Contemporary higher education is suffering a crisis of legitimacy. Government funding and bias have so corrupted it that larger and larger proportions of society view modern universities as unnecessary overfunded wastelands of government propaganda. A recent Pew Research poll found that only half of all Americans now have a positive view of colleges and universities and that 59 percent of Republicans believe colleges are bad for America.
Now Peter Boghossian–1 of 3 liberal college professors who recently placed a number of fake research papers in peer-reviewed academic journals in order to demonstrate that almost any preposterous “study” can get published in so-called “grievance studies” journals as long as the study supports government expansion or political correctness–is facing disciplinary charges at Portland State University.
Boghossian is a whistleblower of a sort. He plagiarized large sections of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and almost got it published in academic journals simply by changing “Jews” to “white males.” (The research paper would have been published in a peer-reviewed journal except that reporting by the Wall Street Journal disrupted the hoax before it was completed.) Boghossian also concocted a ridiculous “study” which sought to show a connection between dog parks and “rape culture.”
Boghossian is paying a price for so thoroughly embarrassing modern academia and the peer review process. PSU claims that he failed to get Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for his research and fabricated data when he and his team claimed, for their dog park article “to have tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality.”
Here is a Reason podcast interview of Boghossian discussing his work and his travails.
