Jacques Pluss: 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. ...
He said in an interview with The Chronicle on Friday that no one, not even his fiancée, could corroborate his account of his intentions during that time.
"Revealing my research to others would have meant intellectualizing it to myself," he writes in his essay. "I would have lifted my psyche from its necessary emotional context. As much as was possible, I had to assume the role."
Perhaps the strangest part of Mr. Pluss's account is his claim that he engineered his own dismissal from Fairleigh Dickinson in order to suffer the kind of public marginalization often experienced by neo-Nazis. "I realized that if I were going to experience the white power movement in America I was going to have to have something happen to me on a professional level," he said in the interview. "It was not going to be enough just to hang back and make the radio show and exchange emails with people."
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education
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. ...
He said in an interview with The Chronicle on Friday that no one, not even his fiancée, could corroborate his account of his intentions during that time.
"Revealing my research to others would have meant intellectualizing it to myself," he writes in his essay. "I would have lifted my psyche from its necessary emotional context. As much as was possible, I had to assume the role."
Perhaps the strangest part of Mr. Pluss's account is his claim that he engineered his own dismissal from Fairleigh Dickinson in order to suffer the kind of public marginalization often experienced by neo-Nazis. "I realized that if I were going to experience the white power movement in America I was going to have to have something happen to me on a professional level," he said in the interview. "It was not going to be enough just to hang back and make the radio show and exchange emails with people."