What Sokal fails to understand is that it is NOT parody to these people. At their core, they really believe what comes out of their mouth (and that of their friends) constitutes reality. Their opinions consistently become ingrained in the previailing culture—why shouldn’t they also trump the laws of physics? The thought the joke was on them. But really, it is on all of us.
It’s not any stretch to compare the degraded standards and intellectual bankruptcy that produced the “Social Text” fiasco from a trendy journal published by DUKE University to the “Gang of 88” and the depravity of the Duke faculty/administration in the face of the fraudulent case against the Duke lax players:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1876027/posts?page=51
Since 1994, at least, it has been completely obvious that “the emperor has no clothes” at Duke and similar places. Yet, few if any academics draw any lessons from such fiascos as the “Social Text” affair or the attempted faculty lynching of the Duke lax players. Those faculty members who are actually competent just hunker down and try to pursue their work, while the charlatans of the left run wild all over the place. This phenomenon was also seen recently at Harvard when less than 1/4 of the arts and sciences faculty managed to depose a very liberal president for not being slavishly politically correct (never mind the entire university’s faculty in medicine, etc. which is ignored in such cases).