A Portland State University professor who resigned in a scathing public letter in which he slammed the university for not allowing any...
A Portland State University professor who resigned in a scathing public letter in which he slammed the university for not allowing any type of thought that doesn't suit its liberal agenda said in a podcast interview that academic institutions are under siege from 'maniacs' with a 'mind virus.'
Peter Boghossian was a full-time assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for 10 years until his resignation letter was published on Wednesday, calling it a 'social justice factory' that drives 'intolerance of divergent beliefs'.
He shared the letter with Bari Weiss, a former New York Times columnist who quit her role at the paper after claiming to encounter the same refusal to consider non-liberal ideas that Boghossian describes at PSU.
Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian, who resigned in a scathing public letter in which he slammed the university for not allowing any type of thought that doesn't suit its liberal agenda, claims that academic institutions are under siege from 'maniacs'
In an interview with Dr. Debra Soh's podcast released prior to his resignation, Boghossian continued to hammer at the idea that students have been brainwashed by academia.
'There's a particularly powerful mind virus... there's a suite of beliefs within an ideology and those beliefs literally exist to rip down western civilization,' he told Soh.
''Our institutions can sustain only so much and they're being attacked from the inside on multiple levels from people who have been -- there's no polite way to say it -- they've been indoctrinated within the academies and indoctrinated to beliefs that are completely untethered to reality.'
. He shared the letter with Bari Weiss, a former New York Times columnist who quit her role at the paper after claiming to encounter the same refusal to consider non-liberal ideas that Boghossian describes at PSU
'The institutions of the freest society the world has ever seen -- the most diverse and racially tolerant the world has ever seen -- are under siege and attack by maniacs.'
He added that the 'woke' academia are more rigid in their ideology than conservative Christians.
'It is far easier to so doubts into a Christian's faith than it is to sow doubt into a woke person's ideology. The reason for that is that woke people don't need faith.'
'They have bodies of knowledge, they have things from professors, they have what they perceived as a legitimate knowledge base... whereas at the end of the day with Christianity you can say it's about evidence but ultimately there's a lot of faith involved,' he added.
Boghossian accused those who follow this ideology of having 'psychological issues' and people who think they should be more accomplished than they are and 'blame the system for their lack of accomplishment.'
'The other problem is you have social media, people set out Twitter mobs on people they don't like.'
Boghossian added that woke people are 'winning the culture war.'
'People now, the idea is to look at the university as an ideology mill. That's such a monstrous departure from the way people have conceived of a university,' he sad.
'People don't go into it but now you have to sign diversity statements, you have to be inclusive... and what they mean by diversity, they don't mean Larry Elder,' he aded, referencing the conservative radio host running to become the first black governor of California in a recall election.
He told Soh that people who beg for diversity and inclusion are doing so because of unearned confidence provided to them by academia and social media.
Boghossian said that people who beg for diversity and inclusion at places like Portland State are doing so because of unearned confidence provided to them by academia and social media
'It's about unearned confidence, it's about being an ideologue, it's about being a more virtuous person because you won't even consider the other side of the issue because to consider it is racist and you're a good person and you don't consider racist things. It's the highest sin.'
Boghossian says that these ideologies have been brewing in universities for almost 40 years but have 'really accelerated' in the last 20.
He believes the problem is that tenure makes professors 'spineless' and 'weak' and unable to push back on these ideas.
'If people occupy a position and that position wasn't earned on the basis of merit, then the whole field is compromised. There's a mass crisis of legitimacy.'
'If people occupy a position and that position wasn't earned on the basis of merit, then the whole field is compromised. There's a mass crisis of legitimacy'
'Media is woke, everything is woke, it's all woke! The consequence of this is that there's no legitimacy.'
He did point out that sports are the one field incapable of wokeness because they're predicated on winning, though he did not address sports in which matches can end in draws.
'That's why they don't have midgets on professional basketball teams, there's no diversity requirements because you want to win.'
It's far from the first time he's been critical of academia, particularly his now former place of employment.
Boghossian recently said in a YouTube conversation with Dave Rubin and Douglas Murray that 'Portland State University is a festering ideological cesspool. I wouldn't even send a dog there'
Boghossian recently said in a YouTube conversation with Dave Rubin and Douglas Murray that 'Portland State University is a festering ideological cesspool. I wouldn't even send a dog there.'
He offered solutions for how to fight back against what he calls the 'metastasizing' of the woke ideology.
'Speak out. You don't know this yet, but they already hate you. It's only a matter of time before that comes out. Any thought that's divergent from the dominant moral orthodoxy, they hate you.'
'What kind of live do you want to live? You want to be a f---ing coward? You want to be spineless? Or you want to speak out?'
'Be smart about it, be willing to revise your beliefs. If you're not willing to do that, then what's the point of any of it?'
Boghossian said in his letter that college staff were abdicating their 'truth seeking mission' and instead driving intolerance of 'divergent reliefs' by squashing any view that was not liberal.
'Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,' he wrote.
Boghossian's letter was addressed to Portland State's Provost Susan Jeffords.
Boghossian previously penned a collection of hoax papers and submitted them to academic journals to prove that they would print anything that went along with their ideals, even if the theories in them were fake.
They included papers on dog rape and an adaptation to Hitler's Mein Kampf. The left reacted badly to it, saying he'd wasted editors' time.
Boghossian says he was harassed on campus with swastikas written on bathroom walls with his name next to them, purely because he had challenged the university's ideas.
He claims that at one time flyers went around campus depicting him with a Pinocchio nose, that he was spit on and that colleagues told students not to take his class.
In a statement to DailyMail.com, a spokesman for the university said: 'Portland State has always been and will continue to be a welcoming home for free speech and academic freedom.
'We believe that those practices are not in conflict with our core institutional values of student success; racial justice and equity; and proactive engagement with our community.
'As with all personnel matters, we have no comment on Dr. Boghossian's statement of resignation.'
'Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions.
'And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male,' he wrote.
Boghossian says the university failed to take action after a tenured professor interrupted his discussion with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in March 2018.
He also said activists pulled speaker wires from one of his panels and that someone triggered a fire alarm at another.
Boghossian, in his resignation letter, also describes how university administrators investigated him in 2017 after receiving a complaint under Title XI - which protects against gender or sex based discrimination - from a man.
He said he was informed by students who were interviewed for the investigation that they were asked if he'd ever beat his wife or kids.
Boghossian worked at Portland State University as an assistant professor in the philosophy department. The university has not commented on his claims
In the end, the investigation found that his accuser's claims were unsubstantiated.
Boghossian says the harassment became worse when he produced a series of hoax papers in an effort to prove that academic journals would print them without checking, so long as they seemed to align with left-wing views.
From 2017 to 2018, the trio wrote 20 papers with absurd premises related to social justice. Four of them were eventually published in reputable journals.
The' study was meant to 'reboot' conversations around topics like gender, race and sexuality, the authors wrote in Aero Magazine.
'We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research,' they said.
Among their works was an article in Cogent Social Sciences that alleged penises were the product of the human mind and responsible for climate change.
Their papers included the phrases 'gender-performative, high fluid social construct', 'exclusionary to disenfranchised communities', and 'isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity'.
Boghossian says the university accused him of 'not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects' after the trio was found out by reporters at the Wall Street Journal, cutting their hoax short.
'Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department.
'They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces.
'Our university remained silent.
'When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.'
He also described a Title IX investigation against him in the 2016-2017 school year, when a student seemed to have accused Boghossian of beating his wife.
'My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children.
'This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor,' he wrote.
'Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.'
Title IX is a 1972 civil rights law that prevents discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.
Boghossian's resignation comes as a slew of school teachers and college professors leave the classroom over similar complaints of a monolithic culture that leaves no room for debate.
Last month, Laura Morris quit in an emotional address at the Loudoun County School Board, where she explained why the 'equity trainings' and political dogma forced her to resign.
She said she could no longer be part of an organization that told her 'white, Christian, able-bodied females' needed to be reined in.
'This summer I have struggled with the idea of returning to school, knowing that I'll be working yet again with a school division that, despite its shiny tech and flashy salary, promotes political ideologies that do not square with who I am as a believer in Christ,' she said.
At $50,000-a-year Dalton in New York City, it was parents who made the first move.
'Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, 'racist cop' reenactments in science, 'de-centering whiteness' in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class,' parents of students at the private school wrote in a letter in April.
The head of the school, Jim Best, later resigned.
Some professors have complained that their school are not progressive enough, like when star professor Cornell West resigned from Harvard Divinity School in a letter in July.
West accused the university of denying him a tenured position because of 'the Harvard administration's hostility to the Palestinian cause,' which he supports.
'We all know the mendacious reasons given had nothing to do with academic standards,' he wrote.
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