Posted on 10/12/2018 12:44:20 PM PDT by Academiadotorg
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 could be properly concluded.'"
"Two of the three, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, had previously boasted of placing a similar bogus piece, on the 'conceptual penis,' only to be embarrassed by the disclosure that the journal they had hoaxed was essentially a pay-for-play scam. (The third hoaxster, Helen Pluckrose, is a self-described 'exile from the humanities' who studies medieval religious writings about women.)" Apparently Reichman and company don’t think much of this discipline which is arguably more substantive than most of what passes for scholarship in academia today.
Nevertheless, he goes on to make an interesting point about the target of the satirists: gender studies. He quotes Daniel W. Drezner, a professor in the Fletcher School at Tufts. Drinzer penned an op-ed on the hoax in the Washington Post.
"Yes, the authors got several papers accepted and favorable referee reports in fields like gender studies," Drezner wrote. "What is entirely unclear is whether other disciplines are equally vulnerable."
College today is a joke.
Would have been interesting if they would have got a scientic consensus.
With gender studies, it is harder and harder to tell the difference between real crazy and made-up crazy.
The conceptual penis is the operative representation of the penis in society as it obtains via a variety of performative acts and statements related to and concerning gender. Conceptualization is the best way to understand the penis, as the notion of “penis as a male anatomical organ” suffers typical androcentric and meta-scientific limitations and errors as it is both overly reductive, in failing to represent the full reality of penis-bearing human experiences, and incoherent, as the penis itself has little or nothing to do with gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987).
Come on, Perfesser, can you really read this and not know somebody's yanking yer chain? Which is, after all, a conceptual penis itself?
So I read both the paper and the explanation. I also enjoyed Fashionable Nonsense when it was released. The problem is that the true believers will believe whatever nonsense is tossed their way if it has enough references. One can state virtually anything these days if it sounds familiar and you can provide 3 references to it.
It is interesting that Boghossian is a “facts and reason, not faith and tradition” atheist. If one thought too hard about this one might conclude that he thinks that gender studies and theology are cut from the same cloth, ie. invented for the reassurance of the believer. He might be afraid to come out and say that. He is, after all, a professor.
I don’t agree with the thesis, I’m just pointing it out.
You have to stick to Engineering or some other real subject
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