Former Portland State professor calls it 'poetic' to watch college campuses 'burn' amid anti-Israel protests
As protests continue to disrupt graduation ceremonies across the country, a former Portland State University professor said the current state of higher education that has become "hijacked by idealogues."
Dr. Peter Boghossian, an educator who accused Portland State of being a "social justice factory" before resigning in 2021, spoke out about how he believes current anti-Israel protests are the result of woke ideologies indoctrinated into curriculums across the country in an interview with Amala Ekpunobi.
"I don't want people going to an institution, students thinking that they're going to get an education, but they're not getting an education - what they're doing is that they're becoming further steeped or indoctrinated into beliefs that are untethered to reality," he told Ekpunobi.
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"We create these environments when people think they have the right answers to moral questions, and they're positive of it, they're positive about it and if someone else doesn't believe it, they're a bad person," Boghossian continued. "When the starting assumption is, ‘I know it's true, I need to teach my students what's true, I'm going to test them on what's true and then they're going to get out into the world and they're going to institutionalize what's true’ - if that's your starting assumption, then you're no longer attempting to educate people, you're attempting to indoctrinate them."
In 2017, Boghossian drafted up "totally deranged" academic papers with a few colleagues to expose how "entire lines of literature" can become "hijacked by idealogues."
"The conceptual penis as a social construct" was the paper Boghossian submitted to academic journals, which led to the ex-Portland State professor being labeled a "transphobe" and angering people. He noted how these peer-reviewed journals are vetted by experts but
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"I'm very pessimistic about the American educational system. I'm extraordinarily pessimistic about the K-12 system where teachers get credentialed by idealogues in universities before they [can] teach…The accreditation bodies, which are basically cartel, it's a long complicated problem," Boghossian said.
The former professor went on to say that while he can understand students’ desire to remediate the disparities of the world, that protesters must ensure "moral impulses are informed correctly."
"We've like let a small group of these people completely take over," he continued."When you create these educational infrastructures that don't value dialogue and discourse, when you create systems in which people asking sincere questions are are met with some kind of punishment…you don't need to be Nostradomus to figure this s--t out, I mean this is an inevitable consequence of creating systems that pretend to educate people but actually indoctrinate them…That's why I think it's just so poetic to watch these institutions burn."
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Boghossian went on to say that while he believes in the ability to protest through the expression of free speech, that there is an inherent difference between protests and riots, relaying that protests don’t "occupy buildings and tell Jewish students they can't go [on campus]."
"When you demean dialogue for long enough, the only thing people have access to is violence - there's no other option. You either have a conversation about your problems or you start killing everybody or, you know, destroying stuff. But these are the people who have not allowed conversation, so of course this is going to come back to bite them, that's the snake eating its own tail…the whole thing is an ideology mill. All of it," he continued.
"The whole civilization is falling apart. What are you going to do? You might be warning people, no one listens to me so f--- it, watch it burn," Boghossian said. "I think it's actually a great thing that it's literally burning to the ground... it is a natural consequence of what they've been doing, so I mean of course nobody should be surprised."
Boghossian didn't immediately respond for comment.