It was a notorious 2016 paper on ¡°feminist glaciology¡± ¨C??¨C by Mark Carey and others?that first caught James Lindsay¡¯s eye. As someone ¡°very drawn to the sciences¡±, with a PhD in physics, he was ¡°amused and aghast and then horrified¡± by ¡°its nakedly political objective ¨C [that] ¡®we need to radically transform glaciology to take in feminist art projects about ice and indigenous myths¡¯¡±.

He therefore began to examine areas of the humanities ¡°focusing on markers of identity¡± ¨C notably the work produced by race, gender, sexuality and even fat studies ¨C and became concerned about certain repeated claims that ¡°lived experience is a means of knowledge production¡±, that ¡°nothing except oppression is objectively real¡± and that ¡°the Western philosophical tradition is just another way of knowing¡±. Since such ¡°disciplines have survived more sober and traditional critique¡±, he decided that the only solution was to ¡°take them on as ethnographers ¨C to become fluent in their language and customs¡± as a way of undermining them from within.

At this point, Dr Lindsay joined forces with Helen Pluckrose, who describes herself as ¡°an exile from the humanities¡±, and Peter Boghossian, assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. All define themselves as ¡°staunchly left liberals¡±.

They therefore began producing fake articles. Their goal was to prove that ¡°one can start with very exaggerated or ethically grotesque conclusions, draw on existing scholarship to support them and get the articles published¡± in leading journals. After some initial failures, Dr Lindsay concluded that the key was to respect ¡°a number of offence-based rules¡±.

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Since they were eventually rumbled, the team came clean in , where Ms Pluckrose is editor-in-chief. Yet seven of their 20 submitted articles had already been accepted for publication, including one on ¡°feminist spirituality¡±?that Dr Lindsay put together in six hours using ¡°a teenage angst poetry generator¡±, and four have appeared online. These, they report, include a paper on dog parks as ¡°a place of rampant canine rape culture¡± and another arguing that heterosexual men might become more feminist and less transphobic if they opted to ¡°anally self-penetrate using sex toys¡±.

In a blog for the Times Higher Education website, Alison Phipps, professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex, acknowledges that some of the papers were ¡°outlandish¡±. Yet she argues that others were ¡°simply based on premises (eg, social constructionism) or political principles (eg, trans equality) that the hoax authors find problematic¡±. She also takes exception to their ¡°demand that all major universities review various areas of study¡±, calling it ¡°a chilling statement which will certainly feed right-wing attacks on gender studies such as those which have recently happened in Hungary, as well as the targeting of feminist and critical race scholars by the ¡®alt¡¯-right¡±.

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For his part, Dr Lindsay reflected that their experience showed that ¡°most people could crank out papers [on ¡®grievance studies¡¯] with relative ease if they learned the rules¡±. Yet he also called for a serious process of ¡°review and reform¡±.

He added: ¡°We would like these fields to see the light, question their assumptions and come up to the same standards of knowledge production as all others. Of course that will not happen.¡±

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com