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Enforcing Political Orthodoxy in Scholarly Publishing

posted by martyb on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the won't-be-fooled-again,-or-will-they? dept.

canopic jug writes:

Portland State University has initiated disciplinary proceedings against their philosophy professor Peter Boghossian for conspiring with colleagues to submit more than two dozen satirical papers to feminist theory and race-studies journals in an effort to prove those disciplines are academically fraudulent. The hoax papers, some of which were accepted by journals and which were revealed back in October, made Boghossian and his cohorts the international toast of "free thinkers" concerned that college campuses have become paralyzed by political orthodoxy.

After their ruse was revealed, the three authors described their project in an October article in the webzine Areo, which Pluckrose edits. Their goal, they wrote, was to "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." They contend that scholarship that tends to social grievances now dominates some fields, where students and others are bullied into adhering to scholars' worldviews, while lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable.

Sources:
The Chronicle of Higher Education : Proceedings Start Against 'Sokal Squared' Hoax Professor (archive)
Willamette Week : Professor Who Authored Hoax Papers Says Portland State University Has Launched Disciplinary Proceedings Against Him (archive)

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  • (Score: 1) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:22AM (1 child)

    by The Vocal Minority (2765) on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:22AM (#785817) Journal

    (4) On the other hand, IF these authors were actually submitting fake "scientific papers" with the same adherence to the style and substance of scientific papers, I'm not convinced their acceptance rate would be significantly lower. If the made up fake data that didn't seem too outlandish and constructed scientific arguments that played into commonly accepted notions in the various subdisciplines of science, I'd bet they'd get a high acceptance rate. The hardest part would be faking the fact that they had a real lab -- it would be easier to uncover the fact that something like that didn't exist. But in the present case, the authors borrowed the name of an actual academic for some papers, so if a team were allowed to appropriate the names of researchers in an existing lab, I submit that it would be relatively easy to get fake papers published in scientific journals too.

    The part you find annoying is that rather than playing into scientific expectations for discourse and accepted elements of scientific disciplines, here the authors played into preconceptions that academics in some humanities disciplines have about politicized ideas -- that's again what got these papers accepted (as in Sokal's case). If they wrote pure nonsense, it wouldn't get published. It's because they played into the preconceptions of these journals that sometimes serious issues in the hoax articles were overlooked... and occasionally even lauded (as in the dog park article).

    Whilst I agree with most of what you have said on this topic you start to go off the rails here, and seem to be downplaying the significance of what has happened. Are you saying that someone from well outside of your field could successfully author a paper reporting primary research in that field and get it published in a legitimate discipline specific peer reviewed journal? This is the part of the exercise that to my mind is the most damning to the disciplines/journals involved - for a legitimate field of academic inquiry I would expect that that, as the work being published is advancing the body of knowledge within that field, considerable familiarity with that body of knowledge would be required to make a significant contribution to it and thus write a paper that merits publication. Quite aside form the political aspect the fact that non-experts have managed to get articles published in these journals suggests that there is very little of worth in these disciplines (culture studies etc.) - or at the very least there is a significant problem with the peer review process.

    I guess it would be possible to get a fake paper published if you really wanted to in most disciplines by taking an already published paper and tweaking it slightly so that is look like that content was original, but this is not what has happened here. These were completely original papers as far as I am aware (apart from the one that was based on Mien Kampf ...).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:55PM (#786005)

    Quite aside form the political aspect the fact that non-experts have managed to get articles published in these journals suggests that there is very little of worth in these disciplines

    These are new fields. They are still figuring out what expertise in the field actually means. It is not extraordinary for a new field to have a lot of fluidity and churn as it figures itself out.

    Your requirements are a prescription for the crib-death of any new field of study.