Well, cool. You can download Judy Wilyman’s anti-vaccination thesis from the University of Wollongong and read it yourself. So click, click, wait a second, and…
YAAAARGH! My eyes! I thought the social sciences side of the academic world would possibly have higher standards for writing than the science side, but no…it’s awful. This should have been shredded, and Wilyman told to go back and start all over.
I got a few pages in and couldn’t take it anymore. Helen Harris managed to read the abstract, and ripped it apart line by line. Orac read some more bits; would you believe she’s criticizing the germ theory of disease?
It’s over 300 pages long. Does she think that if you pile up the drivel high enough it becomes an architectural marvel, or something? It doesn’t work that way.
Note also: her advisor is now defending her work, blaming the criticisms on a conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in selling vaccines
, among other familiar crank tropes.
I presume her advisor, Brian Martin, is tenured, so there’s not much one can do to boot him out in disgrace. But it is perfectly reasonable to deny a discredited professor the privilege of ruining students’ careers by refusing him graduate students, or requiring additional, critical sponsorship by other faculty of any students. The University of Wollongong should be taking steps to protect their reputation immediately.
Her thesis adviser Brian Martin has a PHD in theoretical physics. Colour me unsurprised that he is a megaGauss crank magnet.
I almost accepted a JOB there! Maybe Martin is having an affair with Wilyman, and can be fired for that?
It’s laughable that Martin is claiming that Wilyman is being bullied, when Wilyman herself has repeatedly harassed parents of children who have died of pertussis.
In defense of my field I’m just going to note that he (Brian Martin) published in stratospheric modeling and magnetic white dwarf physics until the mid ’80s. It’s been a while.
This is sounding a bit like a bargain basement version of the Linus Pauling story, what with how he turned to crank medicine in later life after all that Nobel Prize for Physics stuff.
@wcorvi #2: You are speculating, on no evidence, that a woman owes her academic success to sleeping with her boss. That is not okay. Wilyman is an awful scholar and appears to be an awful human being, but that particular trope is harmful to women in academia and in the workplace generally.
Plenty of male academics do stupid, obnoxious things, but how often do you hear people attribute their success to sleeping with the boss?
Someone please tell me that this is just some silly attempt to wring some new life out of the Sokal hoax where some student was trying to show just how shoddy some review processes can be such that a work that is completely bereft of sanity or intelligence is pushed through a department completely unfamiliar with the subject due to the ability of the author to dazzle with sciencey-seeming excrement.
@rrhain #7:
No, it’s definitely not. Sorry.
That is not a fair invocation of the Sokal hoax, which was not at all about a student pushing crap research through a department. It was an ingenious, well -designed demonstration of the anti-science stupidity of a respected postmodern journal. Quite the opposite of being written “sciency”, it was, with malice aforethought, written in anti-sciencey jibberish.
Sokal’s hoax had tremendous intellectual merit. Bad comparison.
Bill Buckner, @9:
Well, that’s why I said, “silly attempt.” Clearly, Wilyman wasn’t trying to show the problems with the review system at Wollongong…I was just vainly hoping that I was going to wake up in a better world where, along with a winning PowerBall ticket, she’d have acquired some sense of intellectual integrity.
Alas, such foolish dreams.
Is gross incompetence a ground to lose tenure? if not deliberate abuse of position? Since it seems this guy is guilty of both.
Yes, Brian Martin is tenured. Jesus, he seems to get kookier as the years go by. Wollongong even had a Lamarckian in the Biology department – I wonder if he’s still there pushing ‘epigenetics’. I’m sure Wollongong has its fair share of kooks mixed in with the competent educators, just like any other legitimate university.
‘Hello, my name is Judy Wilyman…”
So, a physics professor was advising a humanities student on a thesis on epidemiology?
I think I see where this went wrong.
I work in a social sciences discipline, and I immediately had alarm bells just reading the introduction. The tone is not “I will present academic findings”, it’s “I’m going to be going off on a personal rant”.
Also, despite the slightly lower job security it offers me, this shows why the lack of a system of formal “tenure” in the UK is a really good idea. It’s still quite hard to sack an academic, but it can be done if they start doing stupid shit!
When I did my PhD* there was a requirement for review by two external experts. Was this bypassed, or does it simply not work that way in Oz?
*blatant self-promotion
rrhain #10,
Fair enough. I just wanted to remind that Sokal was not about writing “sciencey” to impress those who are ignorant/uneducated but have respect (even if fear-based) for science and thus can be fooled (e.g., the AiG approach). Sokal was about writing anti-sciency garbage to mock, devastatingly, the very educated (though not in science) who write and publish utter nonsense about science.
Actually, in writing this, I see your point much better. Sorry–I was a bit slow to the uptake. I guess it would be kind of cool if this were revealed as an attempt to mock anti-vaxers. Although I would find fooling a department and Ph.D. committee much more depressing (i.e., less funny) than fooling editors at a non-peer-reviewed postmodern journal.
I wonder how long it will take until antivaxers start quoting this ‘thesis’ as scientific evidence. The mountain of bullshit just got a little bit higher…
Ms. Wilyman’s thesis defines her PhD as “Piled higher & Deeper”.
Roy
Apparently, that was the case here. The external experts were chosen by the adviser Martin, who is a kook himself, so I expect these experts are not much better, and the university refuses to name the two experts, or even mention their field of expertise.