Free Republic

On November 27, 2019, Harvard University denied tenure to an ethnic-studies professor specializing in Dominican identity. Students and faculty at Harvard and across the country sprung into protest mode. The failure to tenure Lorgia García Peña, they said, resulted from Harvard’s racism. NBC Nightly News, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other outlets covered the controversy from the same angle. In fact, García Peña had been catapulted into the academic firmament with a speed that most non-intersectional professors can only dream of. She has been showered with benefits. Thirty-one percent of Harvard’s tenure-track professors lost their tenure bids...

You’ve almost certainly heard some of the following terms: cisgender, fat shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture and whiteness. The reason you’ve heard them is that politically engaged academicians have been developing concepts like these for more than 30 years, and all that time they’ve been percolating. Only recently have they begun to emerge in mainstream culture. These academicians accomplish this by passing off their ideas as knowledge; that is, as if these terms describe facts about the world and social reality. And while some of these ideas may contain bits of truth, they aren’t scientific. By and large, they’re...

One of the three “Sokal Squared” academic hoaxers, Peter Boghossian of Portland State University, has been accused of violating his university’s research policies. Boghossian is the only one of the three to hold an (untenured) academic position and so is the only one vulnerable to disciplinary action. Boghossian and his compatriots parodied fashionable social-“science” research; now, some in the academy are crying that parody is not fair play. The charge against Boghossian is a clever catch-22. Any research with human subjects—in this case, the “subjects” were the editors of the targeted academic journals—must be approved by the local Institutional Review...

A PROFESSOR is facing the sack after using "feminist buzzwords" to get an entire passage from Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" published in an academic journal. Peter Boghossian helped create a series of spoof academic papers to satirise a number of fields including what he describes as the "grievance studies" - including fields on gender, obesity and homosexuality. Assistant philosophy professor Peter Boghossian appears defiant for his role in the elaborate hoax. The assistant philosophy professor at Portland State University in Oregon penned a total of 20 "intentionally broken" and "nonsense" papers with the help of two collaborators. Each of one was...

There’s nothing the American right likes better than skewering the crazy libs, and oh boy do they have some content on their hands today. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, three leftist scholars decided to prank academia by submitting satirical papers to very real academic journals in the topical vicinity of something called “grievance culture.” As it turns out, they were phenomenally successful. Read, if you will, the description of this paper by “Helen Wilson” about rape culture among dogs, and note that it was actually published in a journal called Gender, Place, and Culture: The author admits that...

On Monday’s episode of “The Glenn Beck Radio Program,” Glenn was joined by author and mathematician Dr. James A. Lindsay to discuss a series of fake “grievance studies” that he and cohorts Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose penned in order to test the extent of political bias in left-wing academic circles. Lindsay, Boghossian (an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University), and Pluckrose (editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine) wrote an op-ed for USA Today titled, “From dog rape to white men in chains: We fooled the biased academic left with fake studies” in which they spelled out the purpose, method...

A trio of writers with credentials who managed to place dubious articles in academic journals are already being dismissed by academics attempting to downplay the prank. "Last week three scholars published an article reporting on how they had submitted over twenty fraudulent and purportedly ridiculous nonsense papers to various journals in gender and diversity studies," Hank Reichman writes on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "Seven were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors 'had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the study, before it...

Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia. (Emphasis...

If you rewrote a chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf using current feminist jargon and submitted it to a respected feminist journal, would they agree to publish it? How about a paper suggesting dog parks are rampant sites for canine rape culture? Or one that explores the threat of “metasexual violence” from (private) masturbation? You can probably guess the answer but read on for the details. A trio of academics decided to explore the current state of peer-reviewed publishing in the humanities by writing bogus papers to see if there were any limits to what was acceptable. Helen Pluckrose, James A....

Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

You have GOT to read this, from Quillette! It starts with this editor’s note: Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in...

Three academics spent more than a year submitting absurd “hoax” papers to the preeminent journals focusing on race, gender, sexuality and other politically fraught disciplines that fall into what the perpetrators of the scheme call “grievance studies.” The self-identified “left-leaning liberal” academics, told the Wall Street Journal they undertook the project out of concern “that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted” by a hesitance among academics to question research based on privilege and identity for fear of accusations of bigotry. Since August, 2017 the academics — James Lindsay, a math doctorate, Peter Boghossian, an...