What the Hoax Papers Tell Us about the Decline of Academic Standards
Nov 28, 2018 Phillip W. Magness
By now, most followers of the higher education press have heard of the “grievance studies†or Sokal Squared hoax.
In this incident, a team of three researchers successfully published several hoax papers on intentionally absurd subjects in ostensibly serious scholarly journals. Their purpose was to demonstrate the susceptibility of these venues to low-quality, ideologically charged “research†that advances left-wing identity politics.
The hoax articles lampooned the academic fashionability of its chosen subject areas. Samples of the published papers included an article on “rape culture†among dogs in urban dog parks, a piece espousing a theoretical framework for the acceptance of obese bodybuilders, a nonsensical string of computer-generated “therapeutic†political poetry, and even a passage of Mein Kampf repackaged as critical gender theory.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/11/what-the-hoax-papers-tell-us-about-the-decline-of-academic-standards/
