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Proceedings Start Against Portland State University Professor Whose Carefully Crafted Fiction Helped Expose the Rot Within Some Sectors of Modern Academia
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 those absurd pieces were published. Portland State University has now started disciplinary proceedings against Boghossian. From a report: The Oregon university's institutional review board concluded that Boghossian's participation in the elaborate hoax had violated Portland State's ethical guidelines, according to documents Boghossian posted online. The university is considering a further charge that he had falsified data, the documents indicate. Last month Portland State's vice president for research and graduate studies, Mark R. McLellan, ordered Boghossian to undergo training on human-subjects research as a condition for getting further studies approved. In addition, McLellan said he had referred the matter to the president and provost because Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern."
The idiots were the publications that published the fake, absurd papers on fake, absurd "disciplines" of study.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
His papers weren't just "shoddy" though. They were deliberately over-the-top absurd to prove a point that these journals are thirsting for absurd narratives to hold up as science.
7 out of the 20 papers got published. That is more than a few "slipping through". It throws the entire system into doubt when over a third of the fake "research" is published and reviewed.
He made us look bad because we published nonsense.
Time for a refresher:
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
Mark R. McLellan, ordered Boghossian to undergo training on human-subjects research as a condition for getting further studies approved.
What a sack of shit. And willfully clueless on top of it. This is standard journalistic investigative technique, and has been considered fine for centuries.
Someone should try to pass BS in front of this "ethics" guy. Hint: You don't need his permission or knowledge of "human studies techniques" to test if he is a fraud or liar or sack of shit.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is a bit more than an edge case, and this is far from the only warning sign. Students asking for trigger warnings, the biology professor who didn't leave campus for being white was forced out of the university, and various incidents where far left people essentially harass anyone with the wrong opinion. This is well documented in mainstream media, and some left leaning media.
The study gets to be fake because it wasn't what was being studied. What was being studied was whether ostensibly scholarly journals did due dilligence in analyzing studies for publication.
Anyone trying to bring up academic charges against them for submitting fake studies, as if they were frauds trying to get away with something, is an utterly profound moron.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
does not excuse his behavior.
Yes, it does. This is how you expose fraud in the system. You have a better way?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The "International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology" is a garbage Indian paper mill so morons can claim they've had something "published" for a nominal fee of $150. The journals that were accepting these papers are considered the gold standard of gender and identity studies, and not only were the papers read and peer reviewed, many were sent back with feedback arguing that the ideas presented in the papers were not radical enough, and that they should be revised and be resubmitted.
Try publishing in JACM, or Journal of Alagorithms, SODA, FOCS, STOC, Stacs, or the other 100 reputable venues. Don't use some money-making scammy CS venue to compare with what Boghossian did... They made it to the top ten journals in Grievance Studies.
The authors of the papers wrote 20 paper and 7 got through. They researched other papers that were accepted and deliberately patterned their papers to match. They also included hundreds of fake research data points to make the studies appear legitimate. Before that they'd done several much crazier papers that got caught. They worked on this for years. It was a well orchestrated hit piece from start to finish.
I don't expect an academic journal to vet everything. That's not the point. They look at a study, check if there's enough research data for it to appear worthy of peer review and then publish it so that it can be peer reviewed. This is is exactly what happened here. The system also worked as designed. Peer review revealed the papers to be bullshit and the people in question are now in trouble for faking research (rightfully so I might add).
There were _plenty_ of legitimate ways for them to go about their research. This is not one of them. They used the academic community for a cheap political stunt. If they're allowed to keep doing that then real research will suffer. Yes, studying gender topics is worth while. I for one would like to find a middle ground between obnoxious SJWs and actual sexual harassment and abuse.
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Institutional review boards get involved when there is Human Subject Research. Human Subject Research is a term defined by law and the review boards are involved to protect the well being or privacy of the subjects of the research.The laws are very reasonable and this case is clearly out of their scope. The purported "subjects" are fictitious and the actual subjects, the journal editors and reviewers, are not subjected to anything that does not fall well within the normal execution of their duties. Editors have no expectation of privacy and the privacy of the reviewers is not an issue as they are completely anonymous. There is nothing to affect their well being either, except for some deservedly blemished pride. Applying the rules for human subject research in this case would defy the purpose of the study as they require informed consent and reasonable rational for how the research will benefit the subjects. Imagine the authors going to the editor and asking: "Sir can I send you a fake article to show how bogus your review process is"?. The review board should conclude that this is not human subject research and wave it off. If anything, they should investigate the ethics of people who published "real" research in those journals. All this is probably done to help his colleagues in the humanities department who publish in those journals to save face or get some sort of vindication.
The campus "free speech/political correctness run amok" crisis is entirely fake.
That's right, one of the pillars of contemporary right-wing outrage is a completely fabricated issue, lacking even a kernel of truth and actually running counter to reality. Spread the word.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Why do you keep repeating the lie that they "got caught in peer review"? They didn't. 7 out of 20 of the papers were published and they were all "peer reviewed". The only reason they got "caught" is because they told everyone they did it!
"but these folks spent significant amounts of effort to get their stuff past the journals."
Really? Writing about dog rape in dog parks and dildo training? That is the point: if that crap gets "past the journals", what other crap gets through regularly?
He didn't just falsify data. They wrote papers that were ridiculous in premise, content and conclusions and got them published. It exposes the fact that peer review is a joke in these "professions". That is what it exposes. The media spews much of their drivel in response to published "studies". It is a real problem.
Milo Yiannopolulos speech shouted down by liberals at Berkley.
Condoleezza Rice cancels speech at Rutgers.
Ann Coulter cancels speech at Berkley due to protests.
So, since there is no issue of speech being limited in schools, I have to assume the above cases are ones of censorship you approve of.
So are you:
Homophobic?
A Racist?
Or Misogynist?
I will have to assume all three since you don't seem to have an issue with a gay man, a black woman, or a white woman being prevented from speaking at a college. To the point that you make the claim it doesn't even happen.
You liberals are the most disgusting people in existence, and you got caught lying again.
They can't. University of Oregon, Oregon State University, and Oregon Health Sciences University are all really important research institutions.
Elsevier is not going to stab themselves in the face just to feel like they attacked this guy. The whole idea of it is laughable. And the administration dealing with this Professor is just the administration at one school.
Administrators at the school don't even make their own budget; they submit their proposed budget to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, who bundles all the higher education budgets for the State together, ensuring the common goals and standards are met. Then that gets presented to the Legislature. You can't be a company that receives some of this money, and go to war with one of the schools, and not lose funding from the rest. We have standards of equality between the institutions, and things like library access are managed at the State level.
In fact, as a non-student who has a membership at a local Public Library in Oregon, even my access to resources at any University library in the State is managed centrally by the State. And because of my participation in that program I also know that current student access and alumni access are managed together; they not only can't control access on a per-institution basis, they can't even limit access separately for alumni and current students.
An analysis of data from Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project by the project’s director, Sanford Ungar, published on Medium. Given that there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (the bulk of which are four-year institutions), dozens of incidents is ... not a lot. When you limit it to just conservative targets, the number becomes even smaller. Now, some might consider a few dozen incidents a year in a country of 4,583 higher education institutions a national crisis; I would consider it perhaps unfortunate, but not a crisis.
Basically, it looks like some guy makes this online tool to look at free speech, that appears to focus mostly on (Administrative) Actions, repeatedly says its not comprehensive and then analyzes a subset of this dataset. The Vox author takes this and somehow comes to the conclusion that this disproves the entire phenomenon that colleges are biased against conservatives. That...is pretty much the crux of the entire article. So...is this the best you can do? Lol....