All hail the hoax that has exposed absurd academics

Academia was rocked last week by an elaborate hoax designed to show how much of what constitutes high-blown scholarship is actually just ideologically motivated “grievance studies”.

The hoaxers are a trio of scholars of Renaissance women’s writing, philosophy and maths, who consider themselves liberal in the true sense. As such, they were motivated by the desire to demonstrate how “open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality” have become “nearly impossible” in today’s academic climate and, by extension, on the Left more widely.

Within the space of one academic year, the hoaxers submitted

20 entirely fictitious and palpably absurd papers to respected journals, and had seven published, with seven more put under serious consideration; only six were rejected outright.

Their published papers included one commended for excellence by the journal Gender, Place and Culture that argued men should be trained like dogs to prevent rape culture (it involved the author claiming to have inspected hundreds of dogs’ genitalia); one arguing that artificial intelligence is potentially dangerous because it is programmed to be “masculinist and imperialist”; and one that claimed excessive fat should be seen and celebrated as a form of bodybuilding.

The stunt and its conclusions – published last week on the political site Areo, in a piece entitled Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship – was a firework up the bum of academic scholarship.

At the core of the grievance studies argument is a critique of moral relativism and identity politics, particularly the idea that all phenomena are social constructs that pit the powerful (white, privileged, Western, male, straight) against the “marginalised”. Beyond academia, the hoax has been met with glee; within, with fury and disdain. Sadly, those the study most needs to reach are also, inevitably, the deafest to its arguments.