THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN YOUR TECHNICAL PAPER GOING UNREAD AND UNCITED.

That's the usual fate of the Minimal Publishable Unit.  "A Minimal Publishable Unit in Hypatia, a Minimal Publishable Unit in Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini: What Difference, at this point, does it make?"

We opened Friday's survey of encouraging developments in a world gone nuts with a story of engineering students mocking a thoroughly silly survey by, inter alia, claiming to "identify" as an Apache attack helicopter.

It got better.  People took the time to read the paper, which might not be in a peer-reviewed journal, or if it is a peer-reviewed journal, it is the last journal being run off on a mimeograph machine.  Rather than engage the attention, which can produce more Minimal Publishable Units (one of the most cited authors in public economics was a scholar who made a lot of instructive mistakes) the authors looked for a safe space to crawl into.

The research team declared that the mockery they received "had a profound impact on morale and mental health," particularly for one transgender researcher who was "already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric." The paper claimed that "managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm" of having to read students' responses in the survey.

I wish that had occurred to me when I got, as I sometimes did, a scathing referee report.  It got better still.

The researchers appeared surprised that their own findings had been "ultimately rejected" by many academic journals, leaving them with the impression that their research decrying so-called fascism in academia is viewed by some as "irrelevant to engineering education, if not alarmist."

They claimed their research methods used "antifascist and trans/queer methodologies to transform the raw data" and "make effective interventions and transformations to our programs and institutions." They described "Anti-fascism" in particular as a framework that connects "contemporary fascist movements to the foundation of the U.S. as a racial project," noting elsewhere that "White supremacy" remains ubiquitous in the U.S.

Saying the solution for the rise of fascism is to change education itself, the team wrote, "The university at its most ideal can be envisioned as ‘a central site for revolutionary struggle, a site where we can work to educate for critical consciousness’ using ‘a pedagogy of liberation.'"

What's next in this melt-down?  Holding their collective breath until they turn blue if their institutions don't appoint another cohort of Morale Conditioners, with more power than the existing aggrandizement of deanlets and deanlings?  Invoking the possibly greater incidence of suicidal behavior among crossers?

There's something manipulative about that "traumatic harm" talk.  It strikes me as adjacent to the distressed student threatening suicide if he or she doesn't make that A in the class or get into professional school.  Such students deserve care, but they ought not be enabled in such a way as to guilt a professor, or a department, into diluting their standards.  Or it calls to mind those sad ballads of unrequited lovers: but go along with your little girl dating or marrying the Leader of the Pack and be prepared to stand for the divorce or the funeral later.   "Revolutionary struggle" in the university?  It's going on, only the faculty who conduct these silly studies are encountering the insurgency.

It was college students mocking their professors, not professors leading violent protests against conservative speakers coming to college campuses, as happens seemingly every day in America.

And the professors are utterly mockworthy. They claim that somebody identifying as an Apache Helicopter (a common meme that makes fun of self-assigned genders) on a survey is indicative of White Supremacy, when in fact it indicates nothing more than a healthy contempt for their supposed betters who are so disconnected from the study of engineering that they are conducting this survey.

Which, by the way, was administered by, you guessed it, engineering professors at Oregon State who got a National Science Foundation grant to do it, along with some gender studies profs.

I miss William Proxmire, because I suspect whatever the purpose and narrative of that grant was, it would be worthy of a Golden Fleece award.  In his absence, it is up to us, the Militant Normals, to continue the task.  "Sometimes the proper response to stupidity is to mock it because ridicule is the only proper response."

So mote it be.