The Australian: Neo-Nazi to the goosestep [February 08, 2006]

THE literary world recently received a double dose of scandal with revelations of two high-profile fabrications: the memoirist James Frey's past, it turns out, is considerably duller than his books suggest; and the novelist J.T. LeRoy, it seems, 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 controversy 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 in New Jersey, soon after it became known that he was a prominent member of the National Socialist Movement. Late last month, in an essay titled Now it Can be Told: Why I Pretended to be a Neo-Nazi, Pluss purported to reveal his true intentions in joining the white supremacist group: he did it all for scholarship.