20-year-old hoax reminder of academia’s relativist bent

political tropes that are catnip to lettered leftists — “emancipatory mathematics,” “demystify and democratize the production of scientific knowledge,” “the crisis of late-capitalist production relations.” Soon after Social Text published his faux scholarship, Sokal revealed in another journal, Lingua Franca, that it was a parody.

This would have been obvious to anyone whose intelligence had not been anesthetized by the patois of “deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” professors. They begin with a few banalities: Science is influenced by political and social forces; literature is conditioned by the writers’ contexts. And they arrive at the doctrine that everything from science to sexuality is a “social construct” reflective of society’s power relations, and therefore everything is arbitrary and political.

In Lingua Franca, Sokal wrote: “Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)” The issue of Social Text containing Sokal’s prank included earnestly intended essays such as “Gender and Genitals: Constructs of Sex and Gender,” which said the “Western assumption that there are only two sexes” is being refuted by “a rainbow of gender” purged of “the binary male/female model.” Sokal’s parody blended in.

Today, Bruce Robbins, a Columbia University humanities professor who was a co-editor of Social Text, tells The Chronicle of Higher Education that Sokal’s essay appealed because he seemed to be a scientist “kind of on ‘our side.’” Robbins and another Social Text editor promptly claimed victim status, saying that “the deceptive means by which Sokal chose to make his point” will injure “the openness of intellectual inquiry.”

Sokal’s point, however, was that intellectual inquiry in the humanities often is not open.

Today, Robbins says Sokal was not unethical, but he should not have regarded those whom Social Text spoke for as “enemies.”

Today, Sokal, who seems eager to make amends for his good deed, claims “a small amount of credit” for what he says is diminished ardor for radical epistemological relativism. Sokal and kindred spirits — he seems to be safely back in the bubble — tell the Chronicle that the real problem is “anti-intellectualism” off campus: “academic expertise” is under attack, “epistemological skepticism” by “the right” is abetting climate change, etc.

Twenty years on, one lesson of Sokal’s hoax is that many educators are uneducable. Another is that academia now might be beyond satire.