Fake academic scandal: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf words used in embarrassing journal hoax

A trio of concerned academics has published seven intentionally absurd papers in leading scholarly journals, making bizarre recommendations including chaining up children and keeping men on leashes.

The trio say the papers, which used fabricated authors and credentials, are an attempt to expose political bias in fields that study race, gender and sexuality, which they see as being misled by biased research and poor methodology.

Their papers argued for a slew of bewildering positions, including chaining up privileged school children as an educational opportunity and a push to include “fat bodybuilding”’ in professional bodybuilding competitions as a way to nullify fat shaming.

Another paper rewrote a chapter of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, replacing parts of Hitler’s political manifesto with terms including “solidarity allyship”, “neo-liberal feminism” and “'multi-variate matrix of domination”.

Each of the papers were peer-reviewed before being published, meaning they passed the highest level of critical assessment in their fields.

The trio went public with the project after The Wall Street Journal uncovered it, saying a paper which claimed dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’" was ridiculous enough to pique the publication's interest.

"We intentionally made the papers absurd and used faulty methods to see if they could pass scrutiny at the highest level of academia. Concerningly, they did," James Lindsay, one of the authors of the papers, said.

"A rambling poetic monologue of a bitter, divorced feminist written by a teenage-angst poetry generator shouldn't be accepted as a scholarly article worthy of publishing."

In US humanities departments an academic with seven papers published within seven years is awarded tenure, an indefinite academic appointment. The trio completed these seven papers within 10 months.

It's scary that the work of these scholars is taught in classes,

The papers' authors, which includes UK academic Helen Pluckrose and philosophy professor Peter Boghossian, argued they were left-leaning liberals that thought these particular disciplines had become corrupted.

"We think rigorous scholarship in the areas of gender, race and sexuality is important but we see the type of scholarship we have been exploring as a hindrance to obtaining genuine knowledge by which to achieve social progress," Pluckrose said.

Boghossian, a professor at Portland State University, said he had been targeted professionally for questioning several of the fields in the past and expected to be fired or disciplined for his role in the papers, but denied he was motivated by a personal grudge.

"It's scary that the work of these scholars is taught in classes, taken up by activists, and misinforms politicians and journalists about the true nature of our cultural realities," Boghossian said.

"Our project has uncovered their corruption."