So Much for Tenure

They say you can tell your rulers by who you cannot criticize or parody. Legal Insurrection, Portland State Prof Who Exposed ‘Grievance Studies’ Corruption Faces University Discipline

Last October, we brought you the story of three academics named Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, who wrote absurd papers in the areas of gender studies, women’s studies, and more.

They then submitted the papers to journals which, to their amazement, published many of them.

Here’s some background from my post in October:

They published their first-hand account of what happened in Areo Magazine:
Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
Part I: Introduction
Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.
We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.
We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research. Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, our aim has been to reboot these conversations. We hope this will 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.”

The work they submitted was truly over the top:

One was quite literally a rewrite from a chapter of Mein Kampf.

But you're not allowed to mock the intelligentsia:

For the sin of exposing the left, Professor Peter Boghossian is now being targeted by the IRB (Institutional Review Board) of Portland State University.

Portland State University has determined that @peterboghossian committed a “human subjects” ethics violation for his involvement in the Grievance Studies probe. Further charges of falsifying data are currently under review. https://t.co/ec5zqwbQxK

— Mike Nayna (@MikeNayna) January 6, 2019

In the video below, Boghossian explains that the IRB exists to approve research projects and studies. He gives the example of wanting to do studies involving human or animal subjects as instances which would require an IRB approval.

He speaks on the phone with his colleagues Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay and suggests that the rules will be manipulated in some way to find him guilty of an ethics violation which would mean he would lose his job.

He also says he wants to film his meeting with officials, a request we learn at the end of the video was denied. Watch the whole thing:

Make no mistake, this is all about politics. The ‘Grievance Studies’ project embarrassed the wrong people, and now someone has to pay.

I covered this back in October, when the papers were first revealed as hoaxes. As an Assistant Professor, Dr. Boghossian is likely not tenured, and given this controversy, it's unlikely he will be. And it's pure politics, exactly what tenure is supposed to protect against.