The amount of pretense in academia is such that one cannot but rejoice when an enterprising professor pulls off a hoax that at least temporarily unmasks that pretense.
Such a fellow is physicist Alan Sokal, who, as a New York University physics professor, submitted a nonsense-filled manuscript to the journal Social Text. This journal was at the time, not peer reviewed, and Sokol's article, which sounded duly scientific, appeared in 1996. In another journal, Lingua Franca, Sokol exposed his own hoax. His purpose, he wrote, was to satirize what he considered the trendy, nonsensical blather of non-scientist writers who, despite their lack of scientific training, like to make pronouncements about science. His hoax article about quantum physics, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," did just that.
A year later, Sokol co-authored a book on how post-modernist leftists mangle science. (Thus always to those who write academic journal articles using the word "toward" in the title.)
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