A professor faces losing his high-powered job at an American university after writing 20 fake scientific papers.
Seven of these fake pieces of research were accepted and four were published online.
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon now faces the sack after a widespread backlash from the scientific community.
Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, prominent academics and science communicators, have defended the controversial the stunt.
Dr Boghossian claims he conducted the questionable experiment to challenge the 'nonsense' which features in many social science papers.
Some of the works included convoluted papers on 'dog rape culture', 'a conceptual penis' and even a re-wrote a chapter of Mein Kampf.
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Peter Boghossian (pictured), an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon now faces the sack after a widespread backlash
Dr Boghossian and two collaborators said their aim was to expose how 'absurdities' get published in legitimate peer-reviewed academic papers due to a lack of critical review.
In total the team of three researchers wrote 20 hoax papers on a field of study loosely defined as 'grievance studies'.
These papers were based on 'nutty or inhumane' ideas that featured 'a little bit of lunacy'.
Portland State University officials said Dr Boghossian had not eceived proper ethical approval for the exercise.
By challenging the protocols implemented by journal staff and peer-reviewers the university say the academic breached guidelines when he manipulated these 'human research subjects'.
He is also being reviewed for falsifying data and the penalty for this is dismissal from the institute.
The authors claim their prank shows that higher education's fixation with identity politics has created 'absurd and horrific' scholarship, according to an in-depth piece by Wall Street Journal.
The other two researchers involved in the deception were mathematician James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, who is editor-in-chief of current affairs magazine Areol.
Their aim was to expose how easily morally fashionable political ideas are published as academic research.
One paper, published in Gender, Place & Culture, claimed to be based on a year observing sexual misconduct among dogs in a US park.
One paper, published in Gender, Place & Culture, claimed to be based on a year observing sexual misconduct among dogs in a US park.
The paper said that parks were 'petri dishes for canine 'rape culture'' and said people needed to be aware of the way dogs were treated depending on their gender.
The year before they had publised a paper called 'The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,' in the journal Cogent Social Sciences.
Another paper published in the journal Fat Studies claimed that body building is 'fat-exclusionary'.
They published a paper in the Journal of Poetry Therapy was about feminist spirituality meetings. It was written by an algorithm.
Another paper published in peer-reviewed journal 'Affilia' was a rewrite of a chapter from Mein Kampf which was accepted despite going through a double peer review.
The authors claim their prank shows that higher education's fixation with identity politics has created 'absurd and horrific' scholarship.
The paper said that parks were 'petri dishes for canine "rape culture"' and said people needed to be aware of the way dogs were treated depending on their gender.
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