The College Fix

Tenure is meaningless if your colleagues feel mocked

The next Robert Oscar Lopez may be the person behind the anonymous Twitter account @Real_PeerReview.

By highlighting the cringeworthy nature of what passes for academic research in the far-left humanities and social sciences – “simply publishing links to abstracts and highlighting one or two sentences from their summaries” – the account upset some academics so much they threatened to expose the person behind it, The Daily Caller reports:

@Real_PeerReview highlighted more than 1,000 scholarly papers in four months. Many were essentially Mad Libs with various topics inserted between the phrases “whiteness,” “hegemony,” and the “patriarchy.”

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The account shut down abruptly earlier this month because the person who ran it “is not optimistic about ability of the current tenure system (broadly) to protect people in similar situations, especially if the affected people work in humanities,” a source close to the tweeter told the publication:

When people in a position to significantly affect the research of [the tweeter] started asking really pointed questions and making veiled threats, the decision was made to shut it all down.

The anonymous academic has an “advanced degree in social sciences” and allegedly feared professional ruin if that person’s identity was exposed.

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Fortunately a new band of academics picked up where @Real_PeerReview left off, highlighting such research gems as the idea that the “religious right” invented pedophiles, an author’s experience as a “sex tourist in the Caribbean,” and guilt for accidentally traveling first-class (seriously).

Pedophiles are a myth created by the religious right in order to repress sexuality https://t.co/PzGuHxgPeA pic.twitter.com/4cbFSV9BQi

— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) June 12, 2016

OK, I've resisted RT'ing @RealPeerReview tweets. Until now. This is just too much. All that's missing is grant funds https://t.co/bSrkf4tsJg

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) June 11, 2016

On accidentally travelling in first classhttps://t.co/0sr3z4LoW3 pic.twitter.com/JGAYZ0RcXY

— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) June 12, 2016

One of the academics in the new group account, who goes by @okayultra, told The Daily Caller she lives in a non-Western country where “standing up for gays and personal autonomy” is as dangerous as mocking critical race theory in the West. She has been targeted for outing as well:

Read the post.

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