At a state school in Oregon, a professor of philosophy decided to write 20 bogus-satire-fueled papers that were aimed at exposing just how ridiculous the academic industrial complex truly is — the results were both horrifying and hilarious.
Three scholars — James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian — worked together to write the 20 fake papers using trendy academic jargon to make the argument for absolutely ridiculous conclusions. They then submitted the articles to high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies — the success rate was remarkable.
Of the 20 outlandish papers, seven of the articles had been outright accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals, and seven more had been accepted for continuing through the various stages of the publishing review process.
Only six of the fake papers actually were rejected.
How ridiculous and absurd were these papers? Well:
- Western Astronomy is Sexist and Imperialist — Physics Departments Should Study Feminist Astrology, or Practice Interpretative Dance.
- Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.
- Rubbing One Out: Defining Metasexual Violence of Objectification Through Nonconsensual Masturbation
If the titles are not stupid enough, here is an actual excerpt from one of the published papers:
"By drawing upon empirical studies of psychological harms of objectification, especially through depersonalization, and exploring several veins of theoretical literature on nonphysical forms of sexual violence, this articles seeks to situate non-consensual male autoerotic fantasizing about women as a form of metatextual violence that depersonalizes her, injures her being on an affective level, contributes to consequent harms of objectification and rape culture, and can appropriate her identity for the purpose of male sexual gratification."
The paper argues that argues that men who masturbate while thinking about a woman without her prior consent are perpetrators of sexual violence. This article was published — this is the result of leftist woke philosophy in academia — those who speak out against it be damned.
Professor Boghossian, the mastermind behind writing the fake papers and thus exposing leftist academia for what it is, resigned from his university on September 8th.
In his resignation letter, Boghossian wrote that his prior employer had been changed from,
"a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division".
And that students at the university are,
"being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues."
Many other scholars around the western world have found themselves in similar situations. What few conservatives who remain in academia may be used to this type of nonsense, the illiberalism of academia is now increasingly affecting actual liberals — people who believe in progress but don't believe the woke tooth fairy.
A report published recently found that since 2015 the number of scholars targeted with demands for investigation, demotion, censorship, or termination reached an all time high in 2020. The majority of these cases are academics on the left being attacked from further left.
The censoring had bled into medicine and actual hard sciences — last year a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh was demoted for publishing a paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association that analyzed and criticized diversity initiatives, and another professor at a University of California med school recently apologized for using the term pregnant women.
One of Boghossian's supporters in Oregon stated that the diversity industrial complex within college administrations always needs to to justify their existence — the result is outlandish social justice policing that creates more and more social laws to enforce.
It's a lucrative gig: Diversity Vice-Presidents at universities in Oregon have an average compensation of $262,000. The University of Michigan has nearly 80 diversity officers at a total annual payroll cost of $10.6m. Anyone who wants to challenge prevailing views faces an onslaught of self-perseveration from those whose job it is to persecute those who are racist and sexist.
Social justice is now big business, and just the very notion of being pursued by the diversity and inclusion thought police is enough to silence people.