A Portland State University professor resigned Wednesday after the university made “intellectual exploration impossible” and turned “into a Social Justice factory.”
Philosophy Assistant Professor Peter Boghossian says he taught at the university for the past decade, teaching critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method. Boghossian alleges the school has stifled thought diversity despite his various attempts to give his students a vast range of different viewpoints.
“I never once believed – nor do I now – that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion,” his resignation letter reads. “Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions.”
“But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.”
Boghossian said students “are not being taught to think” but “are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.”
The former professor alleges the faculty “abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions.”
Boghossian said anyone who questioned “approved narratives” were dismissed and professors who assigned texts written by European males were “accused of bigotry.”
He said a group of students, also worried about the rise in thought intolerance, approached him about the shift within the school, prompting Boghossian to read into “primary source material produced by critical theorists” to try and understand this new thought ideology. Boghossian, however, says as he spoke out about the issues he was witnessing from teaching subjects from a critical lens, he was retaliated against.
