Peter Boghossian: Hiding People From Truth Does Not Protect Them—Academic Institutions, DEI Bureaucracies, and Ideological Capture

“It’s a tremendous danger when we have people who run institutions and who have jobs for life in the academies, they’re completely convinced they found the truth, they publish in their own journals, they teach those ‘truths’ to their students, and then they’ve indoctrinated generations of students.” Peter Boghossian is a former professor of philosophy and co-author of the Sokal Squared hoax papers. These were intentionally false and absurd intellectual papers that were accepted as legitimate in ostensibly prestigious academic journals. In 2021, Boghossian resigned from Portland State University. “In DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] bureaucracies, we have extraordinarily intolerant people. We have ideologues. They have a set, or a suite of propositions that they forward to the expense of all else,” says Boghossian. “You can either have free speech at a university or you can have DEI bureaucracies. It is literally impossible to have both.” Today, Boghossian, a champion of the Socratic method, goes around the world, teaching people how to speak across divides and to harness their humility and ability to ask the right questions. “We know where this problem comes from. It’s the academic institutions,” says Boghossian. “The places from which you graduated are not the same places today.” We speak about what he calls a “large-scale ideological capture” of institutions, and debate what the best path is moving forward toward genuine diversity of thought and expression. “To what extent should society tolerate illiberal, radical, intolerant people in the orthodoxies in which they bring to that society? That’s the paradox of tolerance in a nutshell,” says Boghossian.