The Paper That Made Me Realize Academia Had Lost Its Mind

How a paper about ice broke the internet—and broke academic credibility.

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About the Author

Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

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Back in 2016, I was still a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara when a paper dropped that seemed to crystallize everything I had begun to suspect about the direction academia was headed. Like many others in the sciences, I had already begun noticing strange developments: top journals publishing pieces claiming that sex was a social construct, or that objectivity was a colonialist holdover. But nothing captured the absurdity quite like the now-infamous “feminist glaciology” paper.

The paper, titled “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change,” wasn’t satire—though it seemed indistinguishable from it. It was peer-reviewed, taxpayer-funded, and taken seriously within the academic community. When I first read it, I assumed it had to be some elaborate hoax. I wasn’t alone. Even Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, said he was convinced it must be fake—until he found out it wasn’t. “Barking mad,” he called it, “but not fake.”

In fact, this very paper became the catalyst for one of the most infamous academic stings in recent memory: the Grievance Studies Affair. James Lindsay has said that it was this feminist glaciology paper that "legitimately changed the world" by radicalizing him. Peter Boghossian, one of Lindsay's co-conspirators in the hoax project, later confirmed that the paper “broke” Lindsay and pushed him to realize that entire fields of academia had lost their tether to reality. A few years later, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose would go on to submit dozens of absurd, ideologically-driven fake papers to journals in fields like gender studies and critical race theory. Many were accepted. One, on “rape culture and queer performativity” in dog parks, even won an award. But the paper that lit the match was the one about glaciers.

Despite its viral reputation, the feminist glaciology paper has rarely been given the full scrutiny it deserves. Many people laughed at the title and moved on. But after revisiting the paper recently on my podcast, I decided it deserved a proper breakdown—because it doesn’t just represent one bizarre academic curiosity, but the start of a genre of academic absurdity that has continued to metastasize within academia and displace reason in entire fields of scholarship.

This infamous feminist "research" is actually unhinged (and creepy!)

The paper was authored by four researchers affiliated with the University of Oregon at the time. Mark Carey, the lead author, is a professor of Environmental Studies and runs something called the “Glacier Lab.” His academic record is mostly unremarkable, though there are ideological hints, such as his focus on the “inequalities of ice loss.” One co-author, M Jackson, has since moved away from science entirely to focus on writing and speaking engagements. A third, Alessandro Antonello, has leaned fully into postmodern themes, exploring “posthumanities” and the need to decolonize relationships between humans and nature. The fourth author, Jaclyn Rushing, appears to have settled into a more conventional role with the USDA Forest Service.

Somehow, all four of these people came together to create what may be one of the most unintentionally influential documents of the last decade.