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Philosopher Peter Boghossian at Portland State facing possible sanction for “research misconduct” in connection with the “grievance studies” hoax

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JANUARY 9–UPDATED

IHE has the details .(Earlier coverage here).  This twitter thread by someone knowledgeable about IRB and research ethics makes a pretty good case that what he did does not fall within the purview of the IRB at his institution, which does seem to me the crucial question.  The University would be within its rights to take account of how Professor Boghossian is spending his time with respect to promotion and merit salary increases–it's not obvious that the expose of "grievance studies" is what he was hired to do (but I simply don't know what the professional expectations are for his position)–but it's far from clear this new Sokal hoax constitutes research misconduct, however obnoxious it may have seemed to the affected journals.  (The original Sokal hoax did not result in any charges of research misconduct against Professor Sokal, a physics professor at NYU, presumably because it was obviously not part of any research he actually does–it was, at best, extramural speech, protected by his contractual right to academic freedom.  The only difference I can see is that Professor Boghossian and colleagues pulled off more hoaxes, but, like Professor Sokal, they took the hoax to reveal something about some of the feebler parts of the humanities.)

(Thanks to Jeffrey Roland and Owen Schaefer for pointers.)

Readers with more knowledge about IRB rules are free to weigh in in the comments, but submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

JANUARY 11 UPDATE:  This informative article makes a good case that Professor Boghossian did require IRB approval.  (Thanks to Craig Larson for the pointer.)

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16 responses to “Philosopher Peter Boghossian at Portland State facing possible sanction for “research misconduct” in connection with the “grievance studies” hoax”

  1. David Beard

    Don't some of the articles depend on falsified data [observed at dog parks, for example]? How might this complicate academic misconduct hearings?

    If I publish false data and then the journal retracts it, am I absolved?

    Reply
  2. Jonathan Cohen

    One reason the hoax *might* not have been covered by IRB is if it's not "research," i.e., not designed to create "generalizable knowledge," rather, just an expose of selected journals. This is why the authors here https://areomagazine.com/2019/01/05/academic-freedom-or-social-justice-what-kind-of-university-is-portland-state/ keep calling it an "audit" and a "quality assurance investigation," standard categories of research-like activities that don't technically qualify as research. Whether they can convince anyone of this might come down to how they reported it – if it's just QA, why report it to the public at large, rather than merely to the "audited" journals? If they were trying to show the public at large that the journals have low standards, that sounds "generalizable," especially given that they were used as exemplars of a certain category.

    Reply
  3. Victoria

    Yes, I agree with Jonathan. It depends on how and whether their work is categorized as “research” that is generalizable. Many humanities subfields talk with people, which you’d think requires IRB approval, but many don’t require going through IRB bc they are not seeking to generalize beyond their case (eg when historians document life histories or interviews).

    Reply
  4. David Wallace

    A naïve question: how would sanction here be compatible with the First Amendment? Portland State is a public institution, and what Boghossian et al did was pretty much entirely speech (whereas, as I understand it, IRBs in more systematic research contexts bypass the First Amendment because the experiments are mostly conduct, not speech).

    Reply
  5. Brian Leiter

    Speech/conduct is not the relevant distinction: the IRB can regulate what researchers say in the course of their research, and to whom they say it, and IRBs do so all the time (e.g., imagine what the IRB would say about the psychologist who proposes exploring childhood sexuality by exposing children to sexual explicit speech and propositions). Some IRB rulings probably are ripe for constitutional challenge, *but* as with laws that prohibit speech in the workplace that constitutes sexual or racial harassment, I expect most would survive a First Amendment challenge. There are some speech absolutists who think most anti-discrimination laws should fall to First Amendment challenge, but the courts have not been receptive.

    Reply
  6. Michael Schmitz

    "The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is an administrative body established to protect the rights and welfare of human research subjects recruited to participate in research activities conducted under the auspices of the institution with which it is affiliated." I think it is obvious that this was not research. The editors and referees etc. were not 'recruited to participate in research activities'. They were pranked, hoaxed, whatever you want to call it. Pranking, hoaxing, subverting, ridiculing, satirizing etc., are, however, methods that have often been used in the history of philosophy. I think it is an embarrassment to academic philosophy that there seems to be so little solidarity with Boghossian. (Jason Stanley on Twitter was an exception today and I hope I have missed others, but generally the silence was deafening.) Even those who disagree with him and dislike his methods should be able to see that it is an abuse of research guidelines to use them against him in this case.

    Reply
  7. Owen Schaefer

    I would respectfully disagree with those who say this wasn't human subjects research. The PSU IRB was correct, IMHO, that it met the definition. (as the Twitter thread linked notes, it probably falls outside of federal regulations, but from what I can tell Portland has adopted the federal definition for its own internal policies on research)

    Research is defined as systematic investigation aiming to generate generalizable knowledge. A systematic methodology was used here, in contrast with the Sokal hoax. The hoaxters carefully crafted a substantial number of papers, and systematically submitted these papers to a similarly substantial number of journals. And their aim was definitely to generate generalizable knowledge. They didn't just want to show some particular journals had problematic referees, but rather that the whole field of so-called 'grievance studies' had fundamental flaws. It was also human subjects research, insofar as people (editors and reviewers) were subject to a direct intervention (a fake set of submitted papers).

    It is in some ways analogous to an audit study, where fake resumes or clients or such are sent to some organization, to see if there's some discriminatory effect. see e.g., http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/DPlab/papers/publishedPapers/Milkman_2012_Temporal%20Distance%20and%20Discrimination.pdf . Such studies typically receive IRB approval. And with good reason – they expose subjects to risks and burdens, as well as involve deception. These need to be balanced against the knowledge gained, and to ensure that there really is scientific validity (a shoddy and risky/burdensome study is unethical, insofar as subjects are exposed to risks/burdens without good justification; this is especially important with no-consent studies like this).

    Internal audits or quality improvement studies are typically exempt from ethics review, as those are meant to improve internal processes/services and not generate generalizable knowledge. They would have their own approval and oversight mechanisms. But this was certainly not an internal audit, as the hoaxters have no institutional authorization or role with the target journals.

    Reply
  8. Justin Kalef

    Hi, all.

    Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose discuss the whole project at length here. It's well worth reading, i think. At the bottom are descriptions of all the papers they submitted and how they were received.

    https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/

    Quite possibly, there are important elements of this that I'm missing. But I'm not sure that many of these papers, at least, are the sorts of things that meet the standard of needing IRB approval.

    For instance, many of the papers just seem to be arguing poorly for seemingly absurd normative conclusions. They were nonetheless accepted.

    If someone writes a terrible paper through incompetence, and someone else writes a similar paper to expose the fact that it's possible to routinely get papers published despite that incompetence, is the second really worse than the first?

    Clearly, it would do a service to all scholarship to expose pseudo-academic disciplines. I don't think any of us would be upset if someone showed that a young earth creationist journal published nonsense, for instance.

    If what the three writers did was wrong, then what _is_ the acceptable way to demonstrate what they sought to demonstrate or test what they sought to test?

    Reply
  9. Michael Schmitz

    If a professor prank-called members of the Trump administration – similar to how comedians often do such things, only more systematically – and published these interviews in order to display the general incompetence of this administration and undermine its legitimacy, would you also say that this was research and that the professor should have gotten IRB approval and abide by its guidelines? To take an example pretty close to real life, Sacha Baron Cohen has recently and earlier quite systematically pranked members of certain groups and arguably has given us some insights into these groups. Do you think he was therefore doing research and if he was a professor, should be subject to IRB guidelines?

    Reply
  10. Nate Stout

    I think Jonathan and Victoria, above, are right that the key issue here is whether what they've done counts as research. It seems to me that the authors took themselves to be aiming to generate generalizable knowledge about a certain culture within academia. That's why, I think, in the article to which Justin Kalef provided a link they describe the project as an ethnographic study. They write, "Our approach is best understood as a kind of reflexive ethnography … Our objective was to learn about this culture and establish that we had become fluent in its language and customs by publishing peer-reviewed papers in its top journals, which usually only experts in the field are capable of doing."

    I believe that, in general, ethnography requires IRB approval, and in this case, given that there is a risk of reputational harm to the editors/referees who were unwittingly part of the project, there probably should have been an IRB review.

    Reply
  11. stevelaudig

    i may have missed something, but Sokal didn't fabricate or present non-facts as facts, and my understanding is that these three, Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, did, in fact, present knowing falsehoods via faked data which was represented as "real". And I see a difference, or am I mistaken about their 'data'?

    Reply
  12. D

    I pretty much agree with the IRB-trained folks above that this probably counts as human subjects research according to the Common Rule, and I'm virtually certain that Portland State has 'ticked the box' and decided to apply that standard to all research regardless of funding (almost all large American Universities have). I'm kind of disappointed that nobody has asked whether that definition is sensible, or plausible, or defensible.
    So, for instance, if I ask people in my workplace whether they would prefer Garamond or Comic Sans in a cover letter, that could also be considered human subjects research under the common rule. Because I've planned (this is part of the definition, for some reason) my question to sample from a population of interest (academics), and I'm clearly hoping to produce knowledge (Comic Sans is dispreferred) that can be generalized to that population (I better not send in my letter to another university in comic sans). The word 'systematic' also appears in that definition, but it is entirely devoid of objective, truth-conditional meaning. If we can imagine that the guy in the next office prefers comic sans, and if that got out people would make fun of him, then identifying details from my 'research' could also harm somebody's reputation, and my research is now non-exempt (and in a fun Orwellian twist, most universities require 'exempt' research to be approved by the IRB anyway).
    So, yes, probably if we apply the Common Rule definition however we want to, the hoax would count as research. But so would virtually any effort to obtain information from other human beings for the purposes of… well, almost anything. Yet we obtain information from other human beings in university settings all the time, and no administrators come chasing after us with pitchforks. So if they've decided to apply this massively vague definition to some kinds of low-risk activity and not to others, it is probably worth wondering whether this is really about the bullshit definition of 'human-subjects research' embedded in the common rule, or whether there may be some ulterior motive at work.
    Finally, I would note that I don't endorse the Sokal Squared hoax nor do I necessarily think that this is a good or legitimate activity for a philosophy professor to engage in. I haven't read the papers, I know nothing about the 'grievance studies' fields, and I consequently have no opinion on the merits of the hoaxers' argument. But I do know IRB bullshit, and this is clearly retaliation rather than anything remotely connected to the welfare of human subjects.

    Reply
  13. D

    I'm just realizing that I kind of buried the lede above in details about the common rule. Overarching point is this: the question of whether this is research or research misconduct is an ethical question that should be settled by thoughtful discussion of what exactly constitutes misconduct and ethical lapses. Legalistic quibbling over the ORI-imposed definition of research is entirely beside the point, because that definition is absurdly vague and broad, and is entirely the product of administrative rent-seeking. It must not be treated as a serious characterization of research, nor research misconduct.

    Reply
  14. Justin Kalef

    Very interesting, D.

    I just read the article Brian linked to in the update yesterday. It seems the criterion is whether it's “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” In this case, supposedly, “it was human-subjects research according to federal regulation … The human subjects being the journal editors.” Moreover, “Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research…”

    So, just to get clear on this: suppose I submit some articles to a number of journals, noting the speed with which I get responses, the number of revisions requested, and the differences between what each journal chooses to publish. I then advise some graduate students on how they can use this information to increase their chances of publication. Or maybe I write a blog post about it. Would I need IRB approval for that, also?

    Reply
  15. D

    Yes, absolutely, according to the letter of the Common Rule. Now, would an administrator ever go after you for such activity? It seems overwhelmingly unlikely. But this is part of the problem; when regulations are this broad and vague, it gives near-absolute discretion to administrators over which types of speech they want to regulate, investigate, and potentially punish. In your scenario, actually, you wouldn't even need to tell grad students anything or write a blog post. Simply collecting the information with the intent to use it in some way in the future (that is, to 'generalize' it to the population of all studies submitted to these or other journals) would put you squarely in the category of human-subjects research. I find the linked article from the Intelligencer problematic for several reasons. First of all, it concludes that if there is a probelm with IRBs, it's a problem with the system and not with PSU's particular actions in this instance: once something qualifies as human-subjects research, the University has no choice but to enforce their guidelines. But this is simply not true, for precisely the reasons I've outlined here: employees engage in non-research actions every day that could be characterized as research under the definition, and nobody ever tries to enforce oversight on those activities. Additionally, they quote an IRB person saying 'intent doesn't matter' for what constitutes data fabrication. I have no idea whether this is a correct interpretation of how PSU defines that term, but it's entirely idiotic either way. If intent really doesn't matter, then generating computer simulations of data in order to make a statistical point would constitute data fabrication. Why hasn't PSU gone after every statistician at their institution?

    Reply
  16. Larry Cahoone

    One word that needs to be used is "journalism." Academics pursue research in their fields, but the work in question is in effect journalism about how those fields operate, which is something academics sometimes do. It may eventually be that a judge will decide the extent to which PSU has stretched any reasonable interpretation of the purpose of the IRB regulations to regard journal editors as research "subjects," but not every academic's claim to know something general is research, e.g. a physicist's op-ed about federal funding or an opinion piece in the CHE. This was a step further, a sting operation on several journals, in which deception was involved. The practices of several journals were exposed. Very embarrassing. But is it fraudulent research violating citizen-subjects? That is absurd.

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