lindsay said.
What happens will tell us more.
We'll actually learn more from this research.
Would you let me know what you think?
We'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
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And I'll have more videos on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, starting at 6 p.m.
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