Duke's hoax-believers & "Sokal's hoax"

Yesterday I posted concerning an article published in Social Text, a Duke University Press journal. ( Duke faculty hoax-believers are rewriting their history )

The article's authors are three Duke professors who were stout supporters of the Nifong/Duke trustee OK'ed trashing of the lacrosse team, the frame-up attempt of three innocent Duke students, and the ongoing cover-up of the frame-up attempt.

The three professors - Robyn Weigman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt - - raised no objection to rogue DA Mike Nifong's conduct which led to his disbarment.

They raised no objection when the CASTRATE and GIVE THEM EQUEL MEASURE banners were waved by a hate-filled crowd at the wall of East Campus.

And the professors raised no objection when white male Duke students were endangered by crowds on Duke's West Campus distributing Vigilante posters and shouting threats.

Given all of that and much more that could be said about the shockingly disreputable actions and inactions of professors Weigman, Lubiano, and Hardt, you might reasonably think the purposes of their article were to explain and apologize for all they did to enable the Duke Hoax frauds and injustices.

But they did no such thing.

Instead , they did what I reported yesterday:

[The three] faculty hoax-believers are now busy rewriting the history of what they did.

It's all very Orwellian. They present their fictions as facts.

And as you'd guess if you know the Duke faculty hoax-believers, the sorrow they feel is for themselves, whom they view as the real victims of the frame-up attempt they helped launch and sustain for almost a year.

Weigman, Lubiano and Hardt's article should remind anyone who cares about Duke that the University must examine why so many of its faculty not only embraced a wildly improbable hoax and engaged in odious behavior, but why so many of them still endorse that behavior, and are upset by what decent people think was only fair: the exoneration of the three falsely indicted players?

There's something else the publication of Weigman, Lubiano and Hardt's article in Social Text brings to mind: "the Sokal hoax."

When Social Text and Duke were hoaxed in 1996, President Nan Keohane promised procedures would be put in place to assure that something like that would never again happen.

But now we have not only the Duke Hoax set off by Crystall Mangum and Mike Nifong's lies, but Weigman, Lubiano and Hardt's article rewriting the history of those lies to cast themselves in a "kinder, gentler light."

Bosh!

Duke needs truth, especially when "Dick's senior team" and The Chronicle's editorial board tell us to MoveOn.Duke.

For any of you who don't know about the Sokal hoax, here's a start below taken from a Wiki entry. I also plan to send KC Johnson and Liestoppers a link to this post.

I'm sure they'll have much more to tell us about the Duke and Sokal hoaxes.
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The Sokal affair (also Sokal's hoax) was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University).

In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[1]

The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"[2], was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. (My recollection is that Stanley Fish had assurred Duke's administrators that Social Text was peer reviewed. But someone might want to check that with Fish and Duke. -- JinC)

On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics.
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The entire Wiki entry is here. It includes links to footnotes.

For a lot more from Sokal himself, including papers generated by his self-admitted hoax, look here.

A very big "thank you" to the Anon commenter who reminded me of Sokal's hoax and provided the Wiki link.