Scholars behaving badly

“woman standing at front of concrete fence wearing academic uniform” by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

In this day and age, academics need to stand together

Over the past 12 months, three scholars — James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian — wrote 20 fake papers and submitted them to journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. The three, who consider themselves left-leaning liberals, have done a terrible disservice to academia.

Consider the following. We have a President who lies multiple times a day while attacking the legitimate media who attempt to get their story right. Inevitably, mistakes get made. After all, we are all human. The correct thing to do under those circumstances is to admit the mistake and correct it, which is exactly what most members of the so-called mainstream media do. Trump and his followers, however, have taken advantage of this honesty to delegitimize the media.

This is no small problem. In attacking institutions that attempt to get to the truth, hard as that may be, Trump and his followers create an environment in which everything is suspect. If there are no actual facts, and everyone has their own alternative facts, then there can be no honest discussion about issues. As former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.”