Academic journal hoax has exposed a world of nonsense
THREE brave academics who had bogus papers — including one exploring dog park rape culture — published in peer-review journals have exposed a shocking lack of intellectual rigour, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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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.
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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 anti-bullying, anti-violence and inclusion.
The rise of the “grievance disciplines” has naturally agitated some academics who still value evidence-based 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 outright.
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 both 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 peer-reviewed 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.
Another of the hoax papers accepted and published by the peer-reviewed journal, Sexuality and Culture, was on “Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use”, which hypothesised that men are reluctant to stick items up their backsides due to their bigotry against trans people. This “transhysteria” decreases a man’s “feminist values” but could be remedied with “self-penetration”.
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.
“While our papers are all outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways, it is important to recognise that they blend in almost perfectly with others in the disciplines under our consideration.”
Of course, those in academia who do not like any level of scrutiny of their profitable taxpayer-funded safe spaces have lashed out at the academics rather than engage in any introspection.
The three have been maligned and falsely labelled alt-Right to discredit their important work. Thankfully, there are a few brave voices applauding the trio, among them Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk who posted: “If this was the record of an actual academic, it would put them on track for tenure at a major university … you can now be made a professor, and get to teach college kids, by spewing absurd, ideological bullshit. Anyone who waves that off is in deep denial.
“Because even if you think the authors are idiots, their hoax was unethical and other disciplines are crap, it wouldn’t change a simple fact: Serious journals in which academics who teach at top universities publish cannot distinguish between bullshit and true scholarship.”
The hoax raises many questions about the wisdom of public money being used to fund intersectional insanity. It is further evidence that much of the peer-reviewed research that cultural warriors use to advance their causes is as flimsy as an under-baked pavlova.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist
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