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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 absurdities of Academia.
Clearly proof that our Universities are broken.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Ah, of course; shoot the messenger. Time honored "head in sand" technique.
That'll solve the credibility problem!
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
... not a good idea to point out that the Emperor wears no clothes after all. The Emperor's minions will come after you with sharpened knives... and actions to revoke your tenure.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
-- "In addition, McLellan said he had referred the matter to the president and provost because Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern.""
The ethical concern being that Boghossian displayed some ethics?
For this really to be carefully crafted, they'd have to have a control group, where they craft equally (im)plausible scientific papers to a large variety of fields and show that particular fields are especially prone to publishing shoddy papers.
As it is, we all know shoddy papers can slip through to publication, publishing a few more proves nothing. Intentionally trying to slip shoddy papers through does seem like something a scholar should not be doing, and disciplinary action is appropriate.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
why do these even exist? Are there deep mysteries about gender and race that we struggle to understand? Or are we just trying to justify the need for useless paycheck collecting parasites at "academic institutions"?
Because he should be able to gut Portland State and wear it like a skin suit because these papers were obvious parodies. IIRC one of them was some sort of "intersectional queer experience in dog parks" paper.
On the activist side, they seriously push ideas like it is racist to warn black people that an old building is not up to modern earthquake codes and might kill them if one hits. Cuz you know, white people only want to scare black folks out so they can gentrify the neighborhood.
And note: this is why the alt-right is gaining ground slowly, but steadily. That siren song "wouldn't it be nice if all of these assholes went away one way or another" starts to sound really fucking appealing after having this sort of bullshit shoved up your ass and backed by amenable authorities.
Under their rules, Sokal's hoax should have been punished.
The reactions of these academics (The ones who try to punish the people who did the hoax) is clumsy because it highlights their own intellectual mediocrity and eventually the poor value of their entire field if this procedure ends up being approved by the profession. They should thank Boghossian for exposing reviewers as frauds and claim they would not have been caught by such a hoax.
But they aren't even smart enough for this. They will pass for people trying to protect a scam at the expense of dumb college "students".
Social studies already have a very poor reputation.
Every assault on social science is a good one, once we debunk it as religion-as-pseudoscience, and quarantine it appropriately, the world can finally move on.
Clearly, the lack of credibility is not the problem. Writing bullshit articles is what everyone does. Only rarely does anyone get exposed.
Threatening the status quo is the problem. He should've just taken the credit and write more bunkum articles. Instead, he had to go and tell outsider people that being a fraud pays. He exposed himself, so now he's gotta hang twice. On the outside, for faking the science. But on the inside, for the exposing, threatening the livelihood of thousands of not-so-honest social "sciences" "researchers".
Social "sciences" has no scientific content left. They have professors that publicly admit to being "post-fact", IOW entirely unscientific. It's all ideology, perhaps even religion, with professors as high priests, and so on. This brings us to: Heretics aren't dangerous because they're wrong. They're dangerous because they might be right. And here's a heretic with proof he's right. Hanging AND burning is not good enough for such a horrible person. Or at least, that's what the university bureaucracy thinks of the whole affair. They really don't want to have to find and then admit they're hosting entire departments full of frauds, even though they really have to know by now. They like their cozy jobs.
The "absurdity" of social sciences is not really the issue. Scientific Journals have been caught publishing AI generated nonsense as computer science papers, publishing pharmaceutical company marketing as medical papers, publishing a request to be removed from their mailing list as a paper and accepting a made-up researcher with no credentials as an editor.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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.
Well, as an Oregonian I have to say that most people here support this type of research, but we don't want public money to go to deception; even a useful deception that embarrasses people who deserve it.
So expect a "burn them all" sort of attitude in response to this. Outside of the Oregon higher education system, there is no valid concept of "circling the wagons" because those people aren't even in the same wagon train as the people cracking down on the guy in the story.
Also it is unwise for a person from the Philosophy department to do this, he had to know he was sacrificing his career. There is already skepticism that the field even does "research," considering that everything objective in the field was carved out as the other sciences, leaving philosophy only with the subject, the unproveable. A very useful field, IMO, critically important to objective thought, since we sense the world indirectly. But still, without generally having any solid basis for experiment.
A sociologist could more easily get away with this! A social-psychologist might not even get in trouble.