The Struggle for Open Discourse at Portland State University

Peter Boghossian is the first one to tell you: he's no victim of cancel culture. The philosophy professor has long had a taste for stoking debate, questioning orthodoxies, and exposing the brokenness of an academic system that values identity-based grievances over scholarship. He did that, in part, by writing phony papers like "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" and getting them published by respected, peer-reviewed journals. 

That project and others painted a target on Peter’s back on Portland State's campus, where he was subjected to endless investigations and harassment. 

This week, Peter resigned in a letter writing to the school's provost: “The university transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a social justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only output was grievance and division.”

In this episode, a frank conversation about the culture of higher education, and how to fight back against radicalism without becoming radicalized yourself.

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