BY JOHN K. WILSON
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and the co-author of the infamous recent “Sokal Squared” hoax against academic journals, was “found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct,” according to Inside Higher Ed.
Some people wrongly think that Boghossian is guilty of fraud for peddling hoax papers with fake research to journals. Not all deception is research fraud; in fact, some forms of deception are essential to good research. You cannot uncover racism, sexism, fraud, etc., without deception in most cases. For example, Donald Trump’s racial discrimination in the housing he ran in the 1970s for the Trump Organization was exposed by using deception. They sent in testers of various races who pretended to want an apartment and revealed the discrimination that way. Should this kind of vital activity be prohibited in academia? I certainly hope not. The standard is whether the deception is integral to the research itself, or whether it is used to commit fraud by deceiving the audience for the research. In this case, it is clearly not fraud.
The second question here is, was he obligated to contact IRB for permission and did he violate the rules by failing to do so? After all, conducting experiments on people requires IRB clearance even if it turns out that the experiments cause no harm and violate no rules. (This kind of offense, of course, would be a minor violation that could not justify any serious punishment.)
We face the danger of IRB expansion far beyond its original purpose to protect human health. When journalism is deemed human experimentation, we have gone too far. I would argue that the submission of articles to a journal is not an experiment on human beings, and that the fact some editors might feel bad about the results is in no way turns this into an experiment. The expansion of IRB authority poses a threat to academic freedom by regulating methodology (what if an IRB had banned this experiment?), and also endangers people by preventing IRBs from focusing their attention on their mission to protect the health of humans.
There’s also another question here: Is this research? IRBs only apply to academic research, not to extramural utterances. If Professor Bart Simpson calls up Moe’s to play a prank, is Prof. Simpson obligated to receive IRB clearance before engaging in this deceptive experiment on humans? The answer is no, because this is an extramural utterance, not research work.
If Boghossian published his account of this hoax in a non-academic webzine, and did not list it among his academic work, how can it be termed research? The standards for extramural utterances are much different than the standards for research, and extramural utterances do not requires IRB approval.
Back in October, I wrote about this case, criticizing Boghossian and his co-authors for their actions and especially for their call for universities to investigate the fields they attacked: “The hoaxers made a horrifying call for massive repression of academic freedom, and whatever you think of the hoax itself, they deserve nothing but condemnation for their demands for mass investigation and censorship.”
However, they are also entitled to academic freedom, even if they are eager to violate other people’s academic freedom. Boghossian should not be investigated and punished for offending people with his bad ideas. He should be criticized, and nothing more.
I share John’s concern with apparent IRB overreach, both in general and in this case. The AAUP has weighed in on the issue on three separate occasions. Most recently, in 2012, the association issued a report, “Regulation of Research on Human Subjects: Academic Freedom and the Institutional Review Board (https://www.aaup.org/report/regulation-research-human-subjects-academic-freedom-and-institutional-review-board),” which questioned the IRB system’s reliance on “local committees whose members have no special competence in assessing research projects in the wide range of disciplines they are called on to assess, whose approval is required for an only minimally restricted range of research projects and who are invited to bring to bear in assessing them an only minimally restricted body of what they take to be information, who are only minimally restricted in the demands they may make on the researchers, and whose judgments about whether to permit the research to be carried out at all are, in most institutions, final. When one steps back from it, one can find oneself amazed that such an institution has developed on university campuses across the country.” That report recommended “that if a research project would impose no more than minimal risk of harm on its subjects, then it therefore should be exempt from the requirement of IRB approval.”
That said, it is important to stress that, despite the impression given by accounts in both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, Boghossian has not been charged with any violation that might lead to disciplinary action. Moreover, should such charges be filed, the faculty at Portland State, including Boghossian, are represented by a union, the AAUP. I do not know if Boghossian is a member, but he is covered by the union contract. And that contract provides for due process protections before any disciplinary action can be taken.
One other point: John asks, “Is this research?” Personally, I don’t think it is. If it is, however, it’s pretty shoddy, but that would be a matter for his departmental peers, not me (or John, or Steve Pinker) to decide. But the point is that Boghossian himself has claimed that it is research. Moreover, in submitting his fraudulent articles he and his co-authors apparently did claim to have obtained IRB approval for their “studies.” As one scholar told Inside Higher Ed (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent-academic-hoax-faces-disciplinary-action-portland-state), “Boghossian ‘wants to have it both ways.’ That is, publicly presenting his project as a ‘rigorous study that exposed flaws in the peer-review system’ while also ‘claiming that the hoax wasn’t a genuine study, and therefore IRB approval doesn’t apply.'” Nonetheless, I don’t think Boghossian should be subject to discipline, although given current rules he probably should have gone through the IRB, which may be more a problem with those rules than with either PSU or Boghossian.
“He and his co-authors apparently did claim to have obtained IRB approval for their studies.” I can’t find that assertion in the article to which you linked? Maybe I missed it.
I am relying here on a campus source.
As a point of fact, Boghossian does list Areo among his academic work.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190109133556/https://www.pdx.edu/philosophy/peter-boghossian
Actually, that’s a list of publications, not research work, and the list includes TruthOut and CounterPunch among other non-academic publications. Professors certainly can list their extramural publications on their official campus website. Of course, even if it was research, it’s still protected by academic freedom.