Over the past year, three scholars have been engaged in a broad and massively secret academic project. Together, they submitted over a dozen papers to top academic journals in fields like gender studies, sexuality studies, race studies, and critical theory. While the majority of their submissions failed the peer review process and were ultimately rejected, a number of their papers were actually accepted into top journals. The Wall Street Journal brought this interesting information to our attention in their article, “Fake News Comes to Academia.”
The scholars intentionally chose these particular fields because they have a “common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.”
You have to question why they would go to this extent, utilizing a massive amount of labor for hoax papers? Supposedly they did it to expose serious flaws and political biases in these disciplines, as well as problems with the peer review process and the “publish-or-perish” atmosphere at many schools.
Melody K. Smith
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