Cooper’s last: Academic hoaxes and the ‘Ideas Boom’

A few weeks ago on Radio National’s Drive program, Patricia Karvelas interviewed Peter Dreier, an urban-studies academic based in the United States, about a ‘hoax’ he perpetrated on the academy. Dreier had made up a conference abstract composed of deliberately obtuse concepts – ‘pure gibberish’, in his words – and successfully submitted it to the conference organisers. Karvelas’ introduction framed Dreier’s act as heroic, with lines such as ‘Have you ever wanted to expose a great injustice…or take a stand?’, the assumption being that Dreier had done precisely that by exposing the vacuousness of some academic research. The Radio National interview came off the back of an article Dreier wrote for The American Prospect, in which he confessed to having faked a style of academic discourse, in the tradition of Alan Sokal. Dreier sat on this information for six years but has now transformed this obscure incident into a wider attack on academic jargon, postmodern theorising, ivory-tower specialisation and the lack of ‘real-world’ application of work in the social sciences and humanities.