A spokesman for Temple, Hillel Hoffmann, said the university condemned “predatory open-access publishing” and said no university money had been spent on the conference. He said that special-needs learners in the community, including adult literacy students, had attended parts of the conference and had benefited from it, but that none had paid to participate. He added that the W.C.S.N.E. would no longer take place at Temple.

Richard Cooper, the director of disability services at Harcum College, a private two-year institution in Philadelphia, helped create W.C.S.N.E. along with Mr. Shoniregun. He says he has no involvement with the paper selection process or financial aspects of the conference, simply serving as an organizer, presenter and master of ceremonies. He described it as a worthwhile gathering of scholars, many of whom live in Africa and India and pay hundreds of dollars in conference fees to attend.

The papers presented at previous W.C.S.N.E. conferences don’t appear to have been composed using the autocomplete function on an iPhone. They mostly describe small qualitative studies and surveys that examine well-established ideas, break little new ground and use statistical jargon to make their findings seem more complicated than they really are. They very likely would be rejected by the American Educational Research Association. But they are also well within the bounds of what gets published in many scholarly journals that, while not prestigious, have never been called a fraud.

Barba Patton, an education professor at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Tex., defended the W.C.S.N.E. unreservedly. “I have attended ten to fifteen of the conferences in the U.S., Canada and in Europe,” she wrote via email. “I have no concerns about the website. You must remember that the conference reaches many who are using the British English rather than the American.”

Mr. Shoniregun did not respond to messages sent to his several email addresses. But he appears to have created a kind of hybrid conference that combines the shady, volume-first internet marketing practices of OMICS with the more quotidian inattention to academic rigor that characterizes much of legitimate academia.

Take the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), by all accounts a legitimate organization. This year, Peter Dreier, chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy department at Occidental College, described how he submitted a proposal full of jargon, misquotation, non sequitur and general academic gobbledygook to an international conference sponsored by the 4S. It was accepted. “I look forward to meeting you in Tokyo,” the panel organizer wrote.

Lucy Suchman, a sociologist at Britain’s Lancaster University and the president of 4S, acknowledges that the abstract review process is “not perfect” and that she would have rejected Mr. Dreier’s submission. But, she notes, 4S reviews hundreds of submissions every year with an “assumption of good faith.” It would not have occurred to them that someone of Mr. Dreier’s standing in academia was engaged in such an “unfortunate prank,” she said, emphasizing the overall high quality of 4S presentations.