Letters: When the Production of Knowledge Gets Messy

What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia

Last week, Yascha Mounk described what happened when “three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies.” Not all the papers were published— but those that were, Mounk concluded, “expose the low standards of the journals that publish this kind of dreck” and show “the extent to which many of them are willing to license discrimination if it serves ostensibly progressive goals.”

While Yascha Mounk’s article is all very pertinent, it overlooks several depressingly mundane realities: the extreme pressure on academics to publish; the growing number of academic journals intended to accommodate these pressures; the increase in submissions to these journals; the subsequent decrease in available time by editors (usually other academics) to carefully vet submissions or to