Portland State Says Researcher Violated the Rights of the Editors He Duped

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, violated ethical guidelines on human-subjects research but didn’t plagiarize or falsify data when he and two co-authors submitted a series of spoof journal articles designed to expose weaknesses in what they call “grievance studies,” the Oregon university has found.

A paper on canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore., and a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf were among seven submissions accepted for publication in journals on gender, race, sexuality, and related fields, the authors said. Four were published online, and three were being prepared for publication, when a Wall Street Journal op-ed raised questions about them.

Last fall the university’s vice president for research and graduate studies, Mark R. McLellan, ordered a faculty review of Boghossian’s recent research. In a letter dated July 17, which Boghossian posted on Twitter, McLellan said that the review was now complete. He said an institutional review board had concluded that the Portland State researcher had violated the rights of human subjects.

“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.”

Boghossian’s supporters questioned on Twitter how the authors could have completed their research if they had been required to notify the journal editors in advance.

“We’re going to submit some fake papers to your journal. We need your informed consent. Once we have that and submitted the papers, we request that you pretend we didn’t tell you they’re fake and that you review them as you normally would.”

— Griff (@GriffLlaregyb) July 24, 2019

The university cleared Boghossian in two other categories it was investigating. It found no evidence that he had treated animals unethically or had plagiarized, fabricated, or falsified data.

As a result of the finding that he had violated standards for human-subjects research, Boghossian was told in December that he was banned from doing any such research until he had completed training and could demonstrate that he understood how to protect the rights of human subjects. The same holds true for any sponsored research in which he’s the principal investigator, collaborator, or contributor.

If he violates those orders, he could be fired, the letter from McLellan said. As of July 17, Boghossian had not completed the training, he wrote. Boghossian declined to comment on McClellan’s critique of his work.

McLellan wrote that the review had raised concerns about “a lack of academic integrity, questionable ethical behavior, and employee breach of rules.” He said he was forwarding a copy of the letter to Boghossian’s supervisors as well as to the university’s president, so they could consider “an appropriate academic and/or administrative review.”

Boghossian’s co-authors are Helen Pluckrose, a self-described “exile from the humanities” who studies medieval religious writings about women, and James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician.

The three authors, who describe themselves as leftists, wrote in a webzine piece that the purpose of their ruse was to “give people — especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice — a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, ‘No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.’”

Boghossian said he had been unfairly criticized as a “tool of the right wing” since “one of the things fueling the right is the lunacy of the left.” But he argued that unless ideologically motivated scholarship is more carefully vetted, important social-justice issues won’t be taken seriously.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.