NORTHAMPTON — A controversial hoax has roiled academia in recent days after a trio of scholars managed to get seven phony papers accepted by scholarly journals over the course of 10 months.
One of those seven papers, out of 20 total that the scholars submitted, was accepted — but not published — by the feminist social-work journal Affilia, whose editor in chief is Smith College School for Social Work professor Yoosun Park.
In the wake of the stunt, reactions from academics were swift to follow. The hoax perpetrators — Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, who describe themselves as “left-leaning liberals” — have said they’ve unearthed “extreme bias in fields that study race, gender, sexuality, and other politically-charged topics.” The stunt also has plenty of detractors, who say it is a dishonest attack that doesn’t prove anything.
In the case of Affilia, the bogus paper the journal accepted was called “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” It contained a very loose rewrite of part of a chapter of Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical book, “Mein Kampf,” and the authors’ identities and credentials were fabricated.
Other hoax papers the academics got accepted at other journals include one about canine rape culture at dog parks, and another about “brestaurants” like Hooters being spaces for men who are “nostalgic for patriarchal dominance.” In total, the trio got seven articles accepted to various journals, four of which were actually published.
Park, the Affilia editor and Smith SSW professor, declined an interview. She referred the Gazette’s questions to SAGE Publishing, which publishes the journal. In a statement that SAGE released, Affilia’s editors say that the fraudulent article did not espouse racism, anti-Semitism or fascist ideology, and that the parallels to “Mein Kampf” were limited “exclusively to word choice in the descriptive text.” For example, the similarities aren’t readily apparent even in a side-by-side comparison of the two texts.
“Indeed, the article as a whole espouses social justice and anti-oppression ideals entirely at odds with fascism,” the editors wrote. “While the editors would have recognized the ideas from Mein Kampf, they did not recognize paraphrases shorn of that ideology.”
Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian say in their own findings that “while the original language and intent of Mein Kampf has been significantly changed to make this paper publishable and about feminism, the reliance upon the politics of grievance remains clear.”
Regarding the authors’ false identities, Affilia’s editors said that “following academic standard of blind peer review and relying on the integrity of the submitting authors, the journal did not question the identities of the authors.”
The scholars have presented their hoax as evidence of lax publishing standards and ideological partisanship in fields like gender and ethnic studies, which they derisively refer to as “grievance studies.” They say their work is important because of the influence these journals have.
“The work of grievance scholars goes on to be taught in classes, to design educational curricula, to be taken up by activists, to influence how media is produced and to misinform journalists and politicians about the true nature of our cultural realities,” Lindsay, an author and mathematician, says in a video explaining the hoax.
Efforts on Thursday and Friday to reach the three hoaxers were unsuccessful.
Critics of the stunt say it demonstrates little more than the scholars’ bad faith attempts to attack those fields. Some have taken to social media to say that such a fraud can happen in most academic fields, so the hoaxers’ focus on ethnic and gender studies is telling of their own ideologies.
“Good work is hard to do,” Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy commented on Twitter. “Incentives to publish are perverse; there’s a lot of crap out there; if you hate an area enough you can gin up a fake paper and get it published somewhere if you try. The question is, what do you hate? And why is that?”
“Do we think crap doesn’t get published in newspapers?” was what University of Massachusetts Amherst historian Laura Briggs — the former chair of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university — said in an interview with the Gazette.
Briggs said that there was no control in the scholars’ experiment — in other words, they didn’t attempt to see if they could similarly get papers published in other fields. That is an argument others skeptical of the hoax have made, while still others have challenged that notion.
“The most important claim is that parts of academia claim to pursue knowledge but can’t distinguish between serious scholarship and fashionable bull,” one of the hoaxers’ boosters, Harvard University lecturer Yascha Mounk, wrote on Twitter. “They showed this for fields of study they looked at. They didn’t for fields they didn’t look at.”
As a book review editor herself, Briggs said she has previously published work she disagrees with or thinks is bad. But it is not an editor’s job to insist that only things they agree with get published, she added.
“What happens if you publish a bad paper? It will get ignored, it will not get cited,” Briggs said. “Or, if it’s egregiously wrong, people will publish a critique of it. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
As for the fraudulent credentials that the three scholars were able to pass off, Briggs said that the academic endeavor relies on trust-based systems: the belief that scholars aren’t publishing faked results, under fake identities.
“We believe that people are who they say they are, and the reason that we can do that is because it’s a fairly rigid system of mentorship and apprenticeship that we think weeds out bad actors and fraudulent stuff,” Briggs said, adding that the system does not work 100 percent of the time.
“Honestly I think the effect of this is going to be negligible,” Briggs said of the hoax.
But there is something to be learned from the experience, perhaps. Affilia’s editors said in their statement that they are “investigating changes to current protocol to improve accountability processes.”
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.