Much of academia has risen up in arms over an audacious year-long hoax perpetrated by three scholars who wrote 20 phony papers in various fields of gender and identity studies that used “politically fashionable” language to support blatantly outlandish conclusions.
And it worked: Seven of the papers got accepted for publication before the hoax’s exposure last week, and seven more are still in the peer-review process. Only six were rejected outright. Which means the howls condemning the hoax are outrageously misdirected.
To a non-academic, the papers seem ridiculous on their face. But not to the BS-detectors in these niche fields of “scholarship.”
- One paper argued that men who masturbate while thinking about a woman without her consent are committing sexual violence.
- A second denounced “Western astronomy” as sexist and imperialist and argued instead for the study of “feminist astronomy” — or interpretive dance.
- Another delved into human reactions to “rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Ore.” The author even “confessed” her own human “limitations in being able to determine when an incidence of dog humping qualifies as rape.”
- Finally, one paper rewrote 3,000 words of “Mein Kampf” in radical-feminist-speak.
Again, these papers went through “rigorous” peer review in significant journals and 14 were headed for publication. That would qualify an author for tenure at any university.
The point wasn’t to expose academia in general, but rather politically trendy fields that, as Harvard’s Yascha Mounk suggests, “cannot differentiate between real scholarship and noxious bloviating.”
In short, it exposed the academic equivalent of Fake News and its lucrative professional infrastructure. But don’t expect any change: Facing the facts would kill the golden goose.
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