Cultural Studies Hoax Mostly Being Brushed Off as Tiresome BS
5th October 2018
All fields have at least a few weak journals. All fields can boast of plenty of lousy journal articles. All fields are embarrassed by occasional frauds. All fields suffer from ideological biases or conflicts of interest that interfere with good scholarship.
But I can’t think of any serious field in which an amateur who’s done a few month’s reading could even produce a plausible parody, let alone a paper that would be taken seriously by dozens of editors and peer reviewers. If that’s all it takes, a PhD is a meaningless five-year waste of time.
Gee, how did that come about?
They can’t be treated as dumping grounds for impassioned mediocrities and then ignored.
If they are, and everyone tacitly agrees to sweep away the whole episode because the hoaxsters didn’t get IRB approval or something, it just gives the game away: these fields exist only to placate troublemakers, and nobody in the serious parts of the university cares about them.
So these fields are basically a parking garage for people who would otherwise just be troublemakers, and whose only utility is that they pad out headcounts in universities who then paid for them through federal student aid programs. Traditional universities who wail and moan about the frauds being perpetrated on unsuspecting students by for-profit vocational schools are essentially doing the same thing in a Clever Plastic Disguise.