Professors Pull Off Clever Hoax With ‘Penis Paper’, Expose Liberal Academia as a Sham

Via Billy

Philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay perpetrated a hoax intended to expose gender studies as a sham, and they succeeded. The respected professors submitted an absurd article — which blamed penises for global warming — to a respected, peer-reviewed, academic journal — which gullibly printed it. In perpetrating their hoax, the professors said they sought to expose academia as shallow, credulous and painfully politically correct.

Their clever hoax echoes what’s become known as the Sokal Affair, in which physics professor Alain Sokal infamously debunked postmodernism to be intellectual fraud. Two decades ago, Sokal submitted an article peppered with nonsense that flattered the ideological predispositions of the editors of Social Text, an academic journal dedicated to postmodernist thought. He proposed that quantum gravity is a “social and linguistic construct,” and it was published without academic peer review, betraying the field’s lack of intellectual rigor.

More @ HEATSTREET