Portland State Professor Resigns After University ‘Sacrificed Ideas For Ideology’Sept. 8, 2021
Jordan Davidson
A Portland State University philosophy professor is resigning from his position after the university “Sacrificed Ideas For Ideology.”
In a scathing letter to the university’s Provost Susan Jeffords disseminated through Bari Weiss’s substack, Peter Boghossian explained that the academic institution’s unwillingness to accept free thinking is harming education.
Boghossian first joined PSU more than 10 years ago. During his time teaching, Boghossian explained that he often invited guest speakers to campus “not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t.”
“From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds,” he wrote. “I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.”
Over the years, however, Boghossian said that “the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible” and “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.”
“Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. ..."
Full story at The FederalistLather, rinse and repeat at universities throughout the US.
