Political Correctness Is Ruining Academic Journals The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what’s taught at colleges today.John Stossel
https://reason.com/archives/2019/03/06/political-correctness-is-ruining-academi
If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in “academic journals.”
The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what’s taught at colleges today.
Recently, three people sent in intentionally ridiculous “research” to prominent journals of women studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, obesity studies, and queer studies.
“The scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted,” says Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. “They have placed an agenda before the truth.”
To show that, hoaxer and mathematician James Lindsay says, “We rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism” and got it published in Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.
For another paper, they claimed to have “closely” examined genitals of 10,000 dogs in dog parks to learn about “rape culture and queer performativity.”
Boghossian had assumed, “There’s no way they’re gonna believe that we did this!”
But the journal Gender, Place & Culture did, calling the paper “excellent scholarship.”
Seven journals accepted the absurd papers, as I show in my latest video.
Hoaxers Boghossian, Lindsay, and Areo magazine editor Helen Pluckrose explain the reason for their trick.
“We think studying topics like gender, race and sexuality is worthwhile and getting it right is extremely important,” says Lindsay
But researchers of these topics have gotten lazy and political, they say. “A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed—like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic,” Lindsay says.
Reach politically “correct” conclusions and you can get most anything published.
“Kind of a last straw happened,” says Lindsay. “There was this paper well-funded by the National Science Foundation that studied ‘feminist glaciology.’ It said glacier science is sexist.”
As a glaciologist giving a TED Talk put it, “the majority of glaciological knowledge that we have today stems from knowledge created by men about men within existing masculinist stories.”
What?
One paper suggested the solution to sexism in glacier science is “feminist paintings of glaciers and feminist art projects,” says Lindsay. They praised art projects like one where they “hooked up a phone line to a glacier so you could call the glacier on the phone and listen to it.” That was “the last straw” for him.
Lindsay adds, “What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies.”
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