Posted on 03/06/2019 10:00:37 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in "academic journals."
The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what's taught at colleges today.
Recently, three people sent in intentionally ridiculous "research" to prominent journals of women studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, obesity studies and queer studies.
"The scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted," says Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. "They have placed an agenda before the truth."
To show that, hoaxer and mathematician James Lindsay says, "We rewrote a section of 'Mein Kampf' as intersectional feminism" and got it published in Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.
For another paper, they claimed to have "closely" examined genitals of 10,000 dogs in dog parks to learn about "rape culture and queer performativity."
Boghossian had assumed, "There's no way they're gonna believe that we did this!"
But the journal Gender, Place & Culture did, calling the paper "excellent scholarship."
Seven journals accepted the absurd papers, as I show in my latest video.
Hoaxers Boghossian, Lindsay and Areo Magazine editor Helen Pluckrose explain the reason for their trick.
"We think studying topics like gender, race and sexuality is worthwhile and getting it right is extremely important," says Lindsay
But researchers of these topics have gotten lazy and political, they say. "A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed -- like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic," Lindsay says.
Reach politically "correct" conclusions and you can get most anything published.
"Kind of a last straw happened," says Lindsay. "There was this paper well-funded by the National Science Foundation that studied 'feminist glaciology.' It said glacier science is sexist."
As a glaciologist giving a TED Talk put it, "the majority of glaciological knowledge that we have today stems from knowledge created by men about men within existing masculinist stories."
What?
One paper suggested the solution to sexism in glacier science is "feminist paintings of glaciers and feminist art projects," says Lindsay. They praised art projects like one where they "hooked up a phone line to a glacier so you could call the glacier on the phone and listen to it." That was "the last straw" for him.
Lindsay adds, "What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies."
The hoaxers didn't get to finish their experiment because The Wall Street Journal's Jillian Kay Melchior noticed the absurdity of the paper on dog humping. She exposed the hoax before all 20 journals weighed in.
What upsets me most is what happened -- or rather, didn't happen -- next.
No university said it would stop using those journals, and no journal editor publicly said, "We must raise our standards."
"Think about if you did this to civil engineers with bridge building," says Boghossian. "They would've thanked us, right? Because they're driving over the bridges with their families, so they don't want the bridges to collapse."
But the journal editors, instead of admitting that they sometimes publish nonsense, attacked the hoaxers. They accused them of doing "unethical research."
A dozen of Boghossian's colleagues at Portland State University criticized him anonymously in the school newspaper, which depicted him as a clown. He's become a pariah at his own school.
"I've been spat on ... physically threatened," he says.
Instead of applauding him for exposing nonsense, Portland State threatened him.
I called the school asking for an interview, but it declined.
How can a college criticize the hoaxers but revere ridiculous journals that publish nonsense?
"When you live in these tight ecosystems, this stuff makes total sense," says Boghossian. For people in the tiny bubble of academic thinking, "there's a pervading rape culture; men are bad -- the whole ball of wax."
It's been going on for some time. A physicist once submitted a nonsense paper claiming gravity is just a "social construct." The journal Social Text published it. That embarrassed the journal, but 20 years later, it is still going strong.
At universities, "scholarship" has gotten even crazier.
The real "hoax" is on students who pay thousands of dollars for useless degrees in fields that end in "studies."
There is no "scholarship" in those "disciplines." The studies are fabricated to entice stupid people to enroll purely to get a look at their money. That is the academia of today.
The Journal if Irreproducible Result....best journal ever
Academia is now where ideologues and other useless parasites go to hide from the real world and make a living.
Like many problems in the USA, I believe it has gone to an extreme because the ability to maintain and grow the ridiculous status quo with massive government spending and massive student debt.
If/when America’s debt bubble bursts, one silver lining will be a forced, greatly reduced spending on useless academia and a badly needed rationalization of the entire sector
Nonsense like this produces people like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who are turned loose upon society. Bad things ensue.
I think higher education should be directly tied to apprentice programs right from the start. And when I say “apprentice” I mean a period of paid employment. This is not an unpaid internship.
People going into engineering, or medicine, or business should not have a huge problem finding an apprentice program that can supplement their on-going college education.
Gender studies? English? Anthropology? Hey, if you can find someone who will pay you to actually work in those fields, that’s just swell — carry on with your 4-year college education! But I would expect those useless majors to mostly dry up as people realize that they are not real fields of endeavor. Go major in coffee pouring and line up an apprenticeship at Starbucks.
Feminist, White-hate and queer studies are all full of unintelligible babblings. No wonder they didn’t pick up on the hoax.
“The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what’s taught at colleges today.”
It’s way beyond stupidity ....it’s evil.
The Joe Ortons of the academic field!
This is art not science. This is an absurdist art movement where the researcher is the star for pushing boundaries, for being subversive to the authoritative narrative, for having courage to “stand up to the man.” The artist view is an inane/insane view, but a view that needs a voice in the hegemony of capitalism. (cough, cough)
It’s ART, mental constructs and rebellion. But the unspoken fish in the ointment is that it’s really about MONEY. Every democrat’s secret or not so secret obsession. Yes, that bourgeois thing called money, the shadow they fully want to embrace. You take away their money you take away everything. Dangle money in front of them and ask for the fashionable nonsense to disappear and, magically, it will.
They will hate you, but love your money all the more.
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Academicians. Let them grow up to be plumbers, cowboys and welders.
Some. Where does the non-for-profit education go? Maybe these journals are run by people who mean to turn good fields into worthless fields of endeavor. BTW, modern education is focused on the pragmatic result$ of education (Carnegie etc.) The result?> Kids can't read.
Sad thing though, necessary fields such as language, literature, history, and philosophy are discredited. You can't do politics without them. Plumbers, carpenters, car mechanics better be smart enough to know how to understand and keep a complex free constitutional society.
Those interested should pull up Jordan Peterson’s interview of Boghossian et al. It is extreme hilarious and profoundly depressing at the same time. Available on YouTube.
As an undergrad, my only professional ambition was to go to grad school, get my PhD in History and live my days as a college professor.
That dream died when I got married my junior year and my wife had our first child just before I graduated.
I was all set to take the GRE and choose a school, but decided I didn’t want to put my new family through the rigors of 3 years of grad school.
I used my degree to get a good job, but always regretted not pursuing my dream of teaching at the college level.
But, watching the freakshow American academia has become, and realizing I would be in the middle of it, maybe it was Providence that intervened those many years ago.
Sad, indeed, to see those fields denigrated. They're ancillary to the production of a well-rounded individual, indispensable to a free society.
Well, all ruminations are basically pie-in-the-sky, but ...
If we could re-invent education for those under the age of 18, we could have an broad educated class who could maintain the republic. Kids used to graduate from High School with an ability to read good books, do math, balance a checkbook, know history, and with an ability to find out more information as needed. I think we lost that a while ago.
Except for real specialists, college should not have to teach anyone that sort of thing. Here, I stretch way back to when college was largely about creating the clergy. The number of ministers needed is generally small — and not many people went to college. Lawyers usually didn’t go to college (Lincoln didn’t). Apart from the clergy, college was something for the idle rich. Then it broadened to include “everyone”. There is no need for that.
A small class of people highly skilled in arts of rhetoric and whatnot could be produced by higher education. Beyond that, I think all real jobs need an apprenticeship more than a college degree. And if high schools did what they are meant to do, anybody you see at the supermarket should have some ability to identify parallels between the current Speaker of the House as some appropriate character from Shakespeare or Russian literature. It really isn’t hard to “literate” — but our society just sabotages such things.
Any parent who sends their child to a university in the US is taking a huge risk.
That’s a pretty good write-up. Thanks for taking the time to do so.
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