Liberal Profs Hit a Grand Sham in Journal Hoax

You've heard of fake news -- but what about fake academia? According to three gutsy professors, it's alive and well and being featured in plenty of peer-reviewed journals. Together, the trio set out to prove it in a scholarly hoax that's taken the entire education world by surprise.

Medieval religious scholar Helen Pluckrose, author and mathematician James Lindsay, and philosopher Peter Boghossian aren't conservative (as a matter of fact, they call themselves "Left-leaning liberals), but they certainly share a lot of conservatives' concerns about the bias of higher education. Fed up with the "grievance studies" that they think have taken over academia, they set out to prove what a joke the field of gender and identity studies has become.

Starting in August of 2017, the professors started cranking out fake papers and submitting them to scholarly journals under different names. The more absurd the topic, the more likely it seemed to get published. Among other things, the trio wrote entire sham essays on subjects like: dog parks becoming "petri dishes for canine 'rape culture,'" what motivates heterosexual men to eat at Hooters, the fat-exclusionary culture of bodybuilding. They even argued for replacing "western astronomy" with "feminist astronomy."

Their experiment worked. Seven of the 20 papers were accepted, all having undergone so-called "rigorous" peer review. "Their submissions were outlandish," the Wall Street Journal points out, "but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals." When the three professors revealed what they'd done, the academic community exploded. They were outraged that anyone would pull back the curtain on what the trio calls "absurd and horrific scholarship."

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