An amazing Twitter thread told how three people posing as academics published papers in academic journals that… well, shall we say, showed these journals for the farces that they are. The person who promoted the farce was Yascha Mounk, whose Twitter bio reads “Lecturer @Harvard, Senior Fellow @NewAmerica, Columnist @Slate, Host of The Good Fight podcast. Defending liberal democracy against the illiberal international.”
His thread begins:
Three intrepid academics just perpetrated a giant version of the Sokal Hoax, placing scores of fake papers in major academic journals. Call it Sokal Squared. The result is hilarious and delightful. It also showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia.
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@HPluckrose,@ConceptualJames and@PeterBoghossian set out to show that ideology reigns supreme in what they call “Grievance Studies”: academic areas organized around victim groups,and often more motivated by a political agenda than a serious search for the truth. If you have doubts about this enterpris – which makes sense since these fields of study do investigate very important topics, like race and gende- take a look at the papers they got published in leading journals. They are… quite something. In a year, three scholars managed to get seven papers accepted into top journals. If this was the record of an actual academic, it would put them on track for tenure at a major university. And, deary me, what papers these are!
He then goes on to describe some of the papers that were actually published:
- one advocates prohibiting white males from speaking in class and suggests teachers institute a form of “experiential reparation” by making white students sit on the ground bound in chains.
- one labels men who masturbate while thinking about a woman as perpetrators of sexual violence unless they get her consent.
- another dismisses western astronomy as sexist and imperialist, making a case for physics departments to study “feminist astrology.”
- Then he writes, “There is the paper that’s LITERALLY A RE-WRITE OF SECTIONS OF MEIN KAMPF.”
- But the worst, perhaps is the piece published in “Gender, Place & Culture, which claims to be based on in situ observation of canine rape culture in a Portland dog park.”
Wow. Mounk continues:
The authors rightly emphasize that topics like race, gender, or sexuality should be the object of serious study. Their problem is that the kind of bullshit that now counts as scholarship in some quarters of the academy does not constitute anything like that.
Most likely, the authors will be denounced. Most likely, these areas of “scholarship” won’t change. Most likely, deans will keep pretending that their emperor are fully clothed. But after today, there’s no more excuse for calling this bullshit out when you see it.
That is a really impressive Twitter thread and an even more impressive hoax. The fake academics explained their motives:
Good for them for using these hilariously weird and dumb articles to show that the academy’s “emperor” has no clothes. They have bowed down to their idol of identity politics for far too long.
To read the full article describing this “hoax,” click here. But the real hoax is that people take these journals seriously.
Hat Tip: Twitter