[Enchante]

She was supposed to be teaching writing, and instead she considers it appropriate to barrage students with her nonsense about “social constructs” of reality. No wonder the students were disgusted - they should be suing her for educational malpractice.

This “social construct” b.s. simply will not go away. Academia has all these incompetents running around babbling worthless inanities about “social text” and “social constructs” — and when they are attempting to talk about the sciences they rarely have the slightest idea what they are trying to say.

Let’s go back to the famous “Social Text” affair in 1996, when an article replete with nonsense was published in a supposedly leading journal, because the editors could not tell the difference between sense and nonsense when it came to talking about science:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

The Sokal affair (also Sokal’s hoax) was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal’s words: “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”[1]

The paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”[2], was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, which was “structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics” made by postmodernist academics.

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/

[The_Reader_David]

I miss Lingua Franca. I covered academe the way popular publications cover Hollywood, except that it was as well-written as The Economist. Lots of fun. Besides the role it played in L'affaire de Sokal, it had great articles about controversies on cannibalism (PC cultural anthropologists saying the humans-hunting-humans variety was fabricated vs. scientific physical anthropologists pointing to hard evidence it really happened), cuss words in the Balkans (a favorite Serbian curse, obviously originally used against Turks and Bosniacs, translates as 'f**k your god'), political infighting at various notable departments, and of course, the twice annual 'who got hired, 'who got tenure' and 'who got promoted' compedia.

[murdoog]

I thought about Sokal too. I suspect she read his paper and thought it was real.