Today I am installing a new operating system on my computer. This will mean that posting won't be as frequent (these things take some time). .
This information was sent to me by Larry (a reader) and then a few others. I thought it would be a good idea to share the news with you. Peter Boghossian has been a friend of mine for many years. He is smart, kind, and a great person to have philosophical discussions with. He is a strong critic of wokeness, in the pejorative sense, and was one the perpetrators of 2017 and 2018 grievance studies scandals that exposed intellectual vacuity in some humanities journals. This, by extension, speaks to the intellectual rigor and fields these journals draw from. He was also untenured at Portland State University. Portland, Oregon is the Mecca for Wokeness. He is an untenured assistant professor in philosophy. PSU has also disciplined him (see below), for some ridiculous reason.
He is a great teacher. At Rate My Professors, he gets a rating of 4.7 out 5 and 95% of the applicants say they would take another course from him. It's easy to believe that he is kind, even-tempered and uses the Socratic method to teach. His goal is to get students to think instead of agreeing with a predetermined conclusion. It's exactly that kind of conversation you have with him. We had lots of conversation when I visited PSU to speak to his class. He was always challenging me in a Socratic manner. I couldn't get him to say what he thought.
Well, PSU didnt fire him. He made the decision to leave.
Click the image below to read more. It takes you to a resignation letter that Peter wrote to his provost today. It is published on the Bari Weisss Substack website:
These are just a few of the many quotes taken from this eloquent, but tragic letter. He starts by listing all the speakers he invited to his classes, including flat-earthers and creationists as well as climate-change skeptics and me. (I spoke about the incompatibility between science and religion). He was challenging the pre-college ideas that his students had been taught. He explains why he is unable to fulfill his mission as philosophy teacher.
I have never believed, nor do I believe now, that instruction was intended to lead students to a specific conclusion. Instead, I tried to give them the space to think critically and to equip them with the skills to find their own conclusions. This is why I became an educator and why I love to teach. This kind of intellectual exploration is impossible because the university blocks by block. It has turned a place of freedom into a Social Justice factory, whose inputs were race, gender and victimhood, and whose outputs were grievances and division. Portland State students are not taught how to think. Instead, they are being taught to imitate the moral certainty of ideologues. Instead of seeking truth, administrators and faculty have turned their backs on the university's mission to seek out truth and encouraged intolerance for differing opinions and beliefs. Students are afraid to express themselves openly and honestly because of this culture.
Over the ten years that he worked there, he learned that PSU was extremely witty and didn't have patience for Socratic-style teachers who challenged not only ideas, but also the University's dictates. It might be called Structural Intolerance.
. . I began to network with students groups that shared similar concerns, and brought in speakers to discuss these topics from a critical perspective. It became clear that the incidents I witnessed of illiberalism over the years weren't isolated. They were part of a larger institution-wide problem. These issues were a source of retaliation for me, and I was more vocal about them.
He describes some of his retaliation, which continued up to the present. But he doesn't want to dwell on the incident because victimization is not something he enjoys. The Grievance Study affair was the beginning.
Naively, I believed that exposing the flawed thinking upon which Portland States' new values were built would be enough to shake the university out of its madness. In 2018, I published a series of ridiculous or morally questionable peer-reviewed articles in journals that were focused on gender and race. One of the articles was about dog rape in dog parks. We proposed that men be tamed like dogs. Our goal was to demonstrate that some types of scholarship are not based on truth, but on advancing social grievances. This worldview does not reflect scientific truth and is not rigorous. The papers angered administrators and faculty so much that they published anonymously in student paper. Portland State then filed formal charges against me. Their accusation? Their accusation of research misconduct was based on the absurd premise, that the journal editors who accepted our deranged articles were human subjects. At Portland State, the ideology intolerance grew. . . .
You can read more about the harassment which included graffiti and disruptions to his classes and panels. None of this was investigated or were students disciplined. He finally gave up, and resigned from frustration at his inability to follow his own principles (he was somewhat silenced).
It's not about me. It is not about me. This is about what kind of institutions and values we desire. Every idea that advances human freedom has been condemned at the beginning. We often forget this lesson as individuals. However, institutions remind us that freedom to question is our fundamental rights. It is our responsibility to remind educational institutions that this right is also our responsibility. Portland State University has not fulfilled this obligation. It has not only failed its students, but also the public who supports it. Although I was grateful to be able to teach at Portland State for more than a decade, it became clear that this institution is not the right place for people who want to explore and think freely. This is not what I wanted. However, I am morally bound to make this decision. My students have learned from me for ten years the importance of living according to your principles. One of my goals is to defend the liberal education system from those who want to take it away. Who would I be if that were not the case?
He has voluntarily quit his job and lost his income. Although I wish he could find another school to take him up, his opposition to the Woke has surely tainted him. The Woke control almost all universities.
PSU may not realize how great a professor it is losing. They must be relieved to have an anti-Woke professor gone. He challenged their ideas and was the subject of complaints. It's their loss. PSU is following Evergreen State's lead, removing dissident professors and demanding intellectual conformity. Parents and potential college students want challenging educations. They want to learn how to think critically and not just absorb the dogma of their professors. These people should avoid PSU like a plague.
