The authors were entirely fake and the text and images were generated by artificial intelligence and packed with unbearably obvious gibberish. It blasted right past the editor and reviewers and was flagged by X users for its truly hilarious and cartoonish images, one of which meant absolutely nothing at all.
It seems that not even the specialists can tell the science from AI-generated caricatures built from utter rubbish. What’s worse is that everyone knows that these cases of hoaxes, plagiarism, and obvious corruption and incompetence are only the tip of the iceberg. Vast swaths of official academia are entirely fraudulent, a heavily funded and deeply institutionalized version of the fake paper published in Frontiers.
Two days ago, a friend and I were musing about the meaning of all of this. He wondered just how easy it was to generate these deep fakes. I pulled up an artificial intelligence (AI) engine and asked for a paper proving that all human beings should be living in refrigerator boxes. I did this just because it was the first thing that came to mind.
Within seconds, I was sitting on a compelling paper with complete arguments and citations and every accouterment of scholarship in modern academia. I did the same thing again with a request to prove that caffeine fixes dyslexia and the results were even more compelling. No, I didn’t submit them anywhere but with a bit of work and time, I’m guessing they could find a home somewhere in the thousands of expensive academic journals to which tax-funded libraries subscribe.
Truly, we are living in the midst of the great meltdown of elite academic culture. It’s likely been falling apart for many decades, but the past few years have been devastating. AI now threatens to reveal the entire empire as a hoax.
If you visit one of the world’s historical universities—Salamanca in Spain, Oxford University in the UK, Harvard in the United States—you find living ruins of what we used to call intellectual life. They were places that birthed great ideas in philosophy, science, and the arts. They were created with high ideals and confidence in the idea of truth and its gradual discovery and elucidation among colleagues trained to show discipline, rigor, and courage.
All were sanctuaries set up with internal freedom for its scholars and security from corruptions of the outside world that would interfere with the power of the research and teaching that went on within its walls. What they all sought was a higher expression of civilized life for all, which they saw as an outpouring of truth. Within this framework, the fruits were born from sharing research and ideas. Collegiality and trust between and among faculty and students was key.
Crucial to the founding of them all was a deep sense of mission. At the time of their construction, the world was broken in obvious ways: via disease, hunger, poverty, illiteracy, violence and war, and lawless despotisms of various sorts. Implicit in the task of research and education was a fiery attachment to curbing these evils and improving understanding as a means of making life on Earth better. And so they labored for hundreds of years toward this end, and with great success.
The whole scene we could describe at length and celebrate with pages of romantic prose about what once was. It seems nearly extinct now. So many friends of mine entered into academia with lofty visions of what could be, only to find themselves trapped in cruel and punishing bureaucracies that force compliance with lies. They have been forced into a choice of changing professions or giving up their dreams.
Many have been forced out in the past few years—railroaded out by the cancel brigade—or had their employment terminated by vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 controls, which served no public health purpose at all but intensified and codified the purge of dissidents that was already underway. What remains is a kind of dystopian scene: an ideological red guard that has captured most of professional academia, imposing an orthodoxy that fails every test of rationality.
Harvard’s endowment today sits at an astonishing $50 billion, but where is the civilized idealism and productivity of the past? Its reputation has been deeply marred by rampant bureaucracy, plagiarism, discrimination, and obvious corruption at all levels. No one disputes it and yet no one has a clue what to do about it. Instead, the endowment will continue generating generous emoluments for aligned bureaucrats and interest groups.
Far from being secure from the depredations of the politics of the outside world, the modern university is wholly invaded by them. It’s even worse: The university is expanding and securing brutalism in the world that they were founded to oppose. Whereas the purpose of intellectual life was once to grant freedom and space for high ideals, now we have an opposite problem. The world has every reason to fear the hegemon of the university and its imperial ambitions to wreck the idealism of the people on the outside.
It was bad enough when the social sciences fell to the woke mob, but the events of the past few years have dealt terrible blows to the hard sciences, too. The whole of medicine and health sciences have been forced to defer to the great lie that lockdowns and other physical and pharmaceutical interventions would mitigate the plague that wasn’t. The belief system that emerged out of this system contradicts all known wisdom of the past.
In this period, the journals themselves became unbearably sloppy, only pretending to peer-review, leading to a retraction crisis as scores and hundreds of fake papers are being revealed.
We can cheer this mercilessly, but it still leaves the great question: What happens to the academic ideal? Where is the learning and where is the teaching? Where will we find scholarship and genuine intellectual life in the future? If nearly the whole of what we called the scholarly world is in an accelerated fall, where is that home of genuine research going to be?
One response might be that we don’t need it. This I do not believe, however. The world is starved for high ideals, truth-seeking, and intellectual courage. All the conditions that existed in the world when the university was founded in the 14th to 16th centuries are back. Everything we once called academic civilization needs to be rebuilt from the ground up—every science, both physical and social, including medical sciences.
There was no audience and no recordings, and that was for a reason. Genuine and serious intellectual life is about exchanging ideas within an environment of exploration, sharing, and learning. That is not always consistent with audiences and performers. Nor are there always immediate takeaways and action items. Your content doesn’t always “go viral.” Sometimes, just providing sanctuary and collegiality, in the context of the free exchange of ideas, is the best way forward.
Some people still hold the romantic attachment to the original idea of the academy as a germinator of great ideas. Real intellectual life can return, but it will take decades and grow from earnest efforts by new institutions to allow honest intellectual exploration. This is not as appealing as political action and snappy media blitzes, but it is essential if we really intend to rebuild for the long term.
