Academia fails the smell test

07 Jan 2025

I’m a bit behind the outrage news cycle here, but In November last year, a student at the University of Cambridge by the name of Amelia (Ally) Louks unintentionally created quite the stink over her PhD thesis entitled “The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose”. It all started with a seemingly innocuous twitter post celebrating successful completion of her degree, and quickly spiralled into a furore that “broke the internet”.

Why? To put it gently, her thesis looks like garbage. For example, the second sentence of the abstract lays out her aim to

...offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell's application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures.

For most people that fails the sniff test. The stench of pseudointellectual equine fecal matter is frankly overpowering. Surely only a particularly niche brand of masochist would be interested in subjecting themselves to what is no doubt the ordeal of hundreds of pages of this.

Which leaves many people wondering; how on Earth can someone get a PhD from one of the pre-eminent higher education institutes in the world by producing what appears to be an elaborately curated, heaping monument to obscurity and the unmistakable scent of pasture?

Fashionable nonsense

I share the disheartenment of the internet. In a sane world, this document would have been ignored by everyone as the esoteric and pointless ramblings of someone who has the comfort and privilege of being able to waste their time on such trivialities. It should not result in a doctoral degree from one of the most prestigious institutions on the planet.

Unfortunately, Louks’ thesis is not some isolated incident. It is just the tip of the iceberg. There are mountains of garbage just like it in academia. Entire industries are dedicated to producing this garbage.

How did this happen? Part of it is an insistence in many quarters on treating humanities subjects e.g. English literature, anthropology, gender studies, art etc as if they are on a par with the natural sciences - physics, chemistry, biology etc. The problem is that they are fundamentally different. In the natural sciences, there are real discoveries to be made, and real research to be done. There is knowledge that require serious time and effort to master, and it can take the better part of a lifetime to make a notable contribution to these fields. And no one can argue about the results; the achievements of science are absolutely extraordinary.

In the humanities, there is not much of any of that. Nonetheless there is a hierarchy to be constructed - somebody must, after all, be the leading gender studies scholar in the world. In the absence of the potential for real scientific competence or truth-seeking, that hierarchy becomes predicated on something else entirely - one’s ability to dress up mundane or silly ideas in a way that superficially makes them sound just as impressive as actual science. Noam Chomsky nails it in this clip,

Suppose you're a literary scholar at some elite university, or anthropologist or whatever. If you do your work seriously, that's fine. But you don't get any prizes for it. On the other hand, you take a look at the rest of the university, and you've got these guys in the physics department, and the math department, and they have all kind of complicated theories, which of course we can't understand, but they seem to understand them, and they have principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles, and they do experiments and find either they work or they don't work. Thats really impressive stuff, so I want to be like that too. I want to have a theory.

In the humanities, literary criticism, anthropology and so on, theres a field called theory. We're just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensively, we can talk incomprehensively. They have big words, we'll have big words. They draw far-reaching conclusions, we'll draw far-reaching conclusions. We're just as prestigious as they are. Now if they say look well look we're doing real science and you guys aren't, that's white, male, sexist, bourgeois, whatever the answer is, how are we any different from them? Ok that's appealing.

It really is that simple. And depressing.

All of this was exposed quite brilliantly by Alan Sokal in 1996, who has been a professor of physics at New York University and University College London. He submitted a fake article to the journal Social Text entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, arguing that quantum gravity is a social construct. Needless to say, the paper was filled with nonsense. It nonetheless got published. In 1998, he wrote the book Fashionable nonsense criticising the postmodern academic tradition that resulted in the unfortunate institutional circumstances that allow this sort of thing to happen.

This was followed up by the Grievance studies affair in 2017 and 2018, by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. They wrote 20 articles filled with patently absurd nonsense and submitted them to various peer-reviewed journals. By the time the hoax was revealed in October 2018, 4 papers had been published, 3 were accepted but not published, 6 were rejected and 7 were under review. The published papers included claims that dogs participate in rape culture and that men can reduce their transphobia by using anal sex toys on themselves.

Further evidence of the rot comes from Judith Butler, who is the Maxine Elliot professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. That is a named professorship at one of the most elite universities in the world. In her most famous work, Gender trouble she argues that gender is not innate, but a performance. Which, depending on how you define gender, is either a truism or an absurdity. Butler is famous for her crimes against the English language, illustrated nicely with this literal award-winningly awful sentence

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

This leads me to what I call The Butler Challenge™: Choose any book by Judith Butler, flip to any page, choose any paragraph, and find me a sentence that isn’t complete gibberish. I offer a handsome bounty to anyone who succeeds in this daring endeavour.

State-sponsored ideological nonsense

If this was all just blather done in the name of light entertainment that would be one thing. It is altogether another thing when the humanities departments at universities are mass indoctrinating students with a particular ideology and sending them out in the world with revolutionary intentions. And on taxpayers’ dime to boot. Tens of millions of pounds are spent funding anti-scientific “research” in univerities. This is stuff that is on a par with flat earth theory, except far more socially destructive. That is unacceaptable.

Unfortunately this shows no signs of abating anytime soon.