March 6, 2019

Hoax

If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in “academic journals.”

If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in “academic journals.”

The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what’s taught at colleges today.

Recently, three people sent in intentionally ridiculous “research” to prominent journals of women studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, obesity studies and queer studies.

“The scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted,” says Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. “They have placed an agenda before the truth.”

To show that, hoaxer and mathematician James Lindsay says, “We rewrote a section of ‘Mein Kampf’ as intersectional feminism” and got it published in Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.

For another paper, they claimed to have “closely” examined genitals of 10,000 dogs in dog parks to learn about “rape culture and queer performativity.”

Boghossian had assumed, “There’s no way they’re gonna believe that we did this!”

But the journal Gender, Place & Culture did, calling the paper “excellent scholarship.”

Seven journals accepted the absurd papers, as I show in my latest video.

Hoaxers Boghossian, Lindsay and Areo Magazine editor Helen Pluckrose explain the reason for their trick.

“We think studying topics like gender, race and sexuality is worthwhile and getting it right is extremely important,” says Lindsay

But researchers of these topics have gotten lazy and political, they say. “A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed — like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic,” Lindsay says.

Reach politically “correct” conclusions and you can get most anything published.

“Kind of a last straw happened,” says Lindsay. “There was this paper well-funded by the National Science Foundation that studied ‘feminist glaciology.’ It said glacier science is sexist.”

As a glaciologist giving a TED Talk put it, “the majority of glaciological knowledge that we have today stems from knowledge created by men about men within existing masculinist stories.”

What?

One paper suggested the solution to sexism in glacier science is “feminist paintings of glaciers and feminist art projects,” says Lindsay. They praised art projects like one where they “hooked up a phone line to a glacier so you could call the glacier on the phone and listen to it.” That was “the last straw” for him.

Lindsay adds, “What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies.”

The hoaxers didn’t get to finish their experiment because The Wall Street Journal’s Jillian Kay Melchior noticed the absurdity of the paper on dog humping. She exposed the hoax before all 20 journals weighed in.

What upsets me most is what happened — or rather, didn’t happen — next.

No university said it would stop using those journals, and no journal editor publicly said, “We must raise our standards.”

“Think about if you did this to civil engineers with bridge building,” says Boghossian. “They would’ve thanked us, right? Because they’re driving over the bridges with their families, so they don’t want the bridges to collapse.”

But the journal editors, instead of admitting that they sometimes publish nonsense, attacked the hoaxers. They accused them of doing “unethical research.”

A dozen of Boghossian’s colleagues at Portland State University criticized him anonymously in the school newspaper, which depicted him as a clown. He’s become a pariah at his own school.

“I’ve been spat on … physically threatened,” he says.

Instead of applauding him for exposing nonsense, Portland State threatened him.

I called the school asking for an interview, but it declined.

How can a college criticize the hoaxers but revere ridiculous journals that publish nonsense?

“When you live in these tight ecosystems, this stuff makes total sense,” says Boghossian. For people in the tiny bubble of academic thinking, “there’s a pervading rape culture; men are bad — the whole ball of wax.”

It’s been going on for some time. A physicist once submitted a nonsense paper claiming gravity is just a “social construct.” The journal Social Text published it. That embarrassed the journal, but 20 years later, it is still going strong.

At universities, “scholarship” has gotten even crazier.

The real “hoax” is on students who pay thousands of dollars for useless degrees in fields that end in “studies.”

COPYRIGHT 2019 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.