Patrick Moreau is professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the review Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and The prose of Alain Grandbois, or read and reread The voyages of Marco Polo (Note, 2019).
There are facts which, despite their anecdotal nature, tell us a lot about the times in which we live: the recent resignation of Peter Boghossian is one of them. The news will probably go unnoticed; it is nevertheless revealing of the climate which now reigns in North American universities (in Quebec included, several could testify to it).
Peter Boghossian, some of the readers of To have to undoubtedly ignore – rightly – the name, was until recently an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. He is best known to the general public for his participation in the so-called “Grievance Studies” hoax. In 2018, with his two accomplices Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, he indeed managed to publish in various journals of the human sciences perfectly bogus studies, but which adopted the denouncing tone and the clichés of so-called contemporary progressivism. Of the seven that were accepted, one was concerned about the ubiquitous “rape culture” in Portland dog parks, another called for the creation of a “rape culture”. fat bodybuilding »So that obese people no longer feel oppressed by the overexposure of Mr. or M’s athletic bodiesme Muscle, a third consisted of certain passages of My fight rewritten using jargon typical of deconstructionist theories, etc. Their aim was obviously to make fun of ” studies “(On gender, race, fat people, etc.) which are multiplying in universities even though their scientific character is sometimes doubtful, the ritual denunciation of the” oppression “of which minorities are victims too often replacing the rationality, objectivity, even simple intellectual honesty.
The world upside down
Following this hoax, one would have thought that some of his academic colleagues would make amends and acknowledge, at least half-heartedly, the existence of a lack of rigor in the peer review of these studies, and perhaps even of a more general problem of replacing, within certain sectors of the human sciences, a rigorous, rational, critical scientific approach, open to debate, by an obtuse, ideological militancy, resistant to any questioning and firing on all cylinders to advance the Cause.
But just the opposite happened; Boghossian then became the target of widespread harassment, not only from those students who describe themselves as “awake” (woke), but also of several of his colleagues and even of the administration of his university. While his name was associated with swastikas in graffiti in the toilets near the philosophy department, that he was heckled during his classes or that a bag containing excrement was left in front of his office door, the CPP ( a sort of ethics committee) of Portland State University brought proceedings against him on the grounds that he had carried out research (those which led to the writing of these famous articles) on human subjects without first obtaining their approval. – which made the famous biologist Richard Dawkins say that this CPP thus manifested its opposition “to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression” and that one could not help suspecting among its members the presence of some “ulterior motive”.
As we can see, the world is now upside down at university: it is no longer the fact of repeatedly publishing biased studies or manipulating research results to make them conform to certain presuppositions. , no more than to hide behind a pseudoscientificity to advance, in largely subsidized works, the theses of a political radicalism sometimes surprising which becomes problematic, but that of using irony to make fun of these drifts. These professors, so radical when it comes to questioning “power relations”, “patriarchy” or “white and supremacist culture”, do not intend to laugh with their own thoughts and their own power and show on these subjects as ticklish as the theologians and inquisitors of old on points of doctrine. Strangely, the most critical theories, which don’t hesitate to question even simple common sense, do not believe it necessary to submit themselves to criticism.
As for Peter Boghossian, who himself practiced as much as he trained his students in critical thinking and the Socratic method, he has just resigned considering that he is no longer able to teach at a university which has ceased to be a “Bastion of free research” to become “a factory of social justice”, he wrote in his letter of resignation. ” [J]he never believed, he continues, that the purpose of instruction was to lead students to certain particular conclusions “, but that it should be rather” to help them acquire the tools enabling them to reach their goals. own conclusions ”. Now, he concludes, we “no longer teach Portland State University students to think”, we train them to reproduce “the moral certainties that are characteristic of ideologists”.
Many of us, I think, regret that such a professor has been forced to resign, and even more that nothing seems to stop this metamorphosis of certain university courses or programs into indoctrinating machines.
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