Portland State Philosophy Professor resigned over 'wokeism'!

can I have your stuff?????

One fine looking dilf. I would love him to suck his dick

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

It's Portland. There's a reason "Portlandia" was so apt.

I had the misfortune to teach there and unfortunately, he's right. My experience was similar.

Ugh, those "celebs" who are on his side, tho'.

R6 If left-wing celebrities weren't such cowards, they would support him. But the left-wing celebrities have all turned Wokes too. The Woke culture is totalitarian and imitates the Nazis. In Canada, they burned books under the false pretext that they humiliated the natives. 5000 books burned. As did... The Third Reich in May 1933.!

Aww, you should have told me this your post would have a happy ending. Frustrated by a changing tide of of POV's he no longer cares to navigate as a professional educator, the professor slaps on a coat of grease paint and is welcomed as another clown by the cast of the circus.

He is a professor, not a politician. Again, if the left supported all those who are victims of the Wokes, this would not happen. But it is impossible for the Pseudo Dems on the DL to do their self criticism

[quote]Boghossian on Wednesday shared his resignation letter with Bari Weiss

Mmm hmm.

This guy has pulled stunts like publish hoaxes while violating ethics by using people for his research without approval. He of course claimed it was a witch hunt, but they had receipts. Dude's a stunt queen.

Such a shame that such a beautiful word 'woke' from African American lingo has been co-opted by white racists and twisted to suit their right-wing agenda. It's funny how these racists always complain about Black lingo but always end up using the same words and languages they whine about.

The left’s abandonment of liberalism is going to prove fatal to both to itself and (via its unwitting encouragement of fascist MAGAts) to the American republic.

Poor fascist MAGAs just can't help themselves, they're being FORCED into fascism by the evil left. You know it's true because r12 said so.

Girls, girls, girls! It's a shitty third-tier commuter school anyhow!

'Boghossian', like 'Kardashian', 'Sarkisian' and 'Kervokian', is an Armenian name.

R11 The Wokes are from the Far left

R13 Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit, it seems.

R10 He submitted an article to see if it would be accepted. It was. It is a stretch to say that somehow is using other people as research subjects. That is like saying using death statistics for pandemic research is using people as research subjects without their consent.

R11 Kind if like how the left has taken words like “women”, “sex” and “gender” and twisted them to suit their own agenda.

R5. I'm the current dean of PSU and I've had the opposite experience. Weren't you the guy we had to fire for clogging the toilets almost every day?

You're a moron R10. Go read what he actually did, rather than what the wokies claim. The suggestion that he used subjects without their permission is a massive absurdity. The subjects simply weren't doing their jobs.

r18, he submitted multiple papers and was sanctioned by the university. It's right there in the link I posted. Don't waste our time with lies.

[quote]Beginning in August 2017, Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose began a much larger attempt in which they wrote 20 hoax papers, submitting them to peer-reviewed journals under a variety of pseudonyms as well as the name of Richard Baldwin, a professor emeritus at Florida's Gulf Coast State College and friend of Boghossian.

[quote]In December 2018, Portland State University ruled that Boghossian had "violated ethical guidelines on human-subjects research". Consequently, he was banned from doing research until he had "completed training and could demonstrate that he understood how to protect the rights of human subjects"

[quote]My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method

^ wrong link

This hot daddy has his own app.

"Atheos is an app by Dr. Peter Boghossian and his team that helps people have non-confrontational discussions about gods, religion, faith, and superstition. It will show you how to gently explore a person's strongest beliefs."

It's only available in the Apple App Store and only for iPhones.

What a maroon. It's difficult to teach atheism when you yourself are stuck in a cult. But he does look like he'd be fun for an hour in bed.

When you raise lambs don't be surprised when only leaders you get are wolves.

R25 Philosophy is now a cult? Wow.... No ownder why Wokeist are so stupid. For your information the themes treated in this App are also treated in college...

^No wonder

We do need to teach average young people critical thinking and information literacy. The exaggerated woke left isn't helping, at all.

Armenian men can be very manly and hairy.

Armenian women too.

No, Einstein @ R27. Your reading comprehension is low, low, low.

His app is only available to people in the Apple cult. Non-believers may not partake.

There's an apple cult now? 🍆 I understand but apple?

R31 This has nothing to do with any manipulation. It means that Android did not get the rights. You don't even know how the apps work. You are really stupid.

R22, he and his colleagues were clearly submitting hoax papers to point out the absurdity of current situation:

[quote] In 2017, Boghossian and Lindsay published a hoax paper titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct". The paper, which the authors said was intentionally absurd and written in a way that imitated the style of "poststructuralist discursive gender theory", argued that the penis should be seen "not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity".

[quote] After news of the research conduct investigation broke, a number of prominent academics wrote letters defending Boghossian, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, mathematician and physicist Alan Sokal, philosopher Daniel Dennett, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and psychologist Jordan Peterson.[39] Pinker wrote that Portland State University's investigation struck him and his colleagues "as an attempt to weaponize an important [principle] of academic ethics in order to punish a scholar for expressing an unpopular opinion".[40] Dawkins suggested that the investigation could be politically motivated: "If the members of your committee of inquiry object to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression, they should come out honestly and say so. But to pretend that this is a matter of publishing false data is so obviously ridiculous that one cannot help suspecting an ulterior motive."

Good for him.

Has DL fave Judith Butler weighed in?

R34, you're just quoting the Wikipedia article I already linked to and quoted myself.

Nothing you said contradicts what I posted. Your point?

The comment about Canada burning books is true. But you missed the punchline. The BIPOC person they used to determine which books to burn turned out to be a fraud. Pretending to be an indigenous person but full of bs. They burned books and buried the ashes in the ground as a rebirth thing. All books deemed unworthy were also eliminated from the library digitally. I can’t believe the parallels to the Nazis weren’t clear. Shocking event.

The Weimar Republic enforced strict hate-speech laws, but failed to stop the rise of the Nazis.

Peter Boghossian is right, of course. However, he completely discredits himself by appearing on Fox News and UNCRITICALLY accepting the support of verified degenerates and intellectually challenged clusterfucks like Megyn Kelly, Tammy Bruce and other autocrat fellating nutjobs on Fox News etc.

You can't credibly excoriate the illiberal and anti-intellectual policies of today's university campuses AND accept support and safe haven from even more regressive, stupid and dangerous dogma mongers on the authoritarian right.

I love how a Canadian book-burning is supposed to have anything to do with this guy.

How did he spend a decade as Assistant Professor without either getting promoted or getting canned? Was he in some sort of adjunct position?

And yes, he's a well-known provocateur with "libertarian" tendencies (supported Andrew Yang). Here's an analysis of his most famous hoax. But I still can't find any info on the nature of his appointment; they must have taken him off the Portland State philosophy faculty page already.

Leftism is eating itself and is in the process of destroying the middle and lower tier college/university system and it’s a fucking joy to behold.

I have no sympathy for anyone who buys into this bullshit for any amount of time thinking they will be safe from the woke mob.

Social media and SJWs are turning an entire generation of younger people into mentally unstable, fragile lunatics who are not being given the tools and tenacity to survive and thrive in the real world.

And space is being cleared out for those who CAN. The next 5 years will see a purge of all this nonsense and I hope thinking and rationality can make a comeback.

R37, you obviously left out the parts discussing how his punishment was really for thinking wrong. You pretty much acted the same way as the university ethics committee by leaving out facts to suit your narrative.

So the West is on fire and the East is drowning and a plague is still killing people and Nazis are marching and planning on stealing an election (assuming they don't just win outright) and I'm still supposed to care about THE WOKE.

Fuck you OP. This tired shit belongs in 2019. No one cares any more. Sell your shit on OANN.

The connection is that burning books is now something Nazis and the woke both do. Nothing scary about that?

This is a Bari Weiss thing.

As a long term “leftie” it saddens me that this will be weaponised by right-wing assholes like Piers Morgan (I’m British, I’m not sure who the US counterparts are other than people like Fucker Carlson). The left will stay silent on this or condemn it outright because their afraid of the woke police themselves. This guy makes important points and in a free society there should always be the space for dialogue. I can’t stand what I’m seeing society become …and anyone who talks about “safe spaces”, “trigger warnings” and “micro-aggression” frankly needs to grow up.

R4 My sister is a professor at a Jesuit university in the Midwest and says that this shit has even started invading there.

While that certain segment of middle aged white ladies known as Karens, we also have a segment of middle aged white men who can not take criticism. They don't like it when people dare to tell them, "it's not appropriate to say these things anymore".

They can call everyone else woke, but these old white men are snowflakes

this guy has been going on and on and on and on and on about this. He is out to tell anyone and everyone. It's his obsession

And of course his dumb ass works and lives in liberal Portland

r44, you and your sock puppets are boring.

This guy used the journal editors he pitched his research hoaxes to, he was studying their response to his hoaxes without their knowledge. That kind of issue with informed consent is well known in academia, anyone who performs hoaxes in academia knows full well that they could get caught violating ethics by doing so. Hoaxing people means deceiving them and in a research project where those same people are the subjects, that's a problem.

[quote]“Human subjects in this case were the journal editors who he was pitching his bogus research study to,” a campus spokesman, Christopher Broderick, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “As he has explained, his goal was to show that the editors of certain academic journals will publish even something as ridiculous as what he submitted.”

Anytime I see Karen or Boris in a post I stop reading. Enough please. So tired and so mind numbing.

[quote] [R44], you and your sock puppets are boring.

You sound delusional.

I find it extremely weird that you keep missing the point of his research hoaxes. You act like he's a total fraud when in fact he was trying to point out the faults in the system.

R16- Nowadays it's the MAINSTREAM left that is WOKE.

An attention whore who probably hadn’t published enough to get tenure under any circumstance at his university.

[quote] An attention whore who probably hadn’t published enough to get tenure under any circumstance at his university.

I was curious about this. He has two books on his website, neither of which looks like peer-reviewed scholarship.

Whenever I hear the words "woke" or "SJW" I know instantly I'm dealing with a chud, so thanks for tipping me off.

Aw, poor little instructor is upset because he can't understand other's point of view and doesn't like the way others engage with him.

So he blames it on a War on Christmas-like bogey man, "Wokeisnm" Poor delicate snowflake.

College campuses these days are pretty miserable places to be. Good for him that he extricated himself from that mess. We only live once, so why put yourself through Portand academia?

I hope he's got something lined up that will keep the rent paid and groceries on the table.

[quote] College campuses these days are pretty miserable places to be.

Sure, Jan.

I love how DL assumes that anyone right of center who claims to work on a college campus is an imposter.

You bitches need to visit an engineering department.

R56: Humanities faculty are expected to write books, which usually are published by university presses—occasionally some will get a commercial publisher. His books were published by companies I’ve never heard of. He mentions publications in journals but doesn’t list them—I wonder if he’s just a minor co-author on most of them.

He must hate that Jordan Peterson is a millionaire and lectures everywhere while he sits in Portland even though he's just as big an asshole as Peterson.

I remember the last panic about all this shit was when I was in college and everyone lost their minds then, too. Guess what happened? The Mercers and the Kochs and various other Nazi billionaires endowed chairs at every college they could think of and yet I'm supposed to care about WOKENESS ON CAMPUS!!!

If any of this pearl-clutching were anything more than pathetic theater, please let me know when Harvard uses its billions in endowments to build public housing in Cambridge or when NYU opens a homeless shelter in Greenwich Village.

Yes, that was my point, r62.

R50 There are real idiots who are also very proud to be idiots. They are not Karens or anything like that. Boghossian is not the first professor to have gone through this in college. There was Evergreen where the Wokes made a mess of things with violence, death threats and unacceptable demands. There are other professors who are resigning, whites et blacks, and even journalists who no longer recognize their supposedly left-wing newsroom and have become Woke. You don't know what you are talking about. You are a fool.

R43 Excellent analysis. Also since the Left is unable to self criticism for the best, they are will go down.

Blah blah blah. Of course the Left is capable of self-criticism. It probably does too much of that.

The Right, on the other hand, brooks no criticism of its fascism and support of the oligarchs of the world.

R45 The West is on fire precisely because of dangerous movements like the Woke who are revisionist, Marxist, and totalitarian. Since this is nothing for you, as long as it doesn't affect you personally, I hope you don't have children. You moron. The East does not have to deal with this kind of dangerous movement because people like that do not exist there. The Wokes have spread their shitty ideology to Canada and Europe. Because as usual, America thinks it's a good idea to export their shit elsewhere. The Chinese don't care about the USA and keep saying how it is a country in decline. People were talking like you just before Hitler was elected. No, YOU go fuck yourself, scum of the humanity.

I think it's less common for philosophy to require books than other fields in the humanities, but how about peer-reviewed articles? I'm still not finding a cv for him. In fact, I'm not even finding that he has a PhD in philosophy, just a doctorate of education (2004, twelve years after getting his masters in philosophy) from the same university he's been teaching at. So again, what exactly is this Assistant Professorship he's resigned from, and how did he come by it? My guess is that it's an adjunct position that's a continuation of some other adjunct positions and, ultimately, of a teaching fellowship.

R69, I think you're misunderstanding R45's references to "East" and "West" (as well as the use of the definite article in English).

Fuck them. Let it all collapse. It needs to. There are probably too many of these schools to begin with. That means too many professors. That means an extraordinary pressure on the administration to keep the tuition money rolling in so that their easy jobs don't dry up.

These days, the students are not viewed as students, but as customers. That gives them inordinate power that students never had until recently. Instead of leading, the elders of the institution bow to their youthful, uneducated and inexperienced (and serious and well meaning) customers.

In the lives of the eldergays here, public institutions were once better supported by the public, minimizing the importance to the institution of the students' money. It was nominal and just enough to give the students some skin in the game and keep them serious and focused. Not any more. The public universities would currently crumble and fall without the income provided by their young customers. Private colleges and universities heavily subsidized the students tuition with academic scholarships which kept them busy in the library. Tuition in private schools was not in any way as large as they are today. Paying half the tuition, even with some student loans, was manageable. It's no longer that way.

For what students are currently forced to pay, it's no wonder they want to call the shots. They have a point. The larger point is that the entire financial structure of these institutions is unhealthy and unsustainable, if these colleges and universities want to continue in their traditional roles.

'The customer is always right.' That's embedded in our thinking. If the kids are customers, they are also the bosses.

r70 his dissertation was Socratic pedagogy, critical thinking, moral reasoning and inmate education: An exploratory study.

Abstract:

This exploratory study examines the hypothesis that Socratic pedagogy is a useful tool for imparting critical thinking and moral reasoning skills to inmates. The study explores the effectiveness of a new curriculum, Introducing Socrates, which relies on Socratic pedagogy to achieve its objectives. The curriculum draws from the effective criminal justice research on cognitive education to determine its objectives, and then looks to the Platonic dialogues to find broad philosophical questions that tie into those objectives. The program also evaluates salient criticisms of Socratic pedagogy that are found in the educational and philosophical literature, and then isolates and evaluates constructs from these criticisms in the study.

Results of this study suggest that Introducing Socrates has the potential to help inmates by providing them with better options, by changing ways they approach problems, and by ultimately giving them tools that will enable them to make better decisions. Notably, no other inmate education treatment currently available is Socratically-based, either pedagogically or with regard to the course content. This is significant because Socratically-based programs have the potential to achieve the same objectives more efficiently, more cost-effectively, and in a more engaging way. This has obvious fiscal, social and psychological benefits for communities and individuals. In sum, this ancient educational and pedagogical approach, when combined with existing corrections educational objectives, may prove to be a uniquely powerful tool to help inmates generate better options to problems and make better choices—and to thus stay out of prison.

I suspect our friend at r69 (who is also OP and has spread his blather throughout the thread) is French, r71. There are lots of translation errors in his posts.

[quote] At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?

Fuck him! I was in college during the Reagan 80s when there were daily microaggressions by students and instructors, and regular accusations that people of color were only present because of affirmative action. All of this went unchallenged by the school and its administrators. I was in a class where the instructor wanted to discuss how slavery was an economic issue and not a racial issue. All under the guise of 'intellectual exploration.'

I don't care that the pendulum has swung to the other end of absurdity, because that racist shit in the 80s was absurd but no one resigned over it. In fact, the MAGA brigade wants to bring it back.

It just seems decadent and stupid to pretend to care about these kind of faculty-lounge theatrics when actual shit is actually happening. The racist paranoiacs who weep for WHITE CULTURE at the hands of THE WOKES!!!! are selling last year's model when anyone with two eyes and a brain in their heads know that this shit DOES NOT MATTER and, in fact, it's being used by the Nazi hoards as a wedge to try and divide their opposition.

[quote]the Nazi hoards

R76 It's h o r d e s. If you weren't so busy defending/deflecting you'd know.

He's not right wing, he's a democrat, an old fashioned liberal, the kind who still believe and stand up for civil liberties like freedom of speech. What he's speaking about isn't propaganda either, it's truth. He's the canary in the coal mine telling the world what's happening to those civil liberties. I see some so called Dems comments daily. They are true believers in leftist authoritarianism and neo leftist theology. To them, anything to the right of M a o is "right wing propaganda" and they support the suppression of speech, while using their freedom of speech.

I've been watching the DL become unbearably controlled for months by some Dems who spend all their time posting about politics and as soon as you disagree with them on any subject you are = A fascist, a nazi, a boris, a racist. That's how I realized that the Dems on this website are Wokeist.

No one with a brain in their heads think WOKEISM is a problem. It's only hothouse flowers like R78 who think anyone gives a shit.

R79 doesn't realize that he's just proved R78's point.

Bullshit, r78/OP. He and you are Rightwing assholes who want to say and do anything you want and suffer no consequences. Just as you are on another thread demanding Facebook and Instagram allow you to commit libel, Boghossian wants to do and say anything without repercussions in the workplace.

Take your Orwellian understanding of free speech elsewhere.

R79 Here's what a REAL Democrat thinks about the Woke culture. There is a big difference with the comments of the so-called Dems on this site. You are one of those Woke cult followers. Shut your big mouth, because all countries are confused with Wokeism because of assholes like you

Obama was quite clear that some people have taken it too far, but there is nothing in his words to suggest he would agree with your assessment of Boghossian.

[quote] Shut your big mouth

"Free speech for me, but not for thee," says the anti-woke.

Wokeism is just another manufactured outage by the Right. They see their white privilege fading and they cling onto amt distraction. Not working.

Won't work. Society well progress like it always has. That's why Feudalism isn't I the Constitution.

[quote]all countries are confused with Wokeism

More unidiomatic English, though I kind of like it for its antique resonance. Maybe from Latin? "Vigilantia turbatae terrae omnes"—sounds almost like Cicero.

Wokism is a problem for Democrats going forth. The posters who pretend it isn’t are in a bubble Fortunately, most black and especially Hispanic oops LatinX voters are turned off by it so In order to win over these voters, Dems will campaign more sanely.

All questions will be answered in 2022.

I suppose his career wasn't going anywhere and he's got other gigs lined up.

I don't care about all the culture war crap, but I think I probably agree with Boghossian about these issues and identity politics and DEI. I work with someone (not in the US) who's now responsible for diversity, which is being framed as "hire refugees and get mothers back into the workforce." I think she'll have a rude awakening if she ever gets into contact with Anglo-American DEI heads.

People can complain about the students but they're a product of their parents' rearing. I got out of higher-ed work years ago and it was clear to me then that parents are actively creating children that are unable to thrive in the real world without mommy and daddy's help.

r29, one of the few good comments in this thread.

r40, given his stance, do you really think he would have been welcomed on MSNBC, CNN, etc? It's unfortunate, but Fox is probably the only channel with sizeable viewership that would have him.

r45, most people are capable of caring about multiple things that affect their society at once.

So, R70, he got an Assistant Professorship in a philosophy department on the basis of an Education dissertation on Socratic pedagogy in prisons—backed up with articles more focused on philosophy (ancient or modern)? I'm still not finding any references for his publications beyond the dissertation you cite and the co-written "hoax" article(s).

Education groups decry ‘cancel culture,’ ‘wokeism’ on college campuses

R84, if white privilege explains why the Right is manufacturing outrage about wokeism, how do you explain the many non-white opponents of wokeism?

Yes, citing The Washington Times really shows your liberal credentials.

[quote]I find it extremely weird that you keep missing the point of his research hoaxes.

I never talked about the intent behind his hoaxes. Not once. I know what the intent was and it's entirely irrelevant to my points that (a) he's a stunt queen who pulls hoaxes (among other things) for attention and (b) received a mild reprimand for what was an obvious ethical issue that any professor who does any research with human subjects should have known was a concern.

What is a wokeist? It's weaponized personal grievances masquerading as a genuine social concern. It’s defined by its fraudulent nature, as being distinct from legitimate social grievances. Wokeism only knows outrage, it knows not empathy for victims.

Wokeism is character-assassination-smear-tactics personified into a movement. Wokeism is social outrage for the sake of social outrage. Wokeism cares not for being a catalyst for actual change, its goal is metaphorical bloodshed and retribution, all in the name of claiming a slightly higher position on the social totem pole. Wokeism is the religification of social justice, a bastardization that pollutes original messages of those legitimate social grievances that it consumes as they become hijacked by decentralized players who are more concerned with inflicting harm, shaming, and celebrating together, rather than righting the very grave wrongs of social institutions. It’s the conspiracy-theory arm of the so-called “left” quite often, a term I refuse to use to this particular group of people because their message is so vehemently anti-left on a predictable basis. The point of wokeism is to attack an out-group, it’s never to correct an error, and rarely to criticize the more dangerous elements of society that lead to those errors, namely infinite-growth capitalism. Outrage for outrage’s sake wants to inflict pain, not acquire justice.

And that's why the Right declares Wokeism as bogey man. It's a tool.

[quote] Wokism is a problem for Democrats going forth. The posters who pretend it isn’t are in a bubble Fortunately, most black and especially Hispanic oops LatinX voters are turned off by it so In order to win over these voters, Dems will campaign more sanely.

You have no idea what you're talking about. "Wokism" was coined by the same right wing reactionaries who termed the Affordable Care Act "Obamacare" and who have labelled "Black Lives Matter" as an anti-American terrorist group. It's all about appealing to low-information white racists.

[quote]What is a wokeist?

It's a straw man along the lines of "political correctness" and "CRT" used to caricature and exaggerate issues and scare the gullible.

R96 is correct

Wokeism comes from the Far Left, not the right-wing. Trying to put everything on the Right will not make you credible.

Bless your heart, R99.

R96 LOL You don't know what you're talking about. Wokes come from Universities. Those who studied Marx, Foucault and Communism. They are not born on the Right. It's amazing how much bullshit you can spout.

The sensible/rational do not like to be scolded or patronized or harangued about what they should think or silenced by those who think they know what's best. Any political ideology or party will indeed find it difficult to attract such voters.

Okay, R101, I'll bite. What are the exact sources of "Wokes" in the works of Marx, Foucault, and "Communism"? Give some examples. And where exactly are those authors being taught in such an uncritical and sweeping way in 2021 that all alternative notions collapse before them?

[quote] Those who studied Marx, Foucault and Communism.

Yeah, that's what students are studying today. Totally.

The best way to realize what a teacher can put up with from the Wokes and how far these dangerous people are capable of going is to listen to the first teacher who testified about the hell he experienced at Evergreen college.

R103 I knew you were atually a wokeist. It was so obvious. You ask me ignorant questions and expect me to answer? You have google to show you why wokes study Marx, Foucault and take a lot from the communist. The cancel culture is Communism. Wokeist themselves claim to be left wing.

^actually

In other words, you don't have an actual answer, r106.

R105, your martyr is a regular on Joe Rogan and "has made several public appearances advocating the use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to prevent or treat the disease and downplaying the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines." So, yeah.

[quote]your martyr is a regular on Joe Rogan and "has made several public appearances advocating the use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to prevent or treat the disease and downplaying the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines."

R108 Shooting the messenger when you have no response to the message.

[quote] Shooting the messenger when you have no response to the message.

No, showing that he is an unreliable witness and has an agenda. He isn't just some poor schmuck who got caught up in a wave of "Wokeism."

I'll say it again, If you've been victimized in academia by "wokeism" and certainly people have been, you can't run into the arms of right wing media for comfort and validation. Why? because those fucks are more illiberal and more repressive than the wokest of the woke.

Thank you r78 for your astute observation:

[quote] I've been watching the DL become unbearably controlled for months by some Dems who spend all their time posting about politics and as soon as you disagree with them on any subject you are = A fascist, a nazi, a boris, a racist. That's how I realized that the Dems on this website are Wokeist.

These are the same moronic twats who were screeching about "SJWism" several years ago, and how it was going to be the number one threat to the destruction of society Lol. Now it's "the woke" that are supposedly destroying society 🙄. Just give it a few years and they'll be screeching about something else....

The funny part about the idiot conservative celebrities supporting him is that they don't understand that the word 'illiberal' is a synonym for 'conservative' in the context he is using it. He is saying that the formerly liberal institutions are going the way of the fascistic, intolerant, fundamentalist conservative institutions. "Woke" is becoming an ideology like all the harmful ideologies that go with the narrow-minded worldview held by the repressive and authoritarian cults known as religions. The Woke Left is the equivalent of the Evangelical Right. Two sides of the same coin.

Liberal has many meanings. Illiberal usually means not supporting classic liberal values such as full expression of views. Both extreme right and left rejection that now but classical liberals, libertarians, and a portion of conservatives support classical liberal ideals. Woke progressivism is illiberal.

I'm still waiting to hear what got him the job he just quit. He's using his resignation to make a political point, but it's not clear what his credentials are beyond a doctorate in Education and a series of hoaxes. Any articles or books in the field he was paid to teach (philosophy)? Any published reviews of other scholars' work? For what it's worth the Portland State students mostly seemed to have loved him, particularly in his critical thinking course (PHL320U), except for the one who says, "His lectures bore me to death. He's always going on rants and goes off topic frequently."

How is it a hoax to seek publication for a poorly written and poorly reasoned article? It seems to me a test. Not a hoax.

The hoax is the shitty putatively academic publication that could not spot a worthless submission. Why give them cover? They are not victims of this professor. We are all victims of bullshit unqualified academics.

R11 It was white people in general.

“Woke” began after the murder of Trayvon Martin and the awakening and self-awareness of realizing that black people are still living in a racist country and understanding the history and systematic oppression. A lot of black millennials were in the dark and were just as ignorant as white people with racism - not understanding redlining, the history of the prison system, and the basics. That was what “woke” was.

What I think happened was other groups - feminists, LGBT, fat people, etc tried to adopt black ideology and thought it would translate over to their groups. And for the most part, it doesn’t. Just look at the non-black plus size groups. Same for non-black transgender people. They tried to copy black people and it failed.

That’s what’s happened to woke.

But Lord help you if you ain't woke to conspiracy theories, racial supremacy or Soros. That "woke" is ok!

Woke is a great concept until it was taken over by white progressives.

And it was only after that when the right-wing started mocking the term, abusing it even further, and it fell into the same category as 'triggered', 'microaggressions' and alternative pronouns beginning with the letters X or Z.

His resignation letter is an audition for Newsmax or Breitbart columnist. Why anyone engages trash like this is a mystery.

R121 A great example is “safe space”.

I know that the concept of safe space came from gays and lesbians. In the early 2000s it was a term adopted by the black community. I learned it as a place where a marginalized group can be and don’t have to worry about discrimination. So like a gay nightclub for gays or a black hair salon for black women are examples of “safe spaces”.

NOW a safe space is literally a “safe space”. At universities they have a “safe space” room that has an emotional support dog and coloring books and bubbles and where someone can go when they feel “triggered”.

Its insanity.

I don't understand your argument, r123. Why is a safe space on campus insane?

Although I am skeptical of his motives, and nauseated by the embrace from the Fox crowd, I think he makes several good points.

If a student needs a 'safe space' to be provided by the school, then that student is not ready for higher education. Just simply not. It is dishonest of the institution to acquiesce to this and act like it is okay. Send them home to Mama and Dad until they are ready.

But that would be the school would have to lose a number of semesters of tuition. And that'a a no go.

That student now sitting in the 'safe space' will not last six months in a work place, if employment comes at all. How on earth will that student get through a job interview?

It's wonderful that you are so amazingly well-adjusted that you would never need a moment to gather yourself. Not everyone is as lucky. In fact, if everyone who ever had a moment when they could have used a safe space was prevented from going to college, there probably wouldn't be ten people at college.

Your response is a typical rightwing talking point. If it doesn't matter to you, anyone to whom it matters is weak and useless.

As someone who edited two scholarly journals, I can tell you that what is most reprehensible is his wasting of the time of editors and reviewers--it was always a challenge to find two or three people willing to review manuscripts, and you couldn't always go back to the same ones, as that became a way of taking advantage of their generosity (reviewers do not get paid and editors receive a very modest stipend, maybe enough to buy them out of teaching a single class in a year to do editorial duties), in addition to which you needed people with sufficient expertise to make an informed judgment. It may be that the reviewers were too far afield to spot the hoaxes or, it is true, that sometimes trendy-sounding manuscripts may get a pass out of novelty and the thought that there is something unexpected of value. Yes, plenty of crap gets published in scholarly journals.--that has always been true, by the way, and in the old days that usually meant the same elder scholars recycling their tenth take on the same material, getting another line on their CV courtesy of a friend who served as editor (I am an aging white man, by the way, so I have seen it happen). I don't know the whole story here, beyond what has been read, but he sounds like the kind of pain in the ass one would not want as a colleague, even if his project did point out some "inconvenient truths." He wasted time that would have been better spent actually doing legitimate scholarship--but perhaps he had none to do.

[quote]It's wonderful that you are so amazingly well-adjusted that you would never need a moment to gather yourself.

There's not a word in my post about anything like that. Not a word. That's YOUR wholly invented strawman created because you know can't respond to a substantive statement with your nonsense.

Most every college and university has had for decades up on decades 'safe spaces' for students in crisis. Most any professor will give time to a student in crisis. Many schools have chapels. And chaplains. They have a student health center. Usually with at least a nurse. Large universities have health centers supervised by physicians. My graduate school had a psychotherapist on the staff. And she wasn't passive, either. She was moving about in the school, with her eyes open to anyone who might be struggling. Any student could seek her time. And professor could ask her to keep an eye out on a student who seemed to be struggling.

The larger point being that if a student is really in crisis, then that student needs to be interacting with professional. Not a coloring book and a puppy. Those are relaxing and enjoyable, but not nearly up to addressing a genuine problem. The school should not be providing a place for a troubled student to hole up, isolate, and avoid getting genuine assistance.

No matter, really. They're NEVER going to hold a job. And then everyone will be screaming 'how did the school miss this' and 'why wasn't the student given real help.'

[quote] The larger point being that if a student is really in crisis, then that student needs to be interacting with professional. Not a coloring book and a puppy.

Safe spaces aren't for people really in crisis. They are for people who need a moment.

[quote] No matter, really. They're NEVER going to hold a job.

Never? What a ridiculous overstatement.

[quote]Safe spaces aren't for people really in crisis. They are for people who need a moment.

Oh ffs. That's what the restroom, or the outdoors, or the secluded corner in the library are for.

[quote] It may be that the reviewers were too far afield to spot the hoaxes or, it is true, that sometimes trendy-sounding manuscripts may get a pass out of novelty and the thought that there is something unexpected of value.

I remember reading something on this guys' (and cowriters') hoax articles that pointed out—in addition to the many rejections the articles got, which kind of undermines his point—is that the articles contain an occasional interesting or even plausible idea, even if he thought it was ridiculous. Academic editors (you have all my respect, R128) are supposed to keep an open mind and publish even the occasional outlandish article in the interest of shaking up old assumptions. You'd think that the anti-"woke" brigade—who are forever decrying the supposed intellectual intolerance of their targets—would get that, but these people's whole gambit seemed to assume a monolithic academic audience that swallowed parodistic ideas hook, line, and sinker.

R122 literally has zero reading comprehension skills. When you start hypermonitoring language and burning books, you're on the road to fascism, not the ones trying to rein you in. It's like it's fucking bizarro world with the Wokesters.

Isn't "creating a safe space" also less a physical thing than a declaration that the institution is fully embracing the wokeness and making the entire place a "safe space" for others like themselves. We're literally watching the creation of a mainstream cult just like the Evangelical cult of the right. The sane people in the middle (aka the majority), whether they lean left or right, want nothing to do with either of them.

[quote] That's what the restroom...is for.

Go cry on the tile floor where people take a shit. What a comforting idea.

For fuck's sake, what is your problem with creating a nice place for people stressing? Why is a room dedicated to comfort such a problem for you? Why do you think someone who takes advantage of it will NEVER get a job? NEVER.

You are blowing a tiny little thing into something enormous for absolutely no reason.

r134 needs a safe space and stat!

The poster going on about safe spaces at universities needs to figure out that they're not some kind of standard institution that doesn't receive criticism from within universities—at least in the sense of the coloring-book-and-stuffed-animal safe space. Left-leaning academics have published pretty trenchant critiques of that, as well as of "trigger warnings" in their simplistic, bureaucratic form.

But if you mean that female students have no right to expect the same respect as male students, or that black students have no right to expect the same experience as white students, and that a campus should be open to all the same meanness, bigotry, and injustice as the world at large (because "that's life" or "they need to know the real world" or whatever)—that's another story. A university *should* function as a space safe for students to study and live without double standards or harassment.

R42 R89 R116 is reading the situation the way I would. Having an EdD instead of a PhD, beinig a careerist Assistant Professor, all bad signs. His publications are not only co-written, they are hoaxes. In Philosophy Departments a wide range of political views are fine, if you are teaching well and publishing well and progressing through the tenure and promotion process you will be fine. This is a textbook case of how to not last in the long term.

“I’m fine to teach students with other beliefs, but the fact that teachers are being compelled to speak a certain way is the scary thing,” Kluge also told NBC.

The school requires that teachers call students by their chosen name or pronoun provided that the student has a written note of consent from a parent and doctor. The school previously allowed Kluge to call students by their last names but changed the policies two months ago to mandate that Kluge call them by their chosen names and pronouns.

Advocates of queer inclusion at the school and in the community don’t see the requirement as an infringement upon Kluge’s rights but simply as a requirement of respect. “Using a trans student’s chosen name is an invaluable support. Educators need to lead by example with respect for students’ identities, names, and pronouns,” said GLSEN advocacy group education manager Becca Mui, NBC reported.

An English teacher has resigned from a top New Jersey prep school that is using critical race theory to create a “hostile culture of conformity and fear” — causing white and male students to believe they are “oppressors,” she said.

“The school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood,” Stangel-Plowe wrote in her letter to school brass.

I received an email from a student who listed their pronouns as "he/they/she" r138

What other choices are there?

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

The people who bitch about "woke-ism" are the ones who want to ban "critical race theory"

The person at r139 probably hates gays as much as trans people

What if I wanted to be called Hitler at a predominantly Jewish school? Would that be okay?

R139, that's one of the problems. There is no more standing as an individual anywhere. With us or against us, with a capital US. Fucking cults.

This thread is a mix of academics with measured responses and Twitter specialists looking to make hot takes.

He was an assistant professor for TEN YEARS. How is that even possible? Obviously, he did this stunt because he realized he never would get tenure. Where did he get his Ph.D.?

R141 is decrying educational standards but links to the Daily Fail

Gotta love it when Republicans pretend to care about Shakespeare. We all know you don't read. Look at Trump, Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, and all the other joke politicians you elected

Sorry-- I answered my own question. He doesn't have a Ph.D.; he has an Ed.D. from Portland State. How did he even get a tenure track job in a Philosophy department?

Can we be sure that these Daily Signal and Daily Mail articles are accurately representing the situations they're talking about, let along the state of academia? I remember watching the Ben Stein movie on "Intelligent Design," about how anti-evolution scientists are so oppressed by the academic establishment—and then reading a careful, annotated critique of the movie that showed how many facts it left out and distorted.

For those who are criticizing "universities," btw, there's a distinction to be made, btw, between the administrations that set up rules in accordance with various new social and political attitudes (because their concerned with appearances and the bottom line) and the researchers and instructors, who often have a much more ambivalent and nuanced approach. The two groups overlap less and less as universities are run on a marketing model.

R144/R146 I was asking the same thing above. I don't think he was in a tt job; possibly an adjunct position called Assistant Professorship. He doesn't seem to have any scholarly publications outside the ones he submitted as a gotcha.

[quote] decrying educational standards

I didn't open the link at R141 but it's obvious the school teachers' intention is to dumb down students reading from Shakespeare to Gibberish.

I'll oh-dear myself: THEY'RE concerned, not "their" concerned.

Also I left in an extra "btw." *sigh*

Dear R128 You're not giving us a good impression of scholarly journals.

[quote] plenty of crap gets published in scholarly journals

I assume you received a decent salary while editing two scholarly journals but your remarks add to the perception of overpaid, tenured academia in handsome 'ivory towers' shrouding themselves in semi-divine pomposity.

Thanks, r147. I haven't read the entire thread carefully.

[quote] Can we be sure that these Daily Signal and Daily Mail articles are accurately representing the situations they're talking about, let along the state of academia?

Usually I am the one who points out the Daily Mail is an aggregator and a good one at that. However, this article doesn't link to anything other than his interview on Fox News and a Substack. Even Fox News can be a reliable source if we're talking about an article adhering to journalistic standards, but a link to an interview is not that.

I agree with you that in this case it's best to take the Daily Mail with a grain of salt.

[quote] I don't think he was in a tt job; possibly an adjunct position called Assistant Professorship.

That makes sense. The department has probably been trying to get rid of him forever so this works out for everyone.

[quote] tt job

tt job = Tenure Track.

Tenure grants a professor permanent employment at their university and protects them from being fired without cause. The concept is closely tied to academic freedom, as the security of tenure allows professors to research and teach any topic—even controversial ones.

anyone has his nice pic?

A lot of schools are now keeping all kinds of assistant and adjunct professors in place for years and years and have curtailed tenure. I don't think it means much in this case. He seems to have been a popular teacher so maybe he got the job because, whoa, he was actually a good teacher.

The erosion of tenured positions doesn't mean "schools are now keeping all kinds of assistant and adjunct professors in place for years and years"; most commonly it means that there's a revolving door of temporary people with low pay and benefits. Fortunately in many places non-tenured positions like instructor and lecturer have some contractual stability, with regular reviews and reappointments; I suspect that's what this guy had, under the title Assistant Professor (which in my experience is used of a junior professor on tenure track before they get tenure). He doesn't seem to have pursued a permanent (i.e. tenure-track and then tenured) position in terms of his research.

There are many names for what we currently find ourselves in; wokeness, political correctness, and cancel culture are some of them, but these only encapsulate a portion of the phenomenon. Cultural Marxism, neo-marxism, social justice, identity politics, and Critical Theory are broader descriptors.

Critical Theory started to become prominent among western academics in the 90s and eventually infiltrated almost every university in the western world. In recent years, the ideology has left the university and has made the jump to media and corporate culture, establishing itself as the primary moral culture within western societies. Currently, the main lines of separation between oppressors and oppressed are race, sex and gender identity.

This is not just a political or social movement within the framework of traditional enlightenment values. Concepts such as logic, science, and reason are viewed as tools of the oppressive white patriarchy. Values like individualism, hard work, punctuality and delayed gratification would be understood as perpetuating white supremacy. Critical Theory has become much more than a social philosophy and is the primary philosophical driving force behind the new civil religion of wokeism. The ideas of sin (privilege) righteousness (victimhood) and damnation (cancellation) are well established within Wokeism. While it provides rituals of penance (“check your privilege” and “allyship”) and piety (kneeling during the anthem or posting black squares), what it never offers is forgiveness. In a recent interview with Dave Rubin, theologian Nathan Finochio described the phenomenon:

“If I’m stuck in the oppressor group and there’s no escaping it, there can be no forgiveness if there’s no repentance, right? Like, isn’t that how it works? So I’m just perpetually a sinner, and I’m just going to continue to perpetuate the oppressor group, and there’s nothing that I can do. Of course, cancel culture is actually the logical conclusion of Critical Theory…because they have to get rid of the oppressor class.”

Western culture has already reached its tipping point. Critical Theory has become the mainstream social philosophy, and Wokeism has become the new civil religion. There are two conceivable ways that our future will unfold. The first is that Wokeism will eat itself and dissolve because these ideologies are inherently self-consuming. If the only thing that exists is power, then corrupt power structures must be torn down. It could be that enough people will begin to wake up to the cognitive dissonance that is being shoved down our collective throats, but that is an incredibly optimistic view of the current situation.

What’s more likely is the second option; that these ideas will be taken to their logical conclusion. In the interview mentioned above, Nathan Finochio said that “cancel culture is actually the logical conclusion of Critical Theory… because they have to get rid of the oppressor class.” Rubin responded with the following.

“I hate to tell you I think it’s beheading that is the logical conclusion of cancel culture.”

Bradley Campbell recently wrote an article saying:

“However it plays out, those who have problems with the new culture, or with aspects of it, aren’t going to get anywhere simply by dismissing it or mocking it. To the extent that social justice culture offers a new moral vision, they’ll need to offer an alternative moral vision.”

^ A fantastic summary, R156 !

The Wokes are so crazy that they even claim that Mathematics is racist. And that's very serious. For example in Seattle, there is a school, I don't know which one, that teaches children that math is racist.

This girl is now free from Woke cult.

R156 writes white. Cancelled!

It really feels like we are in the Dark Ages. I doubt people in the original Dark Ages realized it but we have the advantage of hindsight. Well, some of us who know what the Dark Ages were have hindsight. Maybe we'll live to see the next Renaissance? Maybe? I mean, many of the changes that came about throughout the Renaissance began due to upheavals brought about by a plague. We can hope.

R160 I so hope so, because I think it's going to end very badly if there are no powerful leaders to shut this cult down from universities.

The problem is, how do we end both the woke bullshit cult on the left AND the evangelical/Trumpian bullshit cult on the right at the same time? They both want to control thoughts and language and actions at their particular ends of the spectrum. The right seems to like being controlled and, unfortunately, it seems the far left at least is starting to go along with the control thing coming from their new woke-angelical "leaders".

How do we get the center-left and center-right together to force the "gelicals" of both stripes to history's dustbin where they belong? The media is shaping so much of it, I really can't figure out what could change it since they are shaping the narrative and I don't see any end to that.

R162 Yes, you're totally right. How to stop both cults?

Democratic strategist James Carville says that Democrats have a "wokeness" problem and "we all know it," adding the party needs to talk about racial issues using the language of everyday Americans.

Speaking with Vox in an interview published Tuesday, Carville said that Democrats often discuss racial issues using language that is alienating to some of the communities they are trying to reach.

"Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud," Carville said.

"Why not?" responded interviewer Sean Illing.

"Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled," Carville responded. "And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters."

Biden couldn't speak Woke even if he tried which is why he won. Watch AOC give an interview where she tries to talk about the abortion crap in Texas without using the words woman, women, or mother for contrast. Absolutely ridiculous.

Exactly!!! AOC is totally into Wokeness. I noticed that months ago. R165

It is pretty obvious you are talking to and agreeing with yourself. You need to work on your act.

You're wrong, R167. You can even check it, moron. But, you won't because it would open the door to all the things you are wrong about and the weight of that could kill a team of oxen. It's also rather telling that you haven't bothered with something those of us with brains call "counterarguments". You can google that to try to figure out what those are.

Interesting analysis

I was worried when I saw this kind of thing all over Twitter. If this cult does not stop, I fear a civil war. Because all these students, will join companies one day and even the circles of power. And there is still no one to stand in their way. This only deepens the divisions within the population and the already fragile communities.

Idiocy of identity politics are always dangerous. Always.

What's happening in R170? Are those kids taking their shirts off and flagellating?

R172 I don't know, but just looking at their backs, I can see the degree of ethno masochism and self hatred. This self-hatred promulgated by the Woke cult. This is not the way to solve societal problems.

R173 ethno masochism and self hatred.

I've noticed so many English and American 20-something ashamed of their skin color. I guess it's related to 'Original Sin and penance that R156 was talking about.

R172, if you read the signs, it seems they are acting out a slave auction selling off whipped and beaten "crackers". And they're doing it in front of black activists, without irony or understanding.

R156 is a confused mass of generalizations and conclusion-leaping. Of course you can criticize those various academic theories and approaches, but they're already being criticized within academia, so you'll just be joining that debate. And they have little to do with "wokeness"; poststructuralism (if that's what we're talking about) comes out of the same broad Hegelian tradition as both Marx and Heidegger and is diverse; it won't inspire uniform political responses anyway. As I said upthread, crude impositions of "wokeness" on campuses are more attributable to administrations' reflexes than to "Critical Theory" or whatever broad label you care to impose. R156 sounds like somebody in the 80s blaming all society's problems on "Deconstruction."

[quote]This is not just a political or social movement [bold]within[/bold] the framework of traditional enlightenment values. Concepts such as logic, science, and reason are viewed as tools of the oppressive white patriarchy. Values like individualism, hard work, punctuality and delayed gratification would be understood as perpetuating white supremacy.

[quote]The ideas of sin (privilege) righteousness (victimhood) and damnation (cancellation) are well established within Wokeism. While it provides rituals of penance (“check your privilege” and “allyship”) and piety (kneeling during the anthem), what it never offers is forgiveness.

Excellent summary r156. In other words, this is a movement that seeks to overturn and destroy the Enlightenment, full stop. We have seen examples, too numerous to list, of all these phenomena recently.

The most alarming of all is the attack on Enlightenment values of freedom of speech, and freedom of inquiry. The civic enlightenment value of free speech says that the cure for bad ideas is MORE speech—submit the bad idea to debate, in other words. But under wokeness, no “wrongthink” should ever be allowed.

Wokeness says that the cure for “wrongspeak” is an abject apology and being permanently no-platformed. The woke are truly ignorant people.

He has t published much in the last 10 years. His hoax papers were published in a pay to publish journal which probably has very lightweight review. His “resignation” probably preceded a firing for cause. He also was probably at a point where he would never get promoted again. If he’s Ben there for over 10 years, he should be full professor by now.

R127 These safe spaces in universities with puppies and bubbles just extend sheltered life.

You have to GROW UP and face reality. The world is cruel and dangerous and people who get “safe spaces” are in first world countries.

The world is not your parents living room. Teachers and authoritative figures are not your parents. No one is obligated to take care of you and your well being but yourself after 18.

Giving 20 years olds a room with bubbles and coloring books don’t solve anything - it’s coddling and sheltering.

You walk into the mall and see people with emotional support dogs. And by no coincidence, it’s always the same kind of person. Mostly socially awkward white women from the suburbs or a frail gay 20-something.

It’s pathetic.

Philosopher Brian Leiter received the following letter from a colleague of Boghossian at Portland State, for context:

[quote]Peter was not a tenure-line faculty at PSU. PSU has an unusual status for non- t-t faculty that they can apply for the same titles as tenure-line faculty. I believe it was 2014 that he got that title (after having been an Instructor for I believe six years before that), but because he is not on the tenure track, he could have kept it indefinitely. In fact, he did decide to apply for promotion to "Associate Professor" last year, but was denied.

[quote]The level of the University's mistreatment of him as reported in his letter might be weighed against the fact that he was re-hired every year for the past dozen years, and that he was promoted as far as he was. (It might be noted that Peter does not have a Ph.D. in philosophy; his Ed.D. is in education from PSU itself.) In the words of a colleague of mine, he had long been hoping that the University would fire him so that he could make a martyr of himself, but seeing that that was not going to happen, he had to fire himself.

[quote]Peter was in fact harassed by one particular student who filed a Title IX complaint, but I am not in a position to evaluate whether the University's response was reasonable. (As you can probably tell, I am skeptical of Peter's own interpretations of these situations.) My own overall sense is that the free-speech situation at PSU is not much different than that at most other universities. But because we are Portland, FoxNews loves to amplify any whiff of impropriety, and Peter is aware that his letter would be an effective form of self-promotion.

R150 Sorry I offended you with my estimation of the variability of quality of scholarship in journals. Of course, there is plenty of fine work published there, but it is also true that some bad and, even worse, dishonest or poorly argued and researched, work gets into print--it does in other professions, so why should it be different in scholarship. My point was that the "success" of this person's hoaxes, while not entirely surprising, given how much range there is in what gets published (and, yes, some of it is driven by trends in the marketplace of ideas), should NOT be assumed to be proof that the world of scholarly journals is itself corrupt. The reviewers who volunteered their time for my journals, in general, took their assignments seriously.

I'm not sure why my pay is a relevant piece of your complaint. My pay was for teaching 3-4 classes a semester, producing my own scholarship, advising students, sitting on college committees, and attending conferences. I rarely was able to use the small stipend the journal offered (we're talking no more than 3000 per year) to buy myself out of teaching. I had a provost who did provide me with release of one class a year and the stipend typically ended up being used for me to travel to conferences where I met with people about the journal and went to panels to see if there were presentations I could encourage scholars to develop into articles. I don't know where you get the idea that most of us editors lead lives filled with eating bon-bons while poor grad students do all the work (I taught at an all-undergraduate school, so I couldn't even use the stipend to support a grad student as editorial assistant--a valuable use of the stipend and a good opportunity for a bright and industrious students).

I would not trade my experience as an editor for more "free" time--it was exciting and rewarding to put scholarship into print, even when there was the occasional one that I published because reviewers said yes, even though I wasn't as thrilled by the piece. That's why good editors do rely on and are grateful for good and thoughtful reviewers. And sometimes you do go with your gut instincts. And, by the way, you take on an editorship knowing that your own scholarship will probably diminish in quantity--it is considered bad form to publish your own work (other than the customary editor's note) in the journal while you are serving as editor.

Thanks, R180; it's much as conjectured.

R181 speaks the truth. I'll add again that journals should also take the occasional chance on "out there" material that may not always be airtight scholarship, but that shakes up assumptions in the field in a productive direction.

Thank you for responding, R181. I will re-read and respond later.

I helped work on 'scholarly journals' for an academic publisher back in the 90s. I knew then most of these stuff we were producing would be either—

1. placed on bookshelves unread. 2. read grudgingly by students who knew how to skim the tedious sections. 3. replaced completely by digital versions in the near future.

R182: I've been a reviewer for a variety of journals including several of the most prestigious and competitive in my field, a number that are "respectable" and competitive, and one that is edited by a friend and not that great. I have yet to see a "paradigm" changing manuscript, let alone one that was just a little flawed-----paradigm shifting articles are few and far between even at the most competitive journals---which usually is where they appear. Many manuscripts are simply atrocious and often they are led by students or postdocs who probably have not gotten very good mentoring, which is why even second-tier journals have 80-90% rejection rates. In contrast I've been able to publish the vast majority of my manuscripts and that was partly because I learned to write well and to position where I submitted, partly based on all the review experience (which began early in my career----I was a reliable, competent reviewer and have always known people on editorial boards, as well as some editors). The journals that no one reads are the ones like the one where this guy published.

It doesn't surprise me that this guy was in a non-tenure track position. Even Harvard has positions like this---Marty Peretz had a faculty title even though he was part-time, year to year person, but he got to use the Harvard brand and bring students into his orbit and give them writing gigs at The New Republic. That's how we got stuck with Andrew Sullivan.

r184 what field are you in? (I'm not r182; just curious.) I'm in literature and I echo a lot of your sentiments.

R184, just to clarify, when I wrote "material that ... shakes up assumptions" I wasn't talking about stuff that goes so far as to change paradigms ... just usefully shake up assumptions. Like R185 I'm in a literary field, and haven't edited a journal but have been a reviewer for many. I can't say I've been sent many atrocious articles, but I probably pass on more than I recommend, because they often read like half-baked elaborations of a spur-of-the-moment idea—sometimes quite well-researched, but still tenuous and inconsequential. If they have some kernel of a good idea I try to give some guidance for developing it.

A discussion on the "resignation"

The Megyn Kelly Show?

[quote] Peter Boghossian

Meh. Ask this Armo about the Armenian genocide and the Turks and watch his rigorous thought and objective even-temperedness crumble to dust.

R185:I'm in the social sciences and straddle public health. Given the greater reliance on monographs in the humanities, I wondered how journals might be used differently whether they got better articles.

As contrary as I am to Postmodern "Philosophy" ([bold]Fou[/bold]cault, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Deluxe & Ferrari, etc.) or "wokeness" in a more general fashion, this professor feels like a crybaby and pedant, and while he pretends to oppose these philosophical quasi-sects, he even uses their vocabulary (as in "systemic [illiberalism]", "[illiberal] culture", clear echoes from "systemic racism", "rape culture"). Most probably he felt bored and trapped in that shitty Portland University and did all this to gain some sympathy from the conservative press and use the outrage generated to attain some kind of sinecure position in a Evangelicalist conservative university or think-stunk, that love so much to defend liberty on the abstract plane and have their little champion martyrs for freedom. Same for this Boghossian guy. What universities everywhere lack is classical humanism, not liberalism, and liberalism is not synonymous with humanism (even if sectarian "humanists" have tried to make it so); humanism is a philosophical project that sees in episteme the happiness of man and is synonymous with the German Bildung; meanwhile liberalism is a wildly divergent philosophical political movement that is mainly concerned (nowadays) with the role of the State in human societies, particularly in relation to the private individual (now that they made "priestcraft" redundant, they focus less on the place of religion in society). These two teachers are just as sectarian as all the freudomarxists and post-nigo-structuralists are, and only feign inclusiveness due to the disintegrating faculties of pluralism, the classical dictum of divide et impera, of course they don't care about a Marxist holding the tenure for [italic]economics[/italic], it isn't their field. Hegel, who has influenced most of these ideologies mentioned, stated clearly that pluralism is the disintegrating heir of medieval feudalism, its existence is due solely to drain from the epicentre of power as much resources as it can. Rousseau said that: falsity has thousands of combinations, but truth only one way of being. Both liberals, freudomarxists, post-structuralists, etc. deny that there's an objective reality or the meaningfulness of such reality to us subjective beings. None of them offers their pupils anything of worth, but merely a cheap rehash of history of philosophy (not proper philosophy) combined with their sectarian views. These professional charlatans who gets their mouths full about Socrates can at best be considered a cheap parody of the Middle Academy, while being the typical pseudo-sceptics, who think it's amusing to "refute" illiterate "believers". What a laugh riot that these rancid atheists now have been welcomed by the pseudo-Christian Evangelicalist crowd as one of their own.

And it's quite tiring people cannot reference any other period in human existence but Nazi Germany, this trivialization of the Nazi régime, one that killed millions, for political name-calling is enervating. And, get one thing, the Nazis did burn books, but also did everybody else, Liberals in Germany set the precedent during the 19th Century, and the occupation authorities preferred to smash them to a pulp rather than burning them due to comparisons with the aforementioned Nazi acts of book burning, but they too destroyed books for the same purposes as the Nazis. Books are of no worth in themselves (in a general sense without taking into account things like incunabula or manuscripts), and I'm tired of seeing people pretending they are, they remain worthless in the hands of countless people, the worth is in the reader. Fascism is dead and buried, and no reasonable person utters that word in relation to another, if only due to respect for the victims that actually suffered at the hands of real fascists, and as AJ Gregor said, what the press or the talking-heads label as "fascism" are mostly mentally unstable individuals acting their psychopathologies. It’s likewise tiring to see people pretending to be champions of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment wasn't something monolithic; Voltaire, Rousseau and Holbach warred an almost to death war, [bold]Voltaire called for the execution of Rousseau[/bold] (Sentiment des citoyens). These people are not what you think, they are not irenic beings floating in a rococo Olympus or Parnassus, they were humans and lived in a country Voltaire described as where "people do the worst things laughing" (Candide), and he probably did the worst things laughing too. Voltaire himself so championed by legions of atheistic secularists ignore that Voltaire opposed completely the idea of evolution, and laughed at those who though we came from fish, supported absolute monarchism (he even supported chancellor Maupeou, who others decried as a tyrant) and essentially held every point of the thèse royale (that of the absolutists), while calling atheists monsters, and I quote what he thought of people like Boghossian: "Un athée qui serait raisonneur, violent et puissant, serait un fléau aussi funeste qu’un superstitieux sanguinaire", an atheist who arguments, violently and forcefully, would be a plague as awful as that of the sanguinary fanatic. As for book-burning we have Rousseau, who recommended burning books, with a few exceptions, the Bible, Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque, and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, essentially the books he enjoyed reading (per Hume, he only read the Bible later in life). I don't know who's worse the cynic who uses the Enlightenment to enrich himself, or the dupe, i.e. the illiterate fanatic, who believes the fantasies these liars tell, neither of them knows a rat’s ass about the 18th Century, or anything relating to it, or if they do they are quite good at hiding it.

People like Pinker, Peterson, Dawkins, etc., all these named, are annoying and disgusting, we should send them to the Sentinel Island so they can enlighten these poor natives and awake them to their dormant rational powers, and be happy for-evermore under the reign of Reason and Liberty. If not even when their ties to people like Epstein are exposed, what can free us from these pseudosophists? Obama, Trump, Romney, Biden... They are all the same, they should be sitting before a human rights tribunal facing the rope. Hopefully one day they shall do so.

^^^ Omg. Take a break. In fact, take numerous breaks.

R193 Go back to reading children's books.

[quote] complaint

R181 ‘Complaint’ is probably not the right word, perhaps ‘envy’.

But I have, thankfully, moved away from the ‘scholarly journal’ profession (and I’m not in the USA). Though I notice you list all the advantages as well as disadvantages to being an editor of scholarly journals.