Exposing academia's idiocy

Roger Kimball writes in the New York Post,

Do you remember when Kim Jong-un banned sarcasm ­because he worried that people were only agreeing with him “ironically”?

Portland State University is taking a page from Kim’s book, ­attempting to fire philosophy prof Peter Boghossian for making PC academe look ridiculous.

Boghossian and two colleagues confected some 20 preposterous hoax essays calculated to appeal to the thriving field of identity studies that focus on the grievances of ever narrower slices of the population.

Seven of these fake papers — including a rewrite of a passage from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” from a “feminist” perspective — were accepted for publication before Boghossian’s prank was revealed.

...So-called “higher” education in America circa 2019 is anything but higher. The question is: How long will a credulous public go on supporting an enterprise that is not only irrelevant to the better ­aspirations of our culture but is positively opposed to them?

The only hope lies in more scholars following Boghossian’s footsteps, by calling out corrupt scholarship in the humanities and giving grievance studies the mockery they deserve. But don’t bet on it: The petty bureaucrats who run the quad are as vengeful and ­vicious as any Korean tyrant.

Read more here.