Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, is being threatened with official sanction or firing for the valuable and novel experiment he and two others began in 2017.

In what has come to be known as the “grievance studies hoax,” Boghossian submitted a number of obvious, ridiculous fake papers to academic journals that focus on gender, race, and sexuality. When seven of their 20 papers were peer reviewed and accepted for publication (four were actually published before the hoax was exposed by the Wall Street Journal), he had proven how corrupt and worthless some academic subjects and journals really are.