The Claudine Gay/Harvard revelations lead the thoughtful person to wonder if much, if not all, of contemporary academia is a scam, a hoax without a knowing wink. Let’s take a trip back in time to 1996 and the Sokal Hoax: 

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist and self-described ‘academic leftist,” composed an essay that was a word salad of solemn academic jargon. He said he strove to be ‘especially egregious,’ by maundering on about “the dialectical emphases’ of ‘catastrophe theory’ becoming a ‘concrete tool of progressive political praxis.” His essay’s gaudy title was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”

Image: Alan Sokal. Yorgos Kourtakis. Wikimedia Commons. org. CCA-SA 4.0 International.

He sent it to the left-leaning ‘cultural studies’ journal Social Text, which swooned, perhaps in part because Sokal larded his nonsense with 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.

As one might imagine, the academic world, caught with its pants down, went berserk, but didn’t learn a thing. Fast forward to 2018:

Everyone is buzzing today about the revelation of the three academics—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—who placed over a dozen complete hoax articles with various premier ‘cultural studies’ or ‘identity studies’ academic journals. All three professors, it should be noted, consider themselves left of center, as does Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who placed a hoax article about the supposed subjectivity of physics in the postmodernist journal Social Text 20 years ago. (Yet somehow Social Text stayed in business instead of closing down in embarrassment, as they should have.)

Many of their hoax articles were not only accepted for publication, they were praised as ground-breaking: 

They are the story of James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, academics all, who, inspired by the famous Sokal Hoax (background in the first link above), wrote 20 academic papers, which they submitted to prestigious academic journals.

What’s remarkable about this is they set out to prove the editors and peer reviewers–professors with doctorates in their respective fields–could not tell the difference between actual scholarship and absolute nonsense couched in contemporary social justicey eduspeak.  One of the papers was a rewrite of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The paper was titled: Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.  They made up the names and affiliations of the ‘authors.’  Another was The Conceptual Penis: A Social Construct, which blamed climate change on penises (That one’s probably true; there’s nothing they can’t do).  My favorite, however, was Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon. 

Thesis: 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. This provides insight into training men out of the sexual violence and bigotry to which they are prone.

Lindsay, Pluckrose and Boghossian explain their methods:  

What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the ‘Masturbation’ paper.

Then there was the “Dildos” paper:

Sure, our ‘Dildos’ paper did that to answer the questions, ‘Why don’t straight men tend to masturbate via anal penetration, and what might happen if they did?’ Hint: according to our paper in Sexuality and Culture, a leading sexualities journal, they will be less transphobic and more feminist as a result.

Praise for the Dog Park paper:

‘This is a wonderful paper – incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized given the incredibly diverse literature sets and theoretical questions brought into conversation. The author’s development of the focus and contributions of the paper is particularly impressive. The fieldwork executed contributes immensely to the paper’s contribution as an innovative and valuable piece of scholarship that will engage readers from a broad cross-section of disciplines and theoretical formations. I believe this intellectually and empirically exciting paper must be published and congratulate the author on the research done and the writing.’-Reviewer 1, Gender, Place, and Culture

The ”fieldwork” was supposedly examining the genitals of 1000 dogs while asking their owners about the dog’s sexuality. The Dog Park paper was lauded as one of the 12 leading works of “feminist geography.”

Is it necessary to ask if academia has learned anything from any academic hoax? If the Harvard debacle has taught us anything, it is surely that academia has no sense of humor, no integrity and is beyond embarrassment or redemption.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.