Hegemonic Academic Bullying: The Ethics Of Sokal-Style Hoax Papers On Gender Studies
A SCHOLARLY PAPER FROM THE GRIEVANCE STUDIES PROJECT
Summary:
In the name of Richard Baldwin, Ph.D. (borrowed identity), professor emeritus of history at Gulf Coast State College (and professional bodybuilder) by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose.
Summary: The second paper we attempted in the Grievance Studies Affair was one we called a “hoax on hoaxes,” this being Peter’s coup-de-grace idea for the project. The idea was to write a hoax paper condemning the use of academic hoaxes, including our own work, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” which was at the time still a minor scandal in academic circles. This paper represented our first attempt to put together a paper of that kind, and though it ultimately failed, it was later reconfigured, mostly by Helen, into the paper we labeled “Hoax on Hoaxes 2,” which was successful at penetrating the high-ranking journal Hypatia with the argument that humor, including academic hoaxes, must be a one-sided endeavor that advances and never exposes “Social Justice” initiatives. This paper offers another glimpse into the early, unsuccessful experimental phase that utilized pure hoaxes.
Notes on Status:
Submitted to and rejected by Journal of Gender Studies.
Contents:
Abstract
Introduction
Background and Context: Gender Studies, Attacks, and the “Conceptual Penis”
The Situatedness of the Ethics of Hoaxes
Gender Studies, Social Justice, and Activism
Endnotes
References
Abstract
In 1996 Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, published an intentionally bogus article in the prestigious peer-reviewed, postmodern journal Social Text. What is conspicuously absent from the scholarly literature is whether or not publishing bogus, Sokal style hoax papers in peer-reviewed journals is unethical. This paper fills that gap. It argues that the ethics of hoax papers is contingent on the discipline. Specially, it argues that hoaxes on unethical fields are morally justifiable, and hoaxes on ethical fields are unjustifiable. To make this argument, first, it situates this discussion in the context of recent attacks on Gender Studies; second, it explains why hoax papers must be understood within a larger moral context of that which facilitates hegemonic oppression and that which remediates it; third, it examines two bodies of evidence—peer-reviewed journals and academic departments—that demonstrate Gender Studies is fundamentally oriented toward alleviating oppression and facilitating social justice activism.
Keywords: Gender Studies, ethics, hoax, Sokal, oppression Gender Studies and the Ethics of Sokal-style Hoax Papers
Introduction
In 1996 Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, published an article in the prestigious peer-reviewed, postmodern journal Social Text (Sokal 1996). The article, however, was not a genuine scholarly article—it was a hoax paper filled with gibberish that deliberately misappropriated scientific concepts. Sokal’s intent was to demonstrate that postmodernism misuses scientific terminology and rests on bogus epistemic justifications for its “ideologically fashionable” conclusions (Sokal & Bricmont 1999). (Whether or not Sokal achieved what he set out to achieve, however, is a matter of debate (Boghossian 1998, 23–31). Bogus papers in this style are henceforth referred to as “Sokal-style hoaxes.”
Fast-forward to 2017 <1>. Two academicians, James “Jamie” Lindsay and Peter Boghossian (aka Peter Boyle), submitted a Sokal-style hoax paper, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” to the obscure, pay-to-publish peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences, part of the Cogent Open Access family of small journals.(Lindsay and Boyle 2017). In their explanation for Skeptic magazine, they state that their explicit purpose was to delegitimize Gender Studies (Boghossian and Lindsay 2017). Lindsay and Boghossian claim that moral flattery of the journal’s editors was responsible for the article’s acceptance and publication (Boghossian and Lindsay 2017). Their stunt received near universal condemnation from all but those on the far right, where it was used to push overt political agendas against feminism, gender studies, postmodernism, the humanities, peer-reviewed scholarship, and even addressing climate change (The Australian 2017), and it was universally heralded as an abject failure because of the journal’s non-existent Impact Factor (a discrete measure that ranks peer-reviewed journals based upon how many times they have been cited in a particular year) (Graham 2017; Joshi 2017; Soave 2017; Taylor 2017; Torres 2017; Yiannopoulos 2017).
From Sokal to Lindsay and Boghossian, and all the hoax papers in-between, what is conspicuously absent from the scholarly literature is whether or not publishing Sokal-style hoaxes in peer-reviewed journals is unethical. This paper fills that gap. There are some indications in the popular literature, but not in peer-reviewed scholarship, for this gap to be addressed. Consider, for example, DeTora’s (2017) letter to the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which she argued, citing Lindsay and Boghossian’s attempted hoax, that hoaxing academic journals outside of one’s area of expertise is unethical (DeTora 2017).
This paper argues for a more nuanced position: the ethics of Sokal-style hoax papers is contingent on the discipline and journal. Specially, it argues that hoaxes on unethical fields are morally justifiable, and hoaxes on ethical fields are unjustifiable. To make this argument, first I situate this discussion in the context of recent attacks on Gender Studies; second, I argue that hoax papers must be understood within a larger moral context of that which facilitates hegemonic structures of oppression and that which remediates it; third, I examine two sources of evidence—peer-reviewed journals and academic departments—that demonstrate Gender Studies is fundamentally oriented toward alleviating oppression and facilitating social justice activism.
Background and Context: Gender Studies, Attacks, and the “Conceptual Penis”
Gender Studies is under attack. Whether its calls for defunding by the “alt-right” and far right (Matthews 2017), tweeting out of context abstracts from Gender Studies articles, (RealPeerReview 2017) attempting to have feminist courses cancelled <2>, subjecting methodologies (e.g., autoethnography) to scrutiny not faced in other domains of thought (Holt 2003), submitting hoax papers to peer-reviewed journals, (Boghossian and Lindsay 2017) or ostensibly high-minded epistemological attacks on the feminist philosophy of science or polemics against more inclusive, diverse hiring practices,(Hermanson 2017) Gender Studies has come under siege by entrenched social and political forces that seek to maintain hegemonic control over oppressed groups including women, people of color, trans* communities, and any group systemically disenfranchised by the androcentric, white, cis-hetero late capitalist and neocapitalist class.
Moreover, the overwhelming majority of these criticisms are neither reasoned nor merely ideological—they are vituperative and morally motivated. That is, the reason critics are specifically targeting “the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular” is because of moral disagreements with the conclusions, implications, and guiding principles emanating from Gender Studies (Boghossian and Lindsay 2017). That is, these attacks are morally motivated rejections of established theoretical considerations of gender, race, and sexuality in favor of hegemonic scientific and meta-scientific narratives entrenched within the academy and the society it seeks to inform. (NB: the overwhelming majority of these criticisms come from white heterosexual male academicians.)
The latest example of this morally motivated attack on Gender Studies is the failed hoax paper, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” (Lindsay and Boyle 2017; Torres 2017). The authors of this paper explicitly state that the reason for their attack is due to moral disagreements with the field (see the quotation in the previous paragraph). Moreover, as James McWilliam (2017) points out in a piece for The Week’s “The hoax that backfired,” something more sinister is at play. That something is bullying, discharging white supremacist impulses, male dominated verbal violence, and humiliation. The failed “Conceptual Penis” hoax can thereby be ironically understood as an archetypal example of patriarchal hegemonic academic bullying.
In making this argument, McWilliam draws particular attention to the authors’ tone, writing, “This is the rhetoric of humiliation” (McWilliams 2017). He continues, “They wanted to do something completely different than discredit the entire field of gender studies. They wanted to humiliate all those who are in it. Which is to say, they were being bullies” (McWilliams 2017). Indeed if one examines the tone of their original article, (Lindsay and Boyle, 2017) and matches that with the peer-reviewed evidence McWilliam provides that defines and explains humiliation, (Elshout, Nelissen, and van Beest 2016) this further situates the hoax within the broader discourse of established, patriarchal power relations, particularly as a form of male-dominant bullying of a sister academic discipline. This kind of institutional “punching down” cannot be understood as ethical, and I assert that hegemonic academic bullying never is ethical. (The question to which I will return in the next section is when Sokal-style academic hoaxes constitute instances of hegemonic academic bullying and when they do not).
Of course, tone does not explain animus. A reasonable observer would conclude that there are racist, sexist, and potentially transphobic motivations at play, as McWilliam writes, “Boghossian and Lindsay are white men working in the most male-dominated academic fields (philosophy and math) attempting to humiliate through bullying one of the few academic fields dominated by women. In our current political climate—thriving as it does on shamelessness and humiliation—this scenario, as the motives become increasingly transparent, only calls for kind of scrutiny and understanding that gender studies can provide (emphasis added)” (Mcwilliams 2017). Ironically, it is Gender Studies that provides the best theory-based interpretive framework for understanding why white males like Lindsay and Boghossian lash out against women, minorities, and Muslims, and attempt to silence dissident voices <3>.
This paper aims to add to that literature by introducing the concept of “hegemonic academic bullying” as a precise term best understood in the theory-based interpretive framework fundamental to Gender Studies. Normally, the phrase “hegemonic academic bullying” would need little or no elaboration within Gender Studies scholarship; its meaning is immediately clear. However, the term is used here in a very specific manner and should be formally defined as any academic act of bullying, intimidation, harassment, or other verbal violence perpetrated along dynamical vectors of entrenched social power as they manifest in academe and in broader society.
Finally, it is worth noting that not only are the disciplines of Gender Studies and related fields under siege, so too are the “radical” ideas of its scholars. For example, academician and activist Nicholas Matte, who teaches at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, has had his scholarly conclusions repeatedly subject to humiliating attacks in the name of “criticism.” Specifically, Matte argued that the notion of biological sex is a “very popular misconception” (Richardson 2016). He did not invent the claim—that biological sex is a social construction (Butler 1999, 10–11; Fausto-Sterling 1993)—it has an extensive pedigree in the feminist literature <4>. Decades of peer-reviewed scholarship, however, was not sufficient to deter detractors with an animus against Gender Studies.
Like the “Conceptual Penis” hoax that was authored by two white males, of note in Matte’s case is that the overwhelming majority of attacks on these claims have also come from prominent white male New Atheists, like evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago) and Richard Dawkins (Oxford) (Dawkins 2015; Coyne 2017) <5>. These morally motivated attacks focus on reductive assumptions that ground sex in genitalia, and consequently that rights should be based upon normative social prescriptions. For example, that one must use a bathroom based upon their birth genitals. Unfortunately, Matte is not alone among Gender Scholars in having his claims subjected to an unusual degree of scrutiny. Clearly, what passes as “criticism” can be a form of hegemonic academic bullying as well when it targets ethically situated scholars, results, or fields of study so long as that criticism can be identified as seeking to entrench, defend, or ensconce extant hegemonic power, exclusion, and oppression.
The Situatedness of the Ethics of Hoaxes
In this section I’ll argue that whether or not Sokal-style hoax papers are ethical depends on the field and the journal they are hoaxing. The crux of the argument is that for a Sokal-style hoax (or certain other criticisms) to be grossly unethical, they must also constitute examples of hegemonic academic bullying. The hierarchical situatedness and moral valence of the journals and disciplines at hand are therefore ultimately the deciding factors in this designation. It goes without saying that hegemonic academic bullying is intrinsically unethical, as it is both a form of bullying and because it abuses privileged positions of power to enact oppression.
In an attempt to secure agreement on basic ethical principles, I’ll begin with an extreme, hypothetical example. If ethical consensus on this issue can be achieved, I’ll then apply the same principle, to opposite effect, on journals in the field of Gender Studies. NB: The issues are, by design, extremely offensive. Consequently, I take the unusual step of issuing trigger warnings for the remainder of this section. Trigger warnings: racism, hate crimes, verbal violence, extremes of systemic oppression, genocide.
Let’s begin with a heuristic analogue to the question, “Are Sokal-style hoaxes unethical?” That analogue is, “Is stealing unethical?” Unless one subscribes to a radical form of deontological fundamentalism, the answer, from standpoint theory to virtue ethics to consequentialism is, “It depends”. That is, it depends upon the context. For example, virtually all moral theories would assert that one is morally justified in stealing a cylinder of deadly nerve gas from a Nazi factory, particularly if one knows it will be used to commit mass murder the following day.
Using the example of stealing, what is considered unethical in most circumstances becomes situationally ethical due to context and circumstance. Similarly, when asking about the ethics of hoax papers, one needs to understand the broader moral context before rendering judgment. I will argue that if the field one is hoaxing is a vehicle for advocating oppression, hoaxing is ethical. If it is a vehicle for removing oppression, like Gender Studies, it is unethical. Now let’s turn our attention to a hypothetical example of when a Sokal-style hoax would be ethically justified and even encouraged.
Assume that the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) runs the peer-reviewed journal, Lynching. Lynching covers all of the odious subjects one would expect, from moral discussions arguing why lynching minorities is a moral imperative, to practical tips for doing so (e.g., advances in preparing lynching devices, such as how to tie knots and what rope to use, and how to avoid, bribe, or recruit law enforcement to avoid criminal prosecution), to anti-immigrant Islamophobic arguments couching Islam as non-racial, to racially motivated moral justifications for the survival of white bodied persons. Would it be unethical to publish a Sokal-style hoax piece in Lynching in an attempt to mock, ridicule, and destabilize the legitimacy of the KKK in general and the journal in particular? <6> No.
It is not unethical to hoax Lynching. In fact, in this particular situation may be ethically necessary to hoax Lynching to expose its clear biases and thus help push it into disrepute so as to rob its moral and political authority. While the reasons for this should be obvious, if one does not agree that delegitimizing Lynching is ethical then it’s unlikely one situated with such deeply internalized bigotry would find any argument persuasive. Making arguments for oppression and mass murder is a grotesque, monstrous departure from the norms of postmodern and Eastern moral traditions, even if it has had a comfortable home in intrinsically systemically oppressive sectors of the colonialist, imperialist, neoliberal, capitalist, and Western moral traditions (Petras 1993). Crucially, the hierarchical power dynamics in society and our academies prevent a hoax of a hypothetical journal like Lynching from being hegemonically mediated, thus such a hoax cannot constitute a form of hegemonic academic bullying.
Furthermore, journals that lend moral credence and authority to justifying systematic oppression and genocide should be radically and relentlessly undermined. That is, even if bullying itself is generally unethical, hegemonic academic bullying flows only along the same lines of systemic oppression that exist in broader society, and reverse-bullying cannot exist. Simply put, systemically oppressed groups cannot “reverse bully” the bullies who wield hegemonic power over them, and, far from being bullying in themselves, acts such as academically hoaxing a journal such as Lynching should serve as a form of radical academic self defense against a kind of violence that uniquely harms oppressed bodies and disempowers oppressed communities.
At this juncture I will pause and repeat that my argument stands or falls based upon whether one accepts this single example. If the reader remains unpersuaded that it is ethical to perpetrate a Sokal-style hoax on an overtly white-supremacist, anti-feminist, Islamophobic, anti LGBTQ journal like Lynching, then no additional examples will be persuasive. Failure to accept a Sokal-style hoax on Lynching likely means that the agents’ moral starting points are incommensurable. Jackson et al., (1991) and others term this “paradigm incommensurability,” where reaching a moral consensus is impossible due to radically disparate starting conditions (Jackson and Carter 1991). However, if one accepts this as an example of when Sokal-style hoaxes are morally justifiable, then an ethical baseline has been established.
Accepting by fiat that hoax papers have the potential to undermine the legitimacy of a journal and even a field, then undermining journals and fields that advocate wantonly oppressive practices and paradigms like, for example, transphobia, white nationalism, Islamophobia, anti feminism, and men’s rights, is radical, ethical, and even necessary. If one accepts this—that it is ethical to hoax fields and journals that traffic in oppressive, anti-egalitarian, and conspicuously anti-social justice practices—then the inverse is also true: it is unethical to hoax fields and journals that combat oppressive, anti-egalitarian, and conspicuously anti-social justice practices.
Specifically, hoax papers that undermine fields and journals oriented to restructure society for the good by overthrowing systemic and hegemonic oppression are unethical. For example, fields that strive to promote gender equity and inclusion (feminism), social and economic justice (Marxism, Black studies, other cultural studies), cultural tolerance with respect to Islam (Islamic studies), and human dignity (trans rights, fat studies) are strictly unethical to hoax. This is because these journals are the intellectual engines that drive inclusivity, diversity, multiculturalism, anti-discrimination, and, ultimately, activism that’s orientated toward overcoming oppression. Sabotaging journals that promote these values compromises their ability to promote social justice activism, facilitate change, and thus overcome systemic oppression.
On the other hand, hoax papers that would undermine fields and journals oriented to reinforce hegemonic social structures are ethical. For example, it is ethical, in varying degrees, to hoax fields, journals, or endeavors that question gender equality or seek to repudiate postmodern gender theory (evolutionary psychology), engage in shallow gender research inconsistent with theory (experimental developmental psychology), advocate for the “rights” of oppressor classes (“men’s rights” and white supremacy), promote neoliberal, capitalist, colonialist, and culturally appropriative goals (capitalist economic theories, marketing, and related scholarship), defend oppressive language and hate speech (classical liberalism and law based upon it), aim to denigrate intersectionality or intersectional feminism, investigate topics that could be used by enemies of social justice (for specific examples, Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and its support by neuroscientist Sam Harris) (Harris and Murray, 2017) , problematize Islam and thus engage in Islamophobic bigotry (again, see Sam Harris) (Aslan 2017), or that exhibit systemic problems with bigotry and misogyny (physics, astrophysics, astronomy (Barthelemy, et al. 2016; Ko, et al. 2013).
This follows because these journals serve as intellectual and academic castles from within which problematic hegemonic forces can keep unwanted “others” out, oppressing them further. To sabotage journals and fields that exclude oppressed groups or facilitate their systematic exclusion would succeed in promoting social justice activism, facilitating change, and thus helping to overcome systemic oppression.
Gender Studies, Social Justice, and Activism
We are now faced with the following questions: (1) “Is Gender Studies explicitly orientated toward social justice and activism?” and (2) “Is Gender Studies or those supported by its scholarship systemically oppressed by hegemonic forces in society?” If the answer to both of these questions is, “No, Gender Studies is not oriented toward social justice and activism, and it is not oppressed by hegemonic forces in society,” then it would be ethical to hoax Gender Studies. This is because Gender Studies would be morally neutral and situated outside of seeking justice for oppression dynamics, and thus its disrepute would neither contribute to nor alleviate oppression.
By analogy, hoaxing a physics journal is, for the most part, neither ethical nor unethical <7>. While the hoax could act as a corrective mechanism to help scholars evaluate aspects of their discipline or to strengthen the quality of peer review, this is a practical and not a moral concern as physics is orientated toward understanding the nature and properties of matter and energy. Physics is not orientated toward alleviating systemic oppression, nor is it situated under a hegemonic oppression dynamic in society, though to the degree it contributes to oppression, hoaxing physics journals would be considered ethical according to a theory-based interpretation of ethics (Harding 1986; Hughes 1995; Hankinson-Nelson 2015; Willey 2016).
There is overwhelming evidence that Gender Studies journals and academic programs are not truth-seeking enterprises in the systemically biased positivist sense; rather, they pursue deeper structural truths that are inextricably aligned with and motivated toward social justice, activism, overthrowing hegemonic norms that marginalize groups, and overcoming systemic oppression (Balick 2011; cf. feminist standpoint epistemology). That is, the answer to question (1) above is “YeThe question that now needs to be examined is, “What evidence is there that Gender Studies is explicitly activist and social justice oriented?” The answer to this question is best ascertained in two ways. First, by looking at the descriptions in leading Gender Studies journals, and second, by examining course descriptions of Gender Studies programs. I’ll now turn my attention to both of these points.
First, in the Appendix, Table 1 lists the leading 17 Gender Studies journals by impact factor (IF) and pulls quotations directly from the self-descriptions on their websites. In the overwhelming majority of these descriptions some kind of praxis connecting theory to activism is made explicit. For example, we see frequent occurrences of activist words like “transform” (e.g., “antiracist goals of social transformation”), “activism” (e.g., “manifesting activism against sexual and gender prejudice”) and “justice” (e.g., “promotion of sexual and gender justice”) <8>. Tangentially, it is lamentable that justice-oriented fields like Gender Studies have to rely upon a marginalizing metric like impact factor, when something like a “social engagement factor” would be vastly more suitable to the field’s goals and likely much more indicative of which sorts of journals are and aren’t ethical to hoax.
From this evidence one can conclude there is not just a strong moral impetus, but that these journals are discharging a moral mission deeply rooted in achieving social justice. This mission is consistent with a broader and better-situated understanding of social truths that rejects meta-narratives in favor of the more robust epistemology of lived experience (Lyotard 1984). From this more discursive positioning, it is straightforward to understand the moral imperative of theory-based social justice research—and the activism that follows from it. This evidence demonstrates the moral positioning of Gender Studies and other theory-based scholarship.
Second, in the Appendix, Tables 2 (West of the Mississippi) and 3 (East of the Mississippi) list 63 Gender Studies departments at universities in the United States <9>. All quotations come directly from self-descriptions on their webpages. In virtually every instance, a connection between theory and practice, thus between ethical scholarship and moral action, is made explicit. For example, “to promote social justice and gender equality,” “designed to promote scholarly inquiry, education, and activism,” and “opens up the door for a career in activism”. In fact, the word “activism” appears 37 times in these descriptions and is used by the majority of programs <10>.
From this evidence, and from the fact that coursework perfectly aligns with these objectives, one can conclude that Gender Studies departments are, in fact, moral incubation chambers orientated toward ending oppression through creating activist scholars. The answer to question (2) above is therefore unambiguously “Yes” as well. Thus hoaxing Gender Studies journals is an unethical act of hegemonic academic bullying that seeks to undermine the moral mission of social justice and thus do harm to oppressed and marginalized groups.
To elaborate, any attempt to hoax these departments, journals, or scholars therefore represents an effort to do violence against a morally noble effort and thus against the people served by those efforts. It is an unethical act of hegemonic academic bullying that is rendered more unethical by the inherent dishonesty of hoaxes in circumstances in which the lie is not situationally excusable because of the unilateral nature of structures of oppression. This, then, informs us of why hoaxing journals and disciplines not dedicated to social justice, or antagonistic to it, is ethical: it represents the same kind of situatedness of context as stealing deadly nerve gas from the Nazis before they can deploy it. Every act of violence shares this trait of situated ethics.
In the present political and social environment of ascendant oppression, perpetrating a Sokal-style hoax upon a morally situated and thus just field oriented toward improvements in equity, inclusion, and social justice is unethical. Such efforts contribute to anti-justice counter narratives on the alt-right and far-right that are paradigmatic examples of hegemonic forces that perpetrate violence on oppressed groups. And while many forms of systemic oppression exist, hegemonic academic bullying is particularly pernicious. This is because it undermines the moral legitimacy of narratives that counter dominant social forces and is expressly anti-feminist, anti intersectional, and anti-justice.
On the other hand, hoaxing fields with negative moral positioning, such as those listed at length above that can be used to enable anti-justice goals and to reinforce hegemonic power dynamics is ethical in the same way that engaging in generally unethical behavior is profoundly ethical when it prevents greater violence. Any field that attempts to push into disrepute the advances of critical theory, constructivism, standpoint theory, and other forms of societally salient postmodern scholarship should be radically delegitimized; to the degree that academic hoaxes can effect that goal, they are to be endorsed as a form of anti-hegemonic academic self defense.
In between these extremes, not all academic hoaxes are equally unethical. Those hoaxing a field with neutral moral valence are ethically neutral. What hangs in the ethical balance in these cases is whether the execution of the hoax furthers positive goals like exposing predatory journal malpractice or exposing subtle hegemonic abuses in the field. In such cases, the positive intentions of the hoaxers may counterbalance the dishonesty required to perpetrate the hoax.
This nuanced view of the situated ethics of Sokal-style (and other) academic hoaxes ties the ethical valence of the hoax to the moral worth of the target. It does so by introducing the concept of hegemonic academic bullying. Academically bullying a journal or field that is and has been historically oppressed is a categorically unethical act that cannot be perpetrated against vectors of hegemonic power, and the ethical indictment is even more egregious because of the justice-oriented moral standpoint of these journals and disciplines.
Finally, I recommend that university administrations take the ethical failures of hegemonic academic bullying seriously. Any academician who perpetrates Sokal-style hoaxes or other hoaxes, or who engages in formal academic criticism of anti-oppressive fields of study, in ways identifiable with hegemonic academic bullying, must be held to account. Repeat perpetrators of hegemonic academic bullying should be put on probation, censured, or removed from their academic posts, and departments that support scholarship that constitutes hegemonic academic bullying should be provided adequate training opportunities or face having their funding reduced.
Endnotes
- In a follow-up article, the eponymous hoaxer, Sokal, offers a brief chronology of academic hoaxes.
- As Beins and Kennedy write, “Antifeminist intellectual harassment goes beyond the boundaries of dissent through its practices of silencing. Through its guerilla warfare-like tactics it seeks to halt feminist critique on a course-by-course basis (p. 300).”
- One explanatory mechanism for this phenomena is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “machinic assemblage”. This is a particularly cogent analytical tool that makes sense of heterogeneity of life narratives and social power differentials.
- The attacks on sex as a social construction has been met with robust defenses not only in the peer-reviewed literature (Hubbard 1996; Xu 2003), but also in popular venues (Rude 2016).
- Other unsubstantiated attacks have come from the conservative white male Canadian professors Gad Saad (Concordia University) and Jordan Peterson (University of Toronto).
- While this is an extreme hypothetical, there are existing journals that are nearly as extreme in their moral message and their advocacy. For example, the National Coalition of Men publish the quasi-peer-reviewed journal Transitions: Journal of Men’s Perspectives (Transitions, 2017). Transitions publishes articles that boast of titles like, “One man’s misgivings about one more homophobic, misandrosistic missive” (Nov/Dec 2007 Volume 27, Number 6, Francis Baumli), and “Double standards: ever wonder why?” (V 25, no 1, Jan/Feb 2005, Thomas Simon).
- Hoaxing physics skews slightly to the ethical. There are some problematic biases in androcentric physics toward masculine rectilinear systems to the systemic oppression of feminine fluid-mechanical systems, so hoaxing physics journals in ways that highlight implicit sexism in the field, such as attempting to force rectilinear physical models upon fluid systems, could be construed as ethical (Irigaray 1987, 110).
- Moreover, the content, conclusions, and analyses of articles published by these journals reflect the accuracy of the journals’ claims. There have not yet been, however, meta-analyses of the feminist literature to provide evidential support for this claim.
- Tables were geographically divided both for ease of reading and to illustrate that geography does not play a factor in a program’s objectives. Canadian universities were excluded so as to delimit the scope of inquiry, but an examination of program descriptions reveals identical orientation. For example, the University of British Columbia self-description reads, “… programs are tailored to train academics, artists, activists, organizers, and mobilizers interested in engaging social justice.”
- This also comports with course titles offered at the various colleges. For example, many of the programs on this list offer courses in “community activism,” “social engagement,” and “transformational partnerships”.
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