I was forced to resign by my woke colleagues, says Oregon professor Peter Boghossian

Peter Boghossian resigns claiming woke students are being ‘trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues’ rather than think for themselves.

Peter Boghossian, right, pictured with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, has quit his job at a US university claiming it has become a ‘social justice factory’.

A philosophy professor who quit after ten years has claimed that his US university became a “social justice factory” where woke students were being “trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues” rather than think for themselves.

Peter Boghossian said that staff at Portland university in Oregon had “abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions”.

Boghossian had previously had run-ins with university officials after co- authoring a series of spoof research articles to highlight his belief that “morally fashionable papers – no matter how absurd – could be published” in social science journals.

Among the papers was one accepted by Cogent Social Sciences arguing that penises were products of the human mind and were responsible for climate change. Another accepted by a different publication copied a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf but with phrases from feminist theory inserted.

The professor’s resignation letter, published on the newsletter platform Substack, was hailed as “devastating” by the historian Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at Stanford University, who called the way Boghossian had been treated disgraceful.

Boghossian wrote in his resignation letter to Susan Jeffords, the provost: “Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offence where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.” He claimed that the university had ceased to be “a bastion of free inquiry” but had become “a social justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division”.

He added: “Professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.”

Dozens of academics, artists and writers, including Sir Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky and Margaret Atwood, signed an open letter last year warning that the free exchange of information and ideas was in jeopardy from “illiberalism”. Boghossian said that he was harassed at work, with swastikas written on bathroom walls with his name next to them, and that colleagues told students not to take his course.

The university said that it would not comment directly on the letter because it was a personnel matter but added: “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.”

Boghossian, who does not categorise himself as a conservative, became a controversial figure on campus for speaking out against what he viewed as the perverse effects of liberal mores.

“I decided to study the new values that were engulfing Portland State and so many other educational institutions – values that sound wonderful, like diversity, equity and inclusion, but might actually be just the opposite,” he wrote. “The more I read the primary source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights based on evidence.”

The Times