[eduah]

The hell are you talking about, none of the cliamed in any way that this was an academic research affiliated with any university, only one of them is affiliated with one. In their quillete article they even talk about how this is not an academic study, but rather a hoax like the Sokal hoax before it

[theoh]

Here's the situation as described in a good and fairly neutral (I think!) nymag article:

"Crucially, it does not matter that the hoaxsters didn’t attempt to publish their final results in a peer-reviewed journal. “Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research,” said Celia Fisher, director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education. All that matters is that Boghossian is an employee at PSU, and that he conducted what the university deemed to be human-subjects research based on a plain reading of how that term is normally defined for this purpose."

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/is-peter-boghossian-g...

So it appears that Boghossian's academic affiliation is something he can't just leave at work; i.e. it seems that it was unsafe to go public with his involvement in the hoax. The Areo article makes it sound like the hoaxers thought they were doing the right thing by dropping their anonymity:

"This generated further attention that eventually got the Wall Street Journal involved, and far more importantly, it changed the ethics of utilizing deception within the project. With major journalistic outlets and (by then) two journals asking us to prove our authors’ identities, the ethics had shifted away from a defensible necessity of investigation and into outright lying. We did not feel right about this and decided the time had come to go public with the project. As a result, we came clean to the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of August and began preparing a summary as quickly as possible even though we still had several papers progressing encouragingly through the review process."

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...

They thought this move would make it OK to complete their research project in good faith (without submitting any further hoax articles). But it wouldn't be the first time somebody thought they were off the hook, when in fact they were still exposed to accusations of ethical wrongdoing.

[eduah]

> Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research

This framing should tell you the bad faith in which the statement is being made. The authors didn't call it a research, critics rightly pointed out that it wasn't an academic research when they first revealed the hoax, and that nobody should take it seriously. Now that it is convenient to attack them by saying otherwise, now all of the sudden it is an academic research

[theoh]

The Areo article starts with "This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most thorough breakdown of the study".

Those words "the study" clearly seek to frame the hoax as part of a research project or "study".

I like the expert opinion quoted in the NY Magazine article that basically says, "yes, this disciplinary action is politically motivated, but it's also entirely legitimate".

It seems like that is often the way the world works—there are many more possible, legitimate, prosecutions than are actually pursued. The choice of which to pursue can be made in unfair ways. Often it is used to reinforce corrupt systems.

In this case, there isn't any visible corruption. Nobody entrapped Boghossian, nobody appears to have had it in for him in advance. He walked into this.