Grievance Studies & the Corruption of Scholarship

October 3, 2018 8:53 PM

Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.
posted by MovableBookLady (12 comments total)

Coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:57 PM on October 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

This has been compared to the Sokal affair, but I disagree. Sokal's article was a work of art, even if its medium was trolling. I also agree with its larger point, which was the contempt and ignorance with which many post-modern beacons of academia wrote about the physical sciences and the social construction of physical reality.

By comparison, the Aggrieved by Grievance Studies people are shitlords, engaged in some successful shitposting, and their politics seem quite suspect.
posted by kandinski at 9:02 PM on October 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

Steven Pinker thinks this is clever, so it obviously isn't.

and this guy nails it:

"I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it."

posted by murphy slaw at 9:13 PM on October 3, 2018 [8 favorites]

Pluckrose is writing [a book] on the 50-year development of grievance studies and the leftist academic culture of victimization.

Mmmhmm.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:15 PM on October 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

OF COURSE fucking Steven Pinker liked this.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:16 PM on October 3, 2018

David Chapman thinks *all* academic journals should be stress stested with fake papers, with a protocol that includes registering fake papers in advance. Cutely, he calls the method "Sokaling". Thread:

https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1047507838493499392
posted by kandinski at 9:17 PM on October 3, 2018

The "dog park" one made me laugh out loud, but I have no idea about how academic research and publishing in the social sciences works, and I therefore cannot be sure if they're making a legitimate point, or are simply trolling. I feel slightly stupid for laughing even though academia can be absurd.

In the YouTube video, they do self-identify as "true" (read: "classical") liberals, and I've noticed that over the past couple of days that "Grievance Studies" has been discussed with glee amongst the usual "humanist" and "classical liberal" suspects, such as Quillette, the National Review, the Spectator and the rest of the crowd that obsess and obsess some more over campus politics and "free speech" blah blah blah.

You know, the people who fight (online, of course) in the culture wars, and argue that things like "IQ is biologically determined" and "evolutionary psychology explains gender roles", yet more blah blah blah.

Fuck, I mean, I thought I had left all this shit behind on campus when I graduated nearly 25 years ago.
posted by JamesBay at 9:22 PM on October 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Here's a Twitter thread from one of the (grad student) reviewers mentioned in the article. Note that they recommended the article they reviewed be rejected.

The article posted in the OP was written in bad faith and I'm honestly disappointed to see it get posted here.
posted by asterix at 9:23 PM on October 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

Pluckrose thinks she’ll have a hard time getting into a doctoral program, Lindsay predicted that he would become "an academic pariah," and Boghossian, who doesn’t have tenure, thinks he will be punished, and possibly fired.

Grievance culture indeed.
posted by benzenedream at 9:32 PM on October 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

"Oh, those assholes aren't interested in The Truth, they're just pushing an ideological agenda," say the people who spent 10 months totally trolling SJWs.

I was going to write a whole thing about how there is no such thing as an objective truth, yadda yadda, but this is so facile that it's not even worth engaging with. Not only did they submit their papers in bad faith, but they engaged with the existing literature in bad faith, too. Ideas they didn't like were invalid "grievance studies" worth targeting, and off they went. Oh, those out of control liberals. My pearls.

They need to grow the fuck up.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:34 PM on October 3, 2018

> Pluckrose is writing [a book] on the 50-year development of grievance studies and the leftist academic culture of victimization.

Mmmhmm.

Surely you don't mean to suggest her scholarship might be based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social professional grievances?
posted by GeckoDundee at 9:34 PM on October 3, 2018

I stopped reading because it didn't really seem serious to me and because I was distracted by the way they kept using the word “liberal.” They're applying it to themselves but the paragraphs I read had the whiff of how someone who regards themselves as conservative or whatever thinks other people use the term. E.g. “the important and noble liberal work of the civil rights movements”.

But I don't read the sort of stuff that would be published in a journal much, so perhaps that's the way the word is used.
posted by XMLicious at 9:35 PM on October 3, 2018