Academic nonsense a reality
A MAGNIFICENT year-long ruse by three scholars has exposed just how hopelessly biased and nonsensical some academic fields have become.
These humanities disciplines have not only expanded exponentially in the past two decades but have been enormously successful in inflicting their warped theories on institutions, both public and private.
Their influence is evident in everything from the junk science underpinning the Safe Schools and Respectful Relationships programs to the “diversity is our strength” gibberish promoted at major organisations.
No one in their right mind could possibly be against safe schools or respectful relationships but plenty are deadset against the radical gender theory these sweet-sounding programs push under the guise of antibullying, anti-violence and inclusion.
The rise of the “grievance disciplines” has naturally agitated some academics who still value evidencebased research and intellectual rigour, and are sick of seeing academia cheapened by ideological zealots.
Enter Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian who set out to expose how social justice activism and “ideologically motivated scholarships” have corrupted certain academic fields. They managed to get seven absurd papers accepted by the “best journals in the relevant fields” and had another seven under consideration for publication when they went public with their hoax. Only six of their 20 papers were rejected.
The papers deliberately included “shoddy methodologies, implausible statistics, claims not warranted by the data and ideologically motivated qualitative analyses” but were nevertheless accepted and even celebrated, earning the writers four invitations to peer-review other papers and a recognition for excellence from an academic journal that leads the field of feminist geography.
Among their papers was this gem: Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks which argued that “dog parks are rape-- condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured”.
The study was honoured by the journal, Gender, Place, and Culture, as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography and published as part of the its 25th anniversary celebration. The study concluded that female dogs are oppressed and their experience mirrors the plight of human females.
The imaginary author, “Helen Wilson of the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative”, wrote that this provides “insight into training men out of the sexual violence and bigotry to which they are prone” and the paper explored options such as leashing men literally and metaphorically.
While the dog park study was celebrated by reviewers as “a wonderful paper, incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written” and one that would make “an important contribution to feminist animal geography”, there was criticism from one reviewer who worried the dogs’ privacy had been breached.
Other papers the trio had accepted for publication include topics such as Fat Bodybuilding, an Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity and Moon Meetings, which is described as a rambling poetic monologue of a bitter, divorced feminist, much of which was produced by a teenage angst poetry generator website, which ended up in the Journal of Poetry Therapy.
Then there is the “Feminist Mein Kampf”, published by leading peerreviewed journal, Affilia.
The authors simply republished part of chapter 12 of Hitler’s political manifesto but with fashionable buzzwords from the social justice movement thrown in.
The three academics have written an explanation for what they did and why it’s important to expose the “grievance studies”.
“Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific and it is not rigorous,” they wrote.
The hoax raises many questions about the wisdom of public money being used to fund intersectional insanity.
THEY MANAGED TO GET SEVEN ABSURD PAPERS ACCEPTED BY THE ‘BEST JOURNALS IN RELEVANT FIELDS’ AND HAD ANOTHER SEVEN UNDER CONSIDERATION FOR PUBLICATION