Rod Liddle in today's Sunday Times
"Hoaxer’s words fall on leftist ears"
The American philosopher Peter Boghossian is about to be sacked by his university for having duped various social science academic publications into accepting a series of hilarious spoof papers full of right-on, woke, made-up leftist bilge.
Perhaps his crowning moment was a dissertation on something called choice feminism, which was simply an entire chapter of Hitler’s arguably controversial memoir Mein Kampf, with a few buzzwords replaced here and there. But most of the stuff he made up was cheerfully given a berth by the dim-witted “experts” who run these fatuous publications. Including “The conceptual penis as a social construct” (which was, as Boghossian attests, 3,000 words of imbecilic drivel).
It’s no surprise, then, that Portland State University wants him out, as Boghossian’s hobby subjects its supposedly rigorous academic standards to side-splitting ridicule. And the means it has for getting him out are exquisitely Kafkaesque. Boghossian did not inform the publications’ editors that he was testing them by submitting spoof papers, so he contravened the academic code by using, effectively, involuntary guinea pigs to prove his thesis. Whoever dreamt that objection up should be in a Joseph Heller novel.
So it looks as though Boghossian’s for the chop, but those journals will go on flourishing. This week’s real academic papers include: “Lactation support and the LGBTQI community”; “‘You’re a woman, a convenience, a cat, a poof, a thing, an idiot’: Transgender women negotiating sexual experiences in men’s prisons in Australia”; and “The importance of disclosure: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, queer/questioning, and intersex individuals and the cancer continuum”.