This article appears in the Witness section of the Winter 2018 issue of the New Humanist. Subscribe today.

Earlier this year, three academics revealed they had spent months playing an elaborate prank. Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian had submitted a series of fake papers to academic journals. One, which was published in a journal of feminist geography, analysed “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity” at dog parks in Portland, Oregon. Another, in a journal of feminist social work, bore the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle” and interspersed modern jargon with passages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In all, the authors had four papers published. Three were accepted but not yet published when they revealed the hoax. Seven were under review, and six had been rejected.

In an article for the online journal Areo, the three authors explained their motivations: “Something has gone wrong in the university – especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields.” They termed this trend “grievance studies”, and said it was “corrupting academic research . . . because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible.”

While the hoax was clearly aimed at what the authors term “identitarian madness”, it quickly drew comparisons to a 1996 stunt by physicist Alan Sokal, who got a paper mixing postmodern philosophy with the theory of quantum gravity into a prestigious cultural studies journal. Sokal was frustrated by what he saw as a perceived lack of peer review and intellectual rigour in publications devoted to postmodern cultural studies. As Peter Salmon wrote in the Spring 2018 New Humanist: “The article used familiar postmodern tropes to put forward a nonsensical argument in which quantum theory is seen as providing a central foundation for postmodern theory. For Sokal, such theory is gibberish.”

Like Sokal, the three hoaxers were seeking to highlight discourse they deem nonsensical. But the real story may not be one of identity politics gone mad, but of a decline in standards by academic publishers. An investigation by the Guardian, in conjunction with a group of German publishers, earlier this year, found that “a vast ecosystem of predatory publishers is churning out ‘fake science’ for profit”. They found that five open access publishers had churned out over 175,000 scientific articles, the vast majority of which “skip almost all of the traditional checks and balances of scientific publishing, from peer review to an editorial board. Instead, most journals run by those companies will publish anything submitted to them – provided the required fee is paid.”

If even the apparently objective discipline of science is vulnerable to such trends, it suggests that the issue is not simply with the “grievance studies” the 2018 hoaxers sought to highlight, but with a system that affords unchecked and unfiltered work a veneer of academic authority.