…the mission of Duke University is to provide a superior liberal education to undergraduate students, attending not only to their intellectual growth but also to their development as adults committed to high ethical standards and full participation as leaders in their communities;

“Lauren” was proud to be accepted by Duke University. She was so proud that she turned down a full-ride scholarship to Vanderbilt. There was, however, this nagging issue. How does a girl of humble means handle $60,000 in annual costs to attend? In a rational universe, she goes to Vandy. In what passes for Modern American Culture; she goes to Hell instead.

A Duke University student using the pseudonym “Lauren” made news last week when it was learned she was participating in “rough-sex” porn to pay her $60,000 tuition, room and board.

So has Duke kept in accordance with its mission statement by kicking her out or at least staging a serious intervention and getting her professional help? Why no! You can’t be quaint and old-fashioned like that. It would enforce repressive gender norms. It wasn’t like she stripped for a bunch of inebriated Lacrosse players – that would be demeaning!

Is it fair to just pick on Duke? Sure, screw with them. They don’t exactly seem to mind. Nor do they possess legitimate moral gravamen to lodge any complaint. Naomi Schaeffer offers details below.

So where are the grown-ups in Lauren’s life? Cheering her on. Her parents at least tacitly approve of her activities. Her women’s studies professors are probably applauding as they pen articles in academic journals about her courage.

And ultimately what is it for? We learn just this week that prestigious scientific journals are knowingly accepting randomly generated gibberish as scientific papers as long as they get paid their conference fees. That is; as long as you fork over the green, you can get your name on an officially scientific science-paper. Poor “Lauren” even has to take a shower after she’d done selling out.

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

This is nothing new. Dr. Alan Sokal famously blew up a Journal of Post-modernism by randomly generating a paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” In defense of the victimized journal Social Text they were merely poseurs. They were simply too ignorant to differentiate a legitimate academic effort from a pile of male bovine scatology desecrating the processed remains of a dead tree.

Dr. Cyril Labbe’ shows just how much like poor, crass “Lauren” many of our most prestigious academic science journals have become. Combining sardonic wit with scathing moral anger at what has become of his profession, he wrote a much more serious and legitimate paper which he ironically entitled “Ike Antkare one of the great stars in the scientific firmament”

Since the 8th of April 2010, these tools have allowed Ike Antkare to become one of the most highly cited scientists of the modern world (see figure 3,2,4,5,6). According to Scholarometer, Ike Antkare has 102 publications (almost all in 2009) and has an h-index of 94, putting him in the 21st position of the most highly cited scientists. This score is less than Freud, in 1st position with a h-index of 183, but better than Einstein in 36th position with a h-index of 84. Best of all, in regards to the hm-index Ike Antkare is in sixth position outclassing all scientists in his field (computer science). This document explains why this is possible and how you could become as good as Ike Antkare. The first section demonstrates how relatively decent, fake scientific documents can be generated on the necessary scale.

Poor, poor “Lauren.” If she isn’t faking “The Big-O,” she may be less indecent than some of the great minds she puts up with intense humiliation to afford to learn from. She might even have a future coaxing donation money out of the rich alumni. Her talents could offer a cash-starved university far more than any mere “Ike Antkare.”

I pity “Lauren” on a certain level. It’s not just that she is selling out her humanity in pursuit of a sheepskin. It’s that she gets to learn from “Ike Antkare” in return for her abject disgrace. She’ll get to live with this if she lives long enough to turn 65 and look back at all the wild and crazy things she did in her youth. Duke University, supposedly dedicated to “attending not only to their intellectual growth but also to their development as adults committed to high ethical standards” just callously cashes the checks.

And it’s not just Duke*. There are a whole bevy of prestigious academic institutions, promising to “attend to intellectual growth,” who couldn’t possibly decide whether Quantum Gravity is a String, Weave or Morphogenic Field. These are people who gladly charge you $300K to spend five prime years of your life learning from venerable intellectual titans who wouldn’t even know enough to laugh at the sentence “In mathematical terms, Derrida’s observation relates to the invariance of the Einstein field equation under nonlinear space-time diffeomorphisms (self-mappings of the space-time manifold which are infinitely differentiable but not necessarily analytic).”

“Lauren” as The Whore of Babylon, may well be the perfect, garish mascot for The Duke Blue Devils. However, she is only the most current and visible manifestation of the extent to which the modern profession of academia has utterly prostituted itself to the detriment of our nation.

*-Not that this observation in any way reduces their culpability.