Academia and the new dark age: Part 5 - Revenge of the Nerds

Will STEM students save us from the Dark Age?

There is a long tradition of academic hoaxes pillorying the postmodernist capture of the social sciences. The recent publication of a paper analysing the hilariously sarcastic responses to a survey aimed at eliciting the experiences of "transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC)" engineering and computer science students, confirms that it is now virtually impossible to distinguish the genuine output of social studies academics from critiques of their oeuvre, in the guise of prank papers.

On the bright side, the paper, titled - I kid you not - 'Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences' - provides some hope for humanity, albeit in a manner entirely unintended by its authors.

(Hat tip to my subscriber,

John Baillie

, for this story.)

First, some background on the glorious tradition of postmodernism-panning prank papers.

The Sokal Hoax

Back in 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor who had become gravely concerned about the intrusion of postmodern ideologies into every academic field - including his own - submitted a sham paper which argued that quantum gravity was a social construct, to an academic journal of cultural studies. The paper, 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', artfully parodied the impenetrable jargon and pretentious incoherence of postmodern 'social science' academic writing, while subtly skewering its denial of objective, observable reality:

"There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in 'eternal' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the 'objective' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility2; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of 'objectivity'.3 It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical 'reality', no less than social 'reality', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific 'knowledge', far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics4; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science5; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics6; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.7"

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

So masterful was Sokal’s imitation that the peer-reviewed journal Social Text published the spoof paper, giving it pride of place in a special 'Science Wars' issue. Sokal unmasked the stunt after a few weeks, and the Sokal Hoax quickly became the 'hard science' academics' version of the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

The Grievance Studies Affair

The Sokal Hoax inspired philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay to submit their own spoof paper, 'The conceptual penis as a social construct', to a social studies journal. The abstract of the paper will hopefully entice you to read the entire, delicious romp through the fecund fields of postmodernist absurdity:

"Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance."

The conceptual penis as a social construct

This, in the author's own words, "3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship" was published in 2017 by the peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (Don't bother looking for the paper on the journal's website; it was retracted after Lindsay and Boghossian revealed their hand.)

Spurred on by the success of their poststructuralist penis parody paper, Boghossian and Lindsay, now joined by former religious studies academic, Helen Pluckrose, embarked on the Grievance Studies project, also known as Sokal Squared. Over the course of a year, the trio produced twenty hoax articles and submitted them to journals of postcolonial studies, critical race theory, intersectional feminism, fat studies and queer studies (among other abstruse spin-offs of critical theory).

Their hoax papers included

• A rewrite of Mein Kampf in feminist jargon ('Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism', which was accepted for publication in the feminist journal Affilia;

• An article which enjoined heterosexual males to anally penetrate themselves with sex toys in order to reduce their transphobia (‘Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use', published by Sexuality & Culture;

• A call for "a new classification within bodybuilding, termed fat bodybuilding", in which the aim is to build as fat a body as possible ('Who are they to judge? Overcoming anthropometry through fat bodybuilding', published in Fat Studies); and

• A completely invented 'study' of rape culture at dog parks ('Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon', published in Gender, Place & Culture).

The brazen ridiculousness of that last article raised suspicions in a Wall Street Journal writer, among others, and the hoaxers' cover was blown. But by this time, four of the twenty spoof papers had gained publication in peer-reviewed journals, nine had been accepted for publication or were under peer review, and only six had been rejected.

As the trio of conspirators explained in a commentary published in Sociological Methods & Research in 2021,

"Our intention was to use scholarship that we consider to be extremely shoddy methodologically and highly questionable ethically to write inadequate papers that are indistinguishable from genuine examples of the genre. We considered the scholarship to be poor due to its neglect of rigorous empirical research in favor of ideological theories and unethical due to its negative stereotyping of certain demographic groups defined by immutable characteristics—for example, white or male—opposition to science and explicit authoritarianism in rejection of viewpoint diversity."

Understanding the “Grievance Studies Affair” Papers and Why They Should Be Reinstated: A Response to Geoff Cole

Hold that statement in your mind - and consider holding your nose - as we jump feet-first into the academic equivalent of Godzilla vs Kong: a bunch of identity politicking social (pseudo)scientists send questionnaires to STEM students, and get a little more than they bargained for.

Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy

Three academics from Oregon State University secured a $349,311 grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a research project on the impact of 'gender' on the education and career progress of engineers. The stated objectives of this project are:

"(i) to infuse critical theory and methodologies into engineering education research; (ii) to record, examine, and share how undergraduate engineering students of different genders find belonging and success; and (iii) to collaborate with research participants to generate recommendations toward transforming engineering programs into more inclusive and just spaces. Analysis will inform understandings of resiliency in the face of gender marginalization as well as potential subjugation linked to other intersecting identities."

Award Abstract # 1764103 Research: Invisible Gendered Experiences in Engineering Education

Yes, almost $350K of taxpayers' money blown, not on ensuring that engineering students learn how to design bridges that don't collapse, or nuclear power plants that don't melt down, but on trying to make engineering a safe space for pronoun-brandishing rainbow people.

My son just happens to be enrolled in an engineering/IT degree, so I can confidently tell you where the average engineering student would suggest that you insert your pronouns. Male students outnumber female students by around three to one in my son's engineering classes, in spite of decades of government programs (costing millions of dollars) aimed at attracting more female students into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses... and also in spite of international research that clearly demonstrates that girls do at least as well as boys in high school science subjects in two thirds of countries.

The simple fact is, the average female is more interested in people than things, and hence is more likely to be interested in person-oriented careers, such as teaching, psychology, law, nursing and medicine, even if she is perfectly capable of studying STEM subjects. Conversely, the average male is more interested in things than people, and hence is more likely to be drawn to thing-oriented careers, such as engineering, computer science and trades.

And no, this is not because 'the patriarchy' bars women from generally more-lucrative STEM careers:

"Cross-national studies have shown that countries that are ranked lower on international measures of gender equality show a higher representation of women in STEM-fields."

Occupational Attributes and Occupational Gender Segregation in Sweden: Does It Change Over Time?

Sweden, for example, is consistently ranked among the most gender-equal nations in the world, yet its labour market is among Europe's most sex-segregated along traditional occupational lines. A 2020 analysis of sex distribution in various occupations found that

"The proportion of women was higher, on average, in occupations high in people orientation and verbal demands and lower in occupations high in things orientation and numerical demands."

Occupational Attributes and Occupational Gender Segregation in Sweden: Does It Change Over Time?

However, undeterred by this body of research demonstrating that engineering is just more of a dude thing, our intrepid Oregon State University academics launched their taxpayer-funded project to socially engineer engineers, with a "first-of-its-kind national questionnaire for transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) students in undergraduate engineering and computer science programs".

They sent a link to the questionnaire to "over 3,000 email addresses of department chairs, program administrators, and faculty at accredited engineering bachelor’s degree-granting institutions", requesting that it be publicised to their student body, with a reward of a $5 Amazon gift card for completing it.

Their massive email blitzkrieg netted only 723 responses to the questionnaire and of these, 374 were invalid or incomplete and just 299 were from students who identified as transgender or 'gender nonconforming'¹.

But it was the 50 responses which the researchers designated 'malicious responses' (either because the "Answer contained slur, hate speech, or mocked research/researcher" or "implied bad faith (i.e., direct mention of gift cards or memes") that provided the fodder for the 'Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy' paper. And what rich fodder it was. The researchers helpfully assembled the ‘demographics’ of the malicious respondents into a table, which I present below for your edification.

Table 2. Demographics of the malicious respondents

By the way, in case you're wondering why so many respondents listed variants of 'attack helicopter' as their gender, it's a popular internet meme which originated in the online gaming subculture and rapidly spread through the weirder reaches of the internet, such as Reddit and 4chan. The meme parodies the gender and sexual identification posts frequently seen on other online fora, by substituting the desire to be an attack helicopter for the desire to change one's sex:

"I sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. Ever since I was a boy I dreamed of soaring over the oilfields dropping hot sticky loads on disgusting foreigners. People say to me that a person being a helicopter is Impossible and I'm f@*king retarded but I don't care, I'm beautiful. I'm having a plastic surgeon install rotary blades, 30 mm cannons and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body. From now on I want you guys to call me 'Apache' and respect my right to kill from above and kill needlessly. If you can't accept me you're a heliphobe and need to check your vehicle privilege. Thank you for being so understanding."

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter - Know Your Meme

Believe me, when you have an engineering student in your family, you learn about this stuff, whether you want to or not.

Predictably, the authors of this paper didn't get the joke, sniffing that

"It is notable that the specific descriptor of an Apache Attack Helicopter is referenced by several different participants—itself a synthesis and reflection of U.S. military force and the appropriation of Indigenous language by colonizers."

Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences

Yeah, or maybe they're just dudes who hang out in online chat spaces, sharing off-colour memes to make each other laugh. Also note that the attack helicopter meme actually cleverly critiques the use of "U.S. military force" by referencing "soaring over the oilfields" to kill "disgusting foreigners" - clearly a swipe at the wars of aggression waged to steal Middle Eastern oil - and theatrically demanding that others "respect my right to kill from above and kill needlessly". Such subtleties apparently escape our well-funded social science researchers, who assume that anyone who holds the "belief that gender is genital-based at birth and any deviation is undeniably outrageous" and hence "that trans-ness is inherently made up or artificial", is thereby a "white supremacist".

Likewise, the researchers show precisely zero capacity to intelligently engage with serious comments from the students, which expressed their intense frustration with the subject matter of the questionnaire, and more broadly with the intrusion of identity politics into their discipline. Comments like these:

• "a degree has nothing to do with gender”

• "While I of course do not condone bullying or discrimination, I wish people in universities (especially the faculty) would not focus so much on gender and identity. That doesn’t matter. Just let people do their thing and teach them how to do Gauss eliminations and whatnot."

• "Please do some research on something that will actually benefit the human race. This notion that these quacks are normal is crazy. Honestly, they make engineering courses more a pain in the ass. Why cant they just sit down and learn the material like the rest of us and stop making everything about themselves?"

• "How on earth did this study get funding???"

• "I really can’t be bothered at this point. You’re ruining genuine scientific disciplines here. There are two genders, male and female. If an engineer creates a bolt and a nut but then whimsically labels them, then they’re not that great of an engineer."

How did the researchers respond to these critiques? By summarily dismissing them as right-wing talking points, reflective of "characteristics of contemporary far-right or fascist political movements in the U.S.":

"The malicious responses... indicated that discussions of gender and sexuality in STEM education are flashpoints for fascist ideologues living 'inside the house' of engineering and computer science."

Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences

Because everyone who disagrees with me is literally Hitler.

Everyone I Don't Like Is Hitler - Know Your Meme

They also loftily opined that "Programs that seek to promote equity and inclusion may be perceived by these respondents as antithetical to ideologies of meritocracy." I can just picture them quivering with incandescent rage at the temerity of these students - who worked their butts off to gain entry to an engineering program, and are still working their butts off to earn what is widely acknowledged to be one of the most difficult degrees - daring to complain about muddle-headed social studies academics spending public money on a vanity project that attacks the very foundations of their discipline. By the way, if you've ever paused to wonder why it is that our electricity grids are remarkably reliable, aircraft accidents are exceedingly rare, and bridges almost never fall down, the answer to these questions has a lot to do with the fact that engineering is an intensely meritocratic profession. And you should be bloody grateful for that.

I'm sure the researchers would have received even more 'malicious responses' from those predominantly "white, cis male, heterosexual" engineering and computer science students if they had advertised their own 'demographics' in the survey, as they did in the paper:

"Andrea Haverkamp is Jewish, transgender, queer, and white. Finn Johnson is white, transgender, queer, and disabled, and Michelle Bothwell is white, cisgender, queer, and disabled. Qwo-Li Driskill is light-skinned, multiracial (Indigenous/Black/white), queer, trans feminine, and disabled, and Devlin Montfort is white, transgender, and queer."

Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences

This recitation of every item on the identitarian alphabet soup menu was so preposterous that it aroused my suspicions that the paper was an elaborate Sokal-style hoax. But a quick search for the authors' academic profiles disabused me of this comforting notion. These are, indeed, real academics who actually teach students. God help us all.

Speaking of needing help, the researchers - all grown adults, mind you - saw fit to let readers know how badly they were affected by the engineering students' malign creativity:

"The malicious words and slurs directed towards our research team had a profound impact on morale and mental health, particularly for one of our graduate student researchers, who was the primary data analyst. As a transgender woman who was already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric, managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm."

Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences

I wonder how much of that $350K grant was siphoned off for therapy to help the poor dear heal from the literal violence inflicted on they/them while they read mean words.

There's so much more to critique in this ridiculous paper, including discussions of how white supremacist movements recruit members from online gaming communities (funny, I thought that was the CIA's job), and the absurd linking of memes referenced by survey respondents with "the fascist storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021" (by unarmed protesters, not a single one of whom has been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government). But I think you've probably got the message.

The researchers are ideologically possessed by postmodernist doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible with the practical orientation of STEM students. Contrast these two statements, one made by the researchers, and the other an excerpt from an email sent to them by someone who received a link to the questionnaire:

Statement 1: The researchers

“Trans and queer methodologies are interdisciplinary, addressing multi-faceted mechanisms of power through engaging in cross-disciplinary politics, methods, relationships, and intellectual structures (Pryse 2000). If ‘to queer’ is to destabilize normativity and the nature of knowledge and its power-as-universal-truth, then a ‘queer’ methodology will destabilize traditional research trajectories and act as an interpretive project.”

Statement 2: The response

“I am only writing this email to make it more obviously aware to you that your ‘transgender and non-conforming gender’ studies are only encouraging this new unfortunate and immature movement that is happening across the United States at this time. I am appalled that you think it is okay to waste money and precious time on something so irrelevant in the field of engineering… please dispose of this study and focus on something better. Do it for humanity. The decisions we make now will effect (sic) the outcome of history forever. Don’t make the wrong decisions.”

Engineering and computer science students are overwhelmingly male, with a strong 'thing' orientation. The word power to them means 'the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time', and bears no relation to any hierarchy of political agency. They like to deal with real things, in the real world, and they actually believe that real things exist and can be objectively observed, studied, designed, built, repaired and improved. They want to spend their time in university learning about real things, and they have precisely zero interest in 'interpretive projects' and 'destabilising normativity'.

And no amount of self-indulgent blathering from the queer/trans/disabled/light-skinned/multiracial social science grifters about being "part of a movement that will dismantle hate, bigotry, and oppression" is going to change that. At least, I bloody well hope not, because all I care about in engineers is their ability to design and build stuff that works. (My hope is buttressed by the fact that this absurd paper was rejected by multiple engineering journals, allegedly because of poor 'fit' - which sounds to me like a polite brush-off - and eventually found its way into the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, an in-house journal of Northwestern University whose chief claim to fame appears to be that its editorial board consists entirely of trans people. How's that for diversity.)

Let's return to that statement by the Grievance Studies Affair trio, that I quoted previously:

"Our intention was to use scholarship that we consider to be extremely shoddy methodologically and highly questionable ethically to write inadequate papers that are indistinguishable from genuine examples of the genre. We considered the scholarship to be poor due to its neglect of rigorous empirical research in favor of ideological theories and unethical due to its negative stereotyping of certain demographic groups defined by immutable characteristics—for example, white or male—opposition to science and explicit authoritarianism in rejection of viewpoint diversity."

Understanding the “Grievance Studies Affair” Papers and Why They Should Be Reinstated: A Response to Geoff Cole

My challenge to you is to go and read the paper and ask yourself whether it fits this bill, and let me know what you think in the Comments section below.

In my view, any researcher who states up-front that "our methodological frameworks do not attempt to remain 'objective' in our analysis of our data" should be immediately disqualified from consideration. But on top of this, they indulge in negative stereotyping by derogatorily referring to the majority of engineering students as "straight cisgender white men"; they draw ideologically-driven conclusions from a ridiculously small sample of responses made by students who were plainly taking the mickey out of what they perceived as a ridiculous waste of an NSF grant; and then they argue that these sarcastic responses are evidence that STEM schools are hotbeds of fascist activity.

And finally, let me know if you had difficulty deciding whether this paper was a genuine example of postmodern scholarship or an elaborate Sokal-style hoax.

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1. I assume that many young women who enrol in engineering would be thought of as 'gender nonconforming' which, when I was growing up, was generally called 'being a tomboy'. And no one really had a problem with it, because in the 1970s and 80s, we actually believed that traditional gender roles were passe and that people could choose what they wanted to do in life, based on their personal preference and aptitudes rather than stereotypical notions about what was appropriate for someone of their sex. What a concept.