I love a good pisstake

but there's a serious point here too.

Wonderful - you should send it to Grayson Perry.

When I studied social science at uni I concluded that the more obscure, outlandish and frankly unbelievable your ideas were, and the more crazy jargon you dotted around your essays the higher the marks you got.

On my post grad course there was a vicar (we nicknamed him The Virgin Vicar) who managed to get sex into every essay and every tutorial discussion, regardless of the initial topic. We had great fun creating graphs of "Sexual References per Minute" during tutorials. He got a distinction at the end of the course! - of course.

Oh Lordy! Even the explanation of the hoax was full of gobbledygook- or was that the point of the piss take. Very quickly lost the will to live.

I found scan reading was sufficient to get the drift. It's really quite scary what tosh can pass as academic writing if this was accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, which was indeed the point.

Indeed - that is quite disturbing.

Just found a good description of the root of the problem by Michael Lechtenwald:
"Much of what pass for scholarship in the humanities & social sciences amounts to highly formalized virtue-signaling rituals."

Ouch.

Also just found a review, by Ed Dutton, of Joanna Williams's book, Academic freedom in an age of conformity. He calls it a "brave and timely tome". It seems pertinent here.

Thanks for this review B. I've never thought of the history of how academia and research has evolved over the years before.

Stepping out of preconceived frameworks is important for progress, yet it seems there is, today, an 'anything goes attitude' which can become so muddied and muddled that the original concept is lost!

When DD got her PhD I was very impressed by the man who read out her name (which he pronounced correctly) and then read out the title of her thesis as if he knew what it meant. I had typed some of it and still didn't have a clue.

If anyone's interested, Helen Pluckrose's answer to the critics of the hoax article is worth a (scan) read.

One of the questions I often ask myself about research projects reported in the newspapers is:
"How on earth did they get funding for that?"