RT,
4
October, 2018
A
trio of frustrated academics has perpetrated an elaborate hoax
exposing malpractice within academic research by submitting 20
bizarre and deliberately ridiculous papers for publication, several
of which were accepted.
Portland
State University assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian
and mathematician James Lindsay are the authors behind the now
infamous 'conceptual
penis' as a social construct paper
in which the pair deployed intentionally dense language to obfuscate
the fact that what they were discussing was absolute nonsense: namely
that penises should not be considered as male reproductive organs but
as social constructs.
However,
their absurdist activism didn't have the desired effect as a call to
arms for academics to take themselves and their work more seriously
and raise standards beyond partisan politics and ideology. So, in
June 2017, the pair teamed up with Helen Pluckrose, the
editor-in-chief of the current affairs magazine, Areo,
to carry out a more elaborate hoax.
Over
the course of the next 10 months, the physicist, the philosopher and
the medievalist submitted a total of 20 fake research papers for
review and publication by cultural studies journals, discussing
elements of modern progressivism including patriarchy theory, rape
culture theory and Western imperialism, to parody what they dub
'grievance studies.'
“Sometimes
we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it,” the
writers explain.
“What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do
dogs – to prevent rape culture? Hence came the ‘Dog
Park’
paper.” The
dog park paper was submitted under the keywords: Animaling, Black
feminist criminology, dog park, feminist geography, queer geography,
rape culture.
The
trio drew inspiration from the Sokal
Affair in
which NYU physicist and mathematician Alan Sokal had his nonsense
paper 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' published in an academic journal.
Sokal famously called postmodernism “fashionable
nonsense,” but
the modern-day hoaxsters took things a few steps further.
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.
(Thread.)
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 3, 2018
Since lots of people are saying that no serious academics publish in the journals the Sokal Squared folks hoaxed, I looked up the university affiliations of the authors in the last issue of the journal that published "dog park". They include:
* UCLA
* Temple
* Penn State
* TCD https://t.co/iVSvdUtCrG
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 4, 2018
For
instance, they rewrote a 3,000-word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kampf using the language of Intersectionality theory. The piece was
reviewed and accepted by the Gender Studies journal Affilia.
In
another bizarre instance, the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia
accepted a paper arguing that social justice advocates be exempted
from mockery but should be free to chastise their political opponents
as they see fit. The same paper also proposed censoring or silencing
‘privileged students’ who should instead conduct ‘experiential
reparations’ including sitting on the floor, wearing chains or
constantly being spoken over.
There's the paper that doesn’t just advocate stopping white males from speaking in class; it encourages teachers to institute a form of “experiential reparation” by making their white students sit on the ground bound in chains.
5/n pic.twitter.com/cBDPKHM6FF
— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 3, 2018
The
team also wrote papers discussing, among other topics: how male
masturbation is sexual violence against the object of the man’s
lust (dubbed ‘The Masturbation Paper’); That AI is inherently
dangerous as it is currently programmed to be masculinist and
imperialist, based on Lacanian
psychoanalysis and
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (The ‘Feminist AI paper’); or the
paper in which the trio argued for the introduction of ‘fat
bodybuilding’ as “a
fat body is a legitimately built body.”(This
was published in Fat
Studie
The
group even received four invitations to peer-review for the journals
that had accepted their work, despite their attempts to make the
papers borderline unintelligible. In total, seven of their papers
were accepted and four published online, one of which has since been
retracted. Seven were still undergoing formal review at the time the
team decided to go public.
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