On a heads up from Power Line, I linked to an article by Peter Dreier called the academic drivel report.  Dreier was invited to submit a paper for publication and presentation at a conference in Tokyo, Japan.  The proposed topic made absolutely no sense to him. So he wrote a totally nonsensical proposal in reply. 

He describes what happened next in an article that I call the The Big Con. He submitted to the panel an abstract, this is a summary of what he intended to present. What he sent, is known in law enforcement circles as “bluster and bullshit, what he called total nonsense.  His submission was accepted.  

Multiply this by thousands of times and the whole idea of “publish or perish” within academia is a crime against the environment.  The horror all those trees dying, the ozone layer depleted, as academics jet off to far flung locales to present papers of dubious scholarship.

Even if you don’t have time to read the article, you might want to save it.  It makes a handy bludgeon for the next time a prissy academic type gets on his high horse about the mating habits of the blind salamander.