If you haven’t seen it before I’d strongly recommend that you check out the piece on Aero Magazine about ‘academic grievance studies’ and their adverse effect on the academic sphere. The Aero piece outlines how three writers, Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian spoofed various peer reviewed academic journals in the ‘cultural studies’ and feminism fields, into publishing outrageous drivel but drivel that fitted into the political prejudices of the journals and their reviewers.

The trio of academic trolls, and in this context I mean the word ‘trolls’ as a compliment, did a brilliant job of showing how left wing social justice activism in the academic sector is chipping away at the concept that ideas should be challenged and tested using empirical methods. Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian managed to get four papers published in academic peer reviewed jourrnals and had a number of other papers either accepted for publication or were being considered when the trio decided to call a halt to the study after one of their spoof papers gained notoriety among those who monitor academic bullshit.

The report that Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian wrote on the study is very long but here are a couple of paragraphs in which these researchers set out their reason for the study and how they carried it out.

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research. Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, our aim has been to reboot these conversations. We hope this will give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, “No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.”

This document is a first look at our project and an initial attempt to grapple with what we’re learning and what it means. Because of its length and detail, it is organized as follows, putting the factual information up front and more detailed explanations thereafter.

• Our methodology, which is central to contextualizing our claims;
• A summary of this project from its beginning until we were eventually exposed and forced to go public before we could conclude our research;
• An explanation of why we did this;
• A summary of the problem and why it matters;
• A clear explanation of how this project came to be;
• The results of our study, including a full list of all of the papers we submitted, their final outcomes, and relevant reviewer comments to date;
• A discussion of the significance of the results;
• A summary of what may come next

You can read the entirety of the study by clicking on the link below:

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/