The Chronicle: Fired Professor Now Says He Became a Neo-Nazi Only to Do Research for a Book
Last week the literary world got a double dose of scandal with revelations of two high-profile fabrications: Memoirist James Frey’s past, it turns out, is considerably duller than his books suggest; and novelist JT Leroy, it appears, does not exist at all.
Now the academic world has yielded up its own fabrication, this one involving neo-Nazis, a white supremacist radio show, a professor’s firing, and a flap over academic freedom. But this time the unmasking was self-inflicted.
Last March, Jacques Pluss was fired from his job as an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University soon after it came to light that he was a prominent member of the National Socialist Movement of the United States. This weekend, in an online essay titled “Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi,” Mr. Pluss purports to reveal his true intentions in joining the white supremacist group: He did it all for scholarship.
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