The FSU Wouldn’t Know Peer Review If It Rejected Them

 

The FSU Wouldn’t Know Peer Review If It Rejected Them

It already did. The Free Speech Union wouldn’t know academe if you poked it with a ten foot barge pole, and it has built a campaign about academic freedom on exactly that.

The Free Speech Union is at it again, peddling Peter Boghossian to New Zealand in the election season, and the sales pitch arrived in the shape of a parable. A philosopher at Portland State asks his colleagues what the evidence is for trigger warnings and microaggressions. He is told the question is itself an offence. So he goes away and exposes the rot by getting nonsense published in peer reviewed journals, and the whole racket only survives because a reporter at the Wall Street Journal came looking for one of his invented authors. 

I replied that he is not a credible academic, that none of this is peer reviewed, and that we should stop importing failed American academics with their culture war grift. 

Two hours later the Union answered. Two sentences, and a link to Wikipedia.

The Free Speech Union promotes Peter Boghossian on X, October 2026.

The full text of the post.

The reply: two words, a quotation from Wikipedia, and a link.

That link is the whole organisation compressed into one gesture. A body that ranks our universities every year, that writes to vice chancellors about scholarly standards, that tours the country telling academics what academic freedom requires of them, settled a question about peer review by pasting a sentence from an encyclopedia anybody can edit. It did not read a journal. It did not read an editorial statement. It did not read the record of the episode it was citing. And the sentence it chose to paste contains the fact that dismantles the case it was trying to make. To see that, you would have to have spent time inside the practice you claim to be defending. Nobody at the Union has.

What peer review actually is

Peer review is unglamorous, unpaid labour performed by people who already have too much to do. A manuscript lands on an editor’s desk. The editor reads it, decides whether it belongs in the conversation the journal is hosting, and then writes to scholars who know the area and asks them, as a favour to a field none of them owns, to spend six or eight hours reading carefully and writing a report. They receive nothing. Their names are usually hidden from the author and the author’s name is often hidden from them. They argue with the argument. They check whether the literature has been read honestly, whether the method answers the question, whether the claims outrun the evidence. Most submissions come back with a rejection or a demand for substantial revision. A paper that eventually appears has often been through two or three rounds across eighteen months, and is better for it. I have done this hundreds of times, for journals I will never be paid by, on papers that disagree with everything I have written.

The system runs on one assumption that it has no mechanism to verify, and everyone inside it knows this. A reviewer assumes the data exist. Nobody flies to Portland to count the dogs. The reviewer’s job is to interrogate the reasoning, the framing and the inference, because fabrication is handled somewhere else entirely, by ethics committees, by institutional oversight, by the scholar’s own obligation to the people they study and to the public that funds them. The whole arrangement is held together by professional trust, in the same way that a hospital runs on the assumption that the surgeon washed their hands. Somebody who walks in, lies about having washed their hands, and then announces that hygiene protocols are a sham has discovered nothing about medicine. They have only told you something about themselves.

What the hoax actually was

Take the paper the Union cited at me. In February 2017 Boghossian and James Lindsay sent a deliberately meaningless article about the conceptual penis to NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. The editors read it and rejected it on the grounds that it was incomprehensible. Their published statement says so plainly, and names the behaviour of the two authors as bogus and immoral. Taylor and Francis runs an automated transfer system that offers rejected authors alternative venues, and that machine suggested Cogent Social Sciences, an open platform where authors pay to publish and, in this case, paid six hundred and twenty five dollars. The paper appeared there in May 2017. A gender studies journal read it and threw it out. A pay what you can platform in another discipline took the money and put it online. From this the authors concluded that gender studies has no standards, and the Free Speech Union, nine years later, pasted the name of that platform into a reply as proof that peer review is a joke. The evidence they produced is evidence of the opposite. Their own citation records a scholarly journal doing its job.

The larger operation that followed, which the Union describes as testing the system another way, works the same way once you look at the numbers rather than the headline. Twenty fabricated papers went out over a year. Four were published. Three were accepted but never appeared. Six were rejected outright. Seven were still sitting with reviewers when the project collapsed. Any scholar reading those figures sees a filter working under conditions designed to defeat it, by authors who had spent a year learning how to imitate the surface grammar of a field and who were willing to invent their data. The Union reads the same figures and sees a scandal, because it does not know what a normal acceptance rate looks like, or what a desk rejection is, or that the ratio it is quoting as proof of collapse is roughly what an ordinary honest submission faces.

The two examples it picked are worth holding up to the light as well. The dog park paper was published in Gender, Place and Culture and later retracted, and its authors state openly that they made up the observations, including a year of fieldwork and thousands of inspections of dogs that never happened. The Union prints this as a triumph. What it is describing is a paper that was withdrawn once the fraud was known, which is the correction mechanism functioning exactly as designed. The Mein Kampf claim is looser still. A paper rewriting a passage from the twelfth chapter of the first volume was accepted by Affilia and never published, and the hoaxers themselves concede in their own account that the text diverges significantly from the original. The chapter they chose is among the least ideological in the book. The Union’s readers are invited to picture editors nodding along to Hitler. What actually happened was that editors read an article about solidarity that bore a rhetorical resemblance to a passage whose provenance nobody could have detected without being told.

The part they print as a triumph

The sentence the Union wrote almost gives the game away. The project only stopped, it says, when a Wall Street Journal reporter went looking for one of their made up authors. Read that again as a scholar would. The deception ended because somebody did the verification work that the hoaxers insisted nobody in the academy ever does. Journals rejected six of the papers. A journalist caught the fabrication. The correction machinery, slow and underfunded and dependent on goodwill, closed the loop and pulled the paper. And the men who were caught turned around and sold the catching of themselves as proof that nobody can be caught. The Union repeats it without noticing, because it has never once participated in the process it is describing and cannot tell a system failing from a system working.

The ethics nobody at the Union mentions

There is a reason the word unethical attaches to this episode in the way that it does, and it has nothing to do with hurt feelings in gender studies. Boghossian and his collaborators fabricated data. They lied about their identities, invented institutions, and submitted the lie to editors and to unpaid reviewers who gave hours of their working lives to manuscripts that were deliberately designed to waste them. Those reviewers are living people, and in December 2018 the institutional review board at Portland State determined that the project met the federal definition of research and that the editors and reviewers met the federal definition of human subjects. Boghossian had sought no approval and obtained no consent. The university’s vice president for research told him in writing that conducting human subjects research without an approved protocol was a clear violation of its policies, directed him to stop, and barred him from being named as principal investigator on sponsored research until he completed training in the rules he had broken. He left the university in 2021.

So the Free Speech Union’s authority on scholarly integrity is a man whose own institution found he had run a study on human subjects without ethics approval and without consent, and who disqualified himself from leading funded research there. The Union bills him as a distinguished philosopher. He was an assistant professor without tenure whose scholarly output in philosophy is thin, whose public reputation rests on trade books and on this stunt, and who now holds a fellowship at a private institution founded in protest against the universities he could not get tenure at. There is no shame in any of that. There is a great deal of shame in building a campaign about academic standards on top of it, and in doing so while never once engaging the one thing a scholar is actually judged by, which is the work.

The company he keeps

James Lindsay is not incidental to this story and the Union mentions him without flinching. Lindsay runs New Discourses, a website owned by Michael O’Fallon of Sovereign Nations, a Christian nationalist organisation. He appears in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s extremist files. He spent 2022 promoting groomer rhetoric against queer people, describing social and emotional learning in schools as a needle injecting Marxism into children, and circulating the claim that Marxists are pursuing the elimination of white people. He has appeared on the podcast of the white nationalist Stefan Molyneux. In December 2024 he turned the identical technique on the Christian right, publishing a rewritten chunk of the Communist Manifesto in a conservative magazine to prove that his new enemies were as gullible as his old ones. The technique is the product. It is a machine for discrediting whoever is currently in the way, and a man who rewrites Mein Kampf as a prank one year and the Communist Manifesto as a prank six years later is not conducting an inquiry into anything. He is running a business, and the business is the manufacture of contempt.

Boghossian built his public career in that partnership and has stayed in it. The Free Speech Union has now flown him here repeatedly since 2024, on tours with Nigel Biggar, with Marian Tupy, into student halls hosted by an offshoot of the Taxpayers’ Union, whose office sits next to its own. Nobody is being smeared by association. This is the association, declared by the Union itself in its own promotional material.

The inversion

And then comes the line the Union chose to end its post with. Speaking in New Zealand, Boghossian told his audience that critical social justice is in decline in the United States and clinging on harder across the rest of the English speaking world, that those who oppose colonialism have no trouble with their own, and that America has given us, in his words, “a neocolonial export to your institutions and your universities.”

An American academic, flown to Aotearoa by a lobby group that licenses its name and its branding from a British organisation and operates out of a building shared with a free market pressure group, stood in front of a New Zealand audience and told us that the thinking produced here about this country’s own colonial history is an American import that we have been colonised by. The export in that room was the man holding the microphone. The export is the ticketing platform, the tour schedule, the branded quote card, the grievance script about trigger warnings that has nothing to do with any New Zealand classroom, the entire American culture war apparatus packaged for sale at ten dollars a head in Auckland. Māori scholarship about this land did not arrive in a suitcase from Portland. The anti woke circuit did.

This is the inversion that the Union performs with everything it touches. Having nothing of its own to say about the university, it takes the vocabulary of those who have fought for intellectual sovereignty and hands it to the people fighting against it. Colonisation becomes the thing the decolonisers are doing. Silencing becomes the thing that happens to the man with the speaking tour and the ten thousand follower account and the sympathetic morning television interview. Academic freedom becomes the right of outsiders to be taken seriously by a profession whose standards they have declined to meet.

What academic freedom is for

Academic freedom is not a slogan about saying what you like. It is a specific and historically won protection, held by scholars so that a line of inquiry can be followed where the evidence leads and findings can be published when they are inconvenient to a minister, a donor, a vice chancellor or a lobby group, and so that the work is judged by people qualified to judge it rather than by whoever is loudest. It exists because of peer review, not in spite of it. The judgment of qualified peers is the mechanism that makes the freedom meaningful, since without it there is no way to distinguish the scholar who should be protected from the charlatan who should be ignored. Strip out the review and the word becomes a licence for anybody with a microphone to demand a hearing in a conversation they have not joined.

You cannot defend that practice while holding it in contempt. The Free Speech Union holds it in contempt. Its poster boy made his name proving that the labour of unpaid reviewers can be wasted by someone willing to lie to them. Its annual university rankings grade institutions on criteria no scholar was consulted about. Its letters to universities arrive on behalf of people who have never submitted anything to review in their lives. Its campaigns run consistently in one direction, against those who teach about colonisation and against the fields that study race, gender and power, which is to say against the parts of the academy that make claims the Union’s funders would rather were not made. It has never once written in defence of a scholar being hounded for teaching Te Tiriti, or for research on Palestine, or for work on the far right in this country. The door swings one way.

The organisation does not want a university with stronger peer review and better ethics oversight. It wants no peer review at all, because peer review is the institution that keeps saying no to the material it is paid to promote. A hoax that nobody inside the academy was fooled by, a man barred from leading research at his own university for breaching research ethics, a collaborator in the SPLC’s extremist files, and a reply to a professor consisting of two words and a Wikipedia link: this is what the defence of academic freedom in Aotearoa looks like when it is conducted by people who have never written a paper, never reviewed one, never sat on an ethics committee, never supervised a doctorate, and never once had to live with the judgment of their peers.

They are talking about a room they have never been in. The loudness is the tell. The work it takes to get into that room is the one thing they have no intention of ever doing, and so they have made a political career out of insisting the room should not exist.