"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 “Publishing in a magazine that’s not peer reviewed doesn’t matter if they’re reporting on their research,” said Celia Fisher, director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education.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.
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
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.
If he had done this outside of his university-affiliated research I bet the university would be investigating him anyway.
I bet the university and the academics he offended would also claim that nothing he publishes happens "outside" his university affiliation because everybody knows he is a professor there, he represents the university, he published articles in academic journals whose editors believed he was doing academic stuff, and so on.
This seems like a bit of a leap. What evidence is there for this being the case?
If not, what made this part of their university life?
The fact that he likely included his academic affiliation on any papers he wrote, likely used university resources to conduct or discuss some part of the research (e.g. meeting rooms, his office, his office phone), is an employee of the university, etc.
I mean, come on - no IRB is going to let you claim a technicality like that. If you could skirt around research regulations by just claiming you were doing it "on your own" with no affiliation to the university, the IRB would be effectively pointless.
Anyway, what's shocking to me coming from Physics is how hard it is to read these papers from outside of academia (no arXiv even to at least see pre-prints). So I'm already more sympathetic to the hoaxers.
They could have done this without claiming that it was part of their university-affiliated research, and thus not fallen foul of ethical guidelines. But they published an official academic paper describing the stunt (afterwards) and claimed that it was a legitimate research project. They can't have it both ways: either it's a rogue hoax carried out outside of their day job, or it has to comply with the rules, which aren't onerous, but do require certain ethical standards to be met.