SCIENTIST TAKES SLY DIG AT ACADEMIC JOURNAL.

Byline: Janny Scott The New York Times

A New York University physicist, fed up with what he sees as the excesses of the academic left, hoodwinked a well-known journal into publishing a parody thick with gibberish as though it were serious scholarly work.

The article, titled ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,'' appeared this month in Social Text, a journal that helped invent the trendy, sometimes baffling field of cultural studies.

Now the physicist, Alan Sokal, is gloating. And the editorial collective that publishes the journal says it sorely regrets its mistake. But the journal's co-founder says Sokal is confused.

``He says we're epistemic relativists,'' complained Stanley Aronowitz, the co-founder and a professor at CUNY. ``We're not. He got it wrong. One of the reasons he got it wrong is he's ill-read and half-educated.''

The dispute over the article - which was read by several editors at the journal before it was published - goes to the heart of the public debate over left-wing scholarship, and particularly over the belief that social, cultural and political conditions influence and may even determine knowledge and ideas about what is truth.

In this case, Sokal, 41, intended to attack some of the work of social scientists and humanists in the field of cultural studies, the exploration of culture - and, in recent years, science - for coded ideological meaning.

In a way, this is one more skirmish in the culture wars, the battles over multiculturalism and college curriculums and whether there is a single objective truth or just many differing points of view.

Conservatives have argued that there is truth, or at least an approach to truth, and that scholars have a responsibility to pursue it. They have accused the academic left of debasing scholarship for political ends.

``While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious,'' Sokal wrote in a separate article in the current issue of the magazine Lingua Franca, in which he revealed the hoax and detailed his ``intellectual and political'' motivations.

``What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: One that denies the existence of objective realities,'' he wrote in Lingua Franca.

In an interview, Sokal, who describes himself as ``a leftist in the old-fashioned sense,'' said he worried that the trendy disciplines and obscure jargon could end up hurting the leftist cause. ``By losing contact with the real world, you undermine the prospect for progressive social critique,'' he said.

Norman Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and an author of a book on science and the academic left that first brought the new critique of science to Sokal's attention, Friday called the hoax ``a lot of fun and a source of a certain amount of personal satisfaction.

``I don't want to claim that it proves that all social scientists or all English professors are complete idiots, but it does betray a certain arrogance and a certain out-of-touchness on the part of a certain clique inside academic life,'' he said.