The Absurdity of Academia: An Interview With Peter Boghossian

On May 4, 2022, Executive Editor Matthew O. Skrod (TDR) interviewed Dr. Peter Boghossian (PB), one of the academics behind the famous Grievance-Studies Affair, prior to an event that Boghossian hosted at the College in conjunction with the Dartmouth Political Union.

Various Editor’s Notes appear in brackets throughout the interview’s transcription, which has been edited for length and clarity.

TDR: When you embarked upon your grievance-studies investigation: (a) Did you anticipate the reaction that you ultimately got? (b) Shouldn’t the journals ultimately have received the really scathing attacks of which you were in fact the recipient?

PB: I almost never think about this stuff anymore. But, did I expect the reaction? Yes and no. I certainly expected some people to be livid and enraged. Maybe it was pollyannaish on my part, a kind of weird, naive optimism, or maybe just an over-hope or overconfidence in the trust of reason. But I actually did believe that a lot of people would see what I revealed and think, “Wow, that’s crazy, we’ve been doing something wrong here.” I guess I figured that, if you’re wallowing in make-believe land and self-delusion, you’d be grateful for a good wake-up call. You would realize that you had wasted a lot of time and money, as well as blood, sweat, and tears, as they say, but you’d also see that you wouldn’t have to waste all of that going forward and that you could do something real. So, I say this in retrospect, and it sounds insane now that I hear myself say it, but I was expecting a lot of people to be thankful for the revelation that the emperor had no clothes.

To the second part of your question, I guess the parallel is, if someone sneaks an inert bomb through a detector at the airport, the response should not be “How dare you!” The response should be, “Thank you for exposing something that we didn’t know about. We don’t want an actual maniac to bring a real bomb on a plane.” To add insult to injury in my particular situation, the journal editors were human subjects. And, of course, Sokal and others said those editors should come out with justification for why they published this madness.

[Alan Sokal is the physics professor who, in 1996, conducted a famous sting operation that exposed the lack of scholarly review devoted to humanities-oriented commentary on the physical sciences. The so-called “Sokal Affair” directly inspired the 2018 “grievance-studies” sting operation of Boghossian and his collaborators—an operation that has alternatively been called “Sokal-Squared.”]

TDR: In the aftermath of the grievance-studies affair, Portland State restricted your research on the basis of “misconduct.” How do you feel the bureaucratization of higher education has impacted research in the pursuit of truth at colleges and universities?

PB: Ha! The truth is taken out of the equation entirely. I’ll give you a quick example. As is customary, every time this is brought up, I have to give the obligatory statement that I completely support trans rights and trans people. I’m down a hundred percent. My example is the following: It’s almost impossible for people who have detransitioned or want to detransition to receive IRB [institutional review board] approval, and so, clearly, IRBs are political and ideological gatekeepers of the dominant moral orthodoxy. There is no interest in sincere truth. Forget sincere truth, these are not even truth seekers. These are people who seek to uphold the orthodoxy. Your question is a good one, but I laugh because academic bureaucracy has literally no concern for truth whatsoever.

Also, think about it this way: One of the charges they brought me up on was plagiarizing Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In response, I said repeatedly, “I am guilty. I plead guilty. I plagiarized Mein Kampf.” Just parenthetically, we had two versions of Mein Kampf. One of the versions was a rewrite from a postmodernist perspective. In the other one, we just took out “Jew” and put in “white man.” I pled guilty to that, and ultimately they ended up dropping the charge!

TDR: There are those who would call you a conservative, which I’m sure is a label with which you would disagree. What do you view as the difference between being anti-woke and conservative? Or is it in fact possible today to be anti-woke and not a conservative?

PB: The answer to the latter question is yes, but I’ll get back to that. To the former question, I think part of the problem is, I’m 55, and the words “conservative” and “liberal” haven’t exactly flipped, but I barely know what they mean anymore. I could give so, so many examples of this.

Just for one, my dad was a Democrat in Massachusetts. I come from a family of Democrats, and we were always “for the working man,” as my dad used to say. Sometimes I wonder, if he were still alive, what he would think of the situation in Portland, Oregon, with the crazy riots, and Antifa assaulting cops and businesses.

Let’s imagine you went up to somebody ten years ago, regardless of his or her political orientation now, and you presented a hypothetical. I actually just talked about this a bit over the weekend with Greg Lukianoff [co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind]. Imagine you said to this theoretical person ten years ago, “At some point in the future, maybe 10 years from now, people will be rioting. These riots will destroy cities pretty significantly. Rioters will throw Molotov cocktails at police stations and assault police officers. They’re also going to destroy businesses. They’re going to do a whole host of things. What do you think should be done?”

If I asked my dad that question, I think he would have looked at me as if I had lost my mind. I think he would not have realized that he understood the question. I think he would have said to me, “What do you mean, ‘What should be done’? We should arrest them! What’s the question here?” But now, particularly in Portland, if you suggest that we need to arrest these people, you’ll be told that you think that way because you’re a conservative, which is ridiculous.

I guess you just have to go issue by issue. So I guess you could say that by and large conservatives are pro-life. I think that’s probably true, but certainly internationally I would hesitate in saying that. When I was a kid, there was a very easy litmus test. If someone was pro-life and subscribed to a whole prescribed suite of beliefs, you knew that at least in the general orbit that person aligned with conservatism. But it’s really not that clear now what those beliefs are.

That’s one answer to your question. There is another answer. And if people want to read something more on this, look up the last two chapters of Cynical Theories, the Helen Pluckrose book, when she talks about liberalism, what it means, and why it’s important. [Helen Pluckrose was one of Boghossian’s collaborators in his grievance-studies investigation.]

I also wrote about this a little bit in my first book. I think that the whole concept of critical social justice, Social Justice (capitalized), or wokeism—whatever you want to call it—has damaged classical liberalism in the liberal mind. I think it has created quite an unusual set of circumstances in the form of identity politics. Essentially, this whole phenomenon has shown itself to be just completely ahistorical. I have no idea where it comes from. I guess you could think of Marxism as wanting to truncate the economic distribution or rearrange the economic hierarchy. So too could you think of a kind of identity politics or wokeism as wanting to invert the social hierarchy with regard to identity characteristics that are said to have social and economic impacts. Thus, I think if you were an actual liberal—from what the term has traditionally meant—not only would you have to eschew any kind of critical social justice, but you’d have to actively repudiate it.

Part of the problem is, by and large, people who subscribe to woke ideology do not believe in dialogue. They believe that dialogue is a tool of the patriarchy—in the literature it’s called privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. So, privilege seeks to preserve itself; there’s no point in dialogue because that’s just an instrument to preserve one’s privilege. If you want to totally abandon the Enlightenment tradition, this is the way to do it. You would just say, “We’re not going to talk to those people because dialogue itself is a form of racism.”

This idea is truly insane. All of the tools of dialogue that we use to adjudicate normal problems, to just figure out what’s true, are off the table for woke folks. These tools, potential instruments of human flourishing, are recategorized as means of oppression and dominance. Not only is this recategorization historically false, but it ultimately means that any situation is inherently unworkable. You won’t be able to solve any problems. You’d have to resort to violence; what other option is there? My other point is that, in conceiving of liberal democracy, if you’re not willing to have an honest conversation about your problems, and if you adopt that cultural value for long enough, one of the consequences is that you’re not going to be able to deal with opposition to any position you hold. That’s on a micro scale. On a macro scale, a strong man is going to step in with the answers, or maybe there will be a national divorce. We can avoid all of this, though, by simply having conversations across divides. One of the reasons I’ve been doing events throughout the country is that the opposite has been modeled for people.

TDR: You have written much about how to approach difficult and emotionally laden conversations. When you’ve faced harassment and retaliation for your views, have you been able to avail yourself of your own strategy?

PB: I’m going to highlight a key problem. There is a scholastic infrastructure in place that suppresses the arguments of those with opposing viewpoints. Maybe it’s because the people constituting this infrastructure are concerned about the privilege-preserving epistemic pushback thing, or maybe it’s because they don’t want to do the intellectual work to figure out another person’s position. Or maybe it’s because they don’t believe the moral beliefs they hold can be rationally derived, and therefore they resort to another justification, like lived experience. I’m not going to come to a conclusion as to which; the answer is it’s probably a mix of those.

I remember that I wanted to bring James Damore, the Google engineer, to Portland State. Helen Pluckrose said she’d travel across the pond and be with us on stage. We also invited tenured and non-tenure-track faculty from the Women’s Studies Department to sit right alongside us and James Damore for the conversation. And the faculty members refused. The same thing happened again at another event a few days later. These people refused to have a conversation.

After I resigned in early September, the president of Portland State University issued what I just found to be the most astonishing statement. The president said that the highest priority of the institution should be social justice—the highest. Not financial solvency. Not the longstanding budgetary crisis. Not teaching!

I then decided to publicly and directly pose the question: Should the highest priority of a public academic institution be social justice? Nobody would talk to me. I actually reached out to liberals and leftists… Tom Hartman in Portland. I reached out to Slate and Salon, who had done numerous pieces on me. I reached out to local professors. I sent out an enormous number of emails. I tweeted, I retweeted, and I retweeted again. Nobody would have that conversation. So to answer your question, though I tried, people refused to speak with me. There is simply no book that you can read to teach you how to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t want to engage in one.

TDR: That does segue into the next question. For this event at Dartmouth and the others which you have been hosting, why did you choose a “reverse” question-and-answer structure? Also, what has the reception been to such distinctively formatted events? What have you seen at other colleges and universities, and what do you expect the reception to be like at Dartmouth?

PB: So, why did we do this? We’ve transformed the event considerably since we started. While the event you’ll see tonight is, as I say, nothing like the original event, the idea was never for me to be on stage. The intention was explicitly to invert the model. Instead of a professor on stage and students asking questions, it’s students on some kind of a stage and a professor asking questions. A lesson that I’ve learned so far is it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to get the people I really want to attend this event—the people I need to speak to the most—to actually come to the event, because the people I need to speak to the most literally don’t accept the salubrious nature of dialogue. They believe that engaging in that process is somehow harmful to minorities or people who have historical oppression variables. This is why, going forward, we will be doing the same event, the one we’re going to do tonight, outside. This way, we’ll bring people in who would never have actively decided to attend the event.

I have few definite thoughts about who comes to the events. I really have no idea, actually, but in all the times that we’ve done this, we’ve only had one person attend who overtly participated in woke ideology. He was wearing a BLM t-shirt—this was at our first event, in Los Angeles. And I let him speak uninterrupted. He went on and on and came back again. But of course the idea that self-expression is good is a big part of the events.

TDR: Could you discuss the theory and the purpose undergirding the way in which you conduct these events?

PB: The events are all demonstrations of something called street epistemology. I wrote my first book on this topic. Essentially, the skeleton of street epistemology is the Socratic method, and then it’s augmented with literature from hostage negotiations, applied epistemology, cult exiting, and, you name it, it’s in there. My second book flushes this out even more. But it’s basically asking people targeted Socratic questions—I call them Socratic-plus questions, so not purely Socratic questions. I ask them these Socratic questions to uncover whether or not they believe that the justifications that they have for their beliefs are sufficient for their confidence in those beliefs.

Of course, we got canceled from Brown and Yale. Berkeley tried to cancel us. I can’t speak to the culture of Dartmouth, but one of the reasons we go around the country to do these events is to show people how to engage in a process that they can literally see. I wanted to model movement across a belief spectrum and give people some tools that they can take home with them. The other purpose I have is to teach people how to calibrate their confidence in their own beliefs, and the reverse question-answer format is a great tool to assist in that. And unfortunately, for too long nobody has been doing anything like this. It should be just the most basic thing. You’ll realize tonight, because I’m not the one making claims, the event is really the least controversial thing anyone has ever done or seen, apart from maybe looking at a wall or something like that.

Essentially, you either believe that the moral beliefs you hold are rationally derivable or you don’t. It comes down to that. And if you believe that they’re rationally derivable, then it would only make sense that you would want to believe true things, because implicit in that is that there’s a truth or falsity. If you don’t believe they’re rationally derivable, you’d never go to an event like this, unless you looked at the event as a power play and wanted to push a kind of post-modern power-knowledge, per Foucault.

We’re too afraid as a general rule to ask people questions about certain things—race, gender, sexual orientation, trans-status, or whatever the moral mood of the day is—because we don’t want to offend people. But when we do that, we trap people into ways of life that won’t lead to flourishing unless by luck. Therefore, by asking people Socratic questions, what I’m hoping to do is allow them to see their own reasoning process, which is something they’ll be able to take home and use to their own ultimate benefit.