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.
