The Grievance Studies Project

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Collaborators  |  Summary  |  Papers  |  Goals  |  Methods  |  Provisional Conclusions  |  Media

Collaborators
Summary
Papers
Goals
Methods
Provisional Conclusions
Media

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Collaborators

We are a small group of concerned academics who wanted to understand and properly criticize an ongoing problem (described below) we see in gender studies and related academic disciplines. We see this problem having negative social and political implications on a global scale, and we think constructive conversation within academia has become nearly impossible. We hope that this project will reboot that conversation and initiate necessary reforms. Because of the politicized nature of these disciplines, it bears mentioning that all three of us would be best classified as left-leaning liberals.

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Project Summary

We engaged in a one-year immersive exploration to attempt to understand certain academic fields as “outsiders within” and test their scholarship at its highest levels. To speak broadly, these include gender studies and other cultural studies fields within the humanities and reaching into sociology, psychology, and, perhaps most worryingly, education.

The specific problem we targeted has various names in various quarters and is difficult to pin down. Careful academics would refer to it as “critical constructivism” and/or “blank slatism” and its scholars as “radical constructivists.” (In this sense, it is the descendants of postmodernist and poststructuralist thought from the mid 20th century.) Pundits have termed it “academic leftism” or “cultural studies” and identify it with the term “political correctness.”

We prefer to call it “grievance studies” because many of these fields refer to themselves as “[something] studies” and because they operate primarily by focusing upon and inflaming the grievances of certain identity groups. We think it represents a significant and influential subset of the scholarship coming out of cultural studies within the humanities, sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences and that is gaining increasing power over our universities, institutions, media, and culture.

Because formal scholarly criticism of these fields (see Pinker, 2003; Sokal and Bricmont, 1998; Söderlund and Madison, 2017; Stern, 2016, in particular) has not created needed reform, we attempted a criticism by means other than detached external scholarship. As the study developed, we came to see the project as a serious ethnographic inquiry into fields, journals, and scholars who exhibit varying commitments to the assumptions of grievance studies. In that sense, ours stands distinctly apart from anything that has been done so far and is a unique line of inquiry. Distinguishing it particularly from previous academic hoaxes, many of our papers were designed to be quite serious, although all forwarded a variety of intentional flaws and satirical elements.

Specifically, over the course of a year we wrote twenty academic papers and submitted them to significant peer-reviewed academic journals in these fields with the hopes of getting them published. Every paper combined an effort to better understand the field itself with an attempt to get absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research. Some papers took bigger risks in this regard than others.

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Accepted Papers

Pending Papers

Rejected Papers

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Project Goals

• We wanted to understand the nature of the problem in academia and the culture that produces it.
  • In that sense, this study was what anthropologists might refer to as a “reflexive ethnography of academic critical constructivism.”
    • In plainer language, what that means is that we sought to become outsiders who embedded ourselves within the culture in order to understand it and to come to fit in with it. We verified our success in this regard by getting high-level academic scholarship published in their journals, some of these quite prestigious.
• We hope to reboot the conversations about topics of cultural interest such as gender, race, sexuality, and so on and bring it back to a more rigorous basis, the nature of which remains to be determined at this time.
• We want to reintroduce skepticism of the underlying assumptions and “critical” methodologies employed in grievance studies so that scholarship regarding important questions of gender, race, sexuality, and so on can be addressed accurately and by the best possible methods.
  • This follows from our suspicion, which we think our project helps establish, that these fields are corrupted by biases favoring a particular radical political view that stems directly from certain thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and many others, and an unwillingness to accept outside criticism (Stern, 2016).
• We perceive a large number of people, both inside and outside of academia, who are aware of the increasing power grievance studies scholars wield, and we wanted to provide an opportunity for these people to feel safe enough to speak out and say, “No, I’m not going along with that (until it has had more thorough and rigorous review)” and for them, along with others, especially on the left, to say, “These people do not speak for me.”
  • This problem has arisen within a culture in which dissenting ideas have not been admitted or tolerated, often resulting in legitimate criticisms being denigrated on moral grounds. For example, questioning tenets of feminist philosophy might get you branded sexist or accused of carrying internalized misogyny. Questioning critical race scholarship is written off as exhibiting “white fragility” (Robin DiAngelo, 2011, 2018), “white ignore-ance” (Barbara Applebaum, 2006), a form of intentional ignorance, a form of resistance, or seeking white approval. Of note, it is impossible to counter such claims, and attempts to do so are taken as proof of guilt.

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Project Methods

We wrote academic papers targeting (mostly) highly ranked, peer-reviewed journals in fields we are concerned might be corrupted by scholarship biased by “grievance studies.” These papers were submitted to the best journals we could find, given constraints of the journals’ aims and scopes, and then we used the feedback we received about them from editors and peer reviewers to improve them and our future papers.

Our primary data for the project, apart from the papers themselves and the outcomes they achieved, are the many extensive comments made by professionals working in the field (journal editors and peer reviewers) on our intentionally broken papers. We wanted to gather these data for two reasons. First, they represented our primary means of gaining expertise and thus learning how to write better papers. Second, they constitute an unvarnished look into the professional workings of the academic culture we were studying.

Each paper was submitted to higher-ranked journals first and then down a line of suitable alternatives until one of the following occurred: it was accepted; it was deemed too unlikely to succeed for reasons we came to understand to continue with it; or we ran out of time.

• Note: The project was originally slated to continue until all twenty papers had run their course or until (roughly) 18 months had elapsed, whichever came first, but we were effectively discovered by media investigations into our paper about rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks (see paper #1 below). This occurred just shy of one year from the formal starting date of the project.

The data we were gathering therefore consist of the track records of how the papers fared, as well as a large body of textual data in the forms of the papers themselves (thus demonstrating what the journals would be willing to publish and their responses) and the reports from the papers’ expert peer reviewers, as assigned by the journals.

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Provisional Conclusions

Because there are serious problems with the assumptions underlying grievance studies and how scholarship in these fields proceeds, it is incredibly difficult to conclude that the work based in grievance studies can be trusted. This means we are skeptical of the conclusions and recommendations appearing in their scholarship and all subsequent work referencing it. Particularly, there is very little reason to consider work in this field as capable of generating knowledge about the world, the people living in it, and the societies they form.

We conclude the problem we have identified in grievance studies, which has taken over large sectors of the humanities and social sciences, is real and significant. That problem is that a political bias which intentionally blends activism into scholarship (sometimes described as “academic leftism”) has become dominant and entrenched in varying degrees within those fields it has successfully corrupted. Moreover, it aims to spread its assumptions and methods into other fields, including the hard sciences. This, in turn, delegitimizes this scholarship and casts serious doubt upon its conclusions and results. These results and methods are therefore in need of reconsideration.

We draw this conclusion from the expert responses our papers generated and from the fact that we produced our scholarship, which was welcomed and even honored as exemplary, with a single methodology. We started with the conclusion we wanted to forward (usually something absurd or morally repellent) and then made the paper and existing canon of academic literature do our bidding to make it publishable. (Details are below, but we draw your attention to the first seven papers, particularly those numbered 3 and 5, along with the one numbered 8.) This is not how academic research should be conducted, and scholarship that is susceptible enough to biases to allow the kind of work we did to pass must be considered to be potentially fatally flawed. This raises serious questions about how much and which scholarship in these fields can be trusted.

Because the scholarship we infiltrated represents a view that currently has a great deal of cultural power (though very little political power, at least in the United States in most districts), and because that power is nearly absolute within the universities (and seems to be going that way in media and many businesses, including large corporations), one conclusion this project provides is a permission slip for academics and others to openly doubt the scholarship that seems to legitimize and institutionalize these conclusions as factual.

Because this is just one project, however, with limited scope and duration, we want it to be a starting point to a proper and thorough review of the fields, journals, disciplines, and scholarship that has allowed this to be possible.

Project Factual Overview

Key dates:

• Official beginning of project: August 16, 2017
• Date of first acceptance (“Dog Park” paper): February 19, 2018
• Date WSJ became involved, initiating release process: July 31, 2018
• Intended release date: (approx.) January 31, 2019

By the numbers (to-date):

• Papers submitted: 20
  • Total time writing new papers: 10 months
  • We averaged one new paper roughly every two weeks throughout the course of the
    project.
• Papers accepted, to-date: 7
  • Typically, 7 papers published over 7 years is sufficient to satisfy the research component for earning tenure at most major universities.
  • Our accepted papers are each in different disciplines/subdisciplines, which makes this project multi-disciplinary.
• Papers favorably reviewed during the process, to-date: 10 (total)
  • This means they have been given a first decision of “revise and resubmit” or, in one case,
    a decision of “reject and resubmit” with much encouragement.
  • We cannot be sure, of course, but many of these papers would probably be accepted if we
    had enough time to see them through. Usually 70-80% of papers that have been given a
    decision of revise and resubmit go on to be published eventually.
• Papers published, to-date: 4
  • One of these papers, the one about dog parks that broke the story, was honored as exemplary scholarship the journal that accepted it, Gender, Place, & Culture, the leading feminist geography journal.
• Aliases used: 8
• Total new submissions: 48
  • Note: this does not count submissions of a journal-requested revision, bearing the status of an in-process paper.
• 0% of our initial exploratory papers went through full peer review
• 94.4% (all but one) of our more considered papers went to full peer review
  • Thus, 80% of our papers overall went to/through full peer review at least once, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field.
  • This shift in success rate followed a commitment to understand the field in greater depth that initiated in late November 2017 and progressed through April 2018, by which time we felt we had become sufficiently competent.
• Number of reviewer’s or (extensive) editor’s reports, to-date: 46
• Total papers still ​in process​: 7 (35%)
  • Papers often require 3-6 months or more to get through the entire process.
  • One of our papers (Feminist Astronomy) was under a single peer review from before Christmas 2017 until mid-August 2018.
  • This results in a maximum of 14 possible eventual acceptances, with 12 considered likely had we had the full term of the project.
• Total papers still actively under consideration: 3 (15%)
  • Beginning in early August 2018, we stopped revising and resubmitting many papers that, had we had more time, would have remained viable. These papers are therefore “in process” but they’ve been taken out of consideration.
• Invitations to be a peer reviewer for other real papers, to-date: 4
  • For ethical reasons, we declined all such invitations.
• Total word count of all papers, most recent drafts: 177,694
  • Because papers went through multiple submitted drafts, and other documents were required (e.g., detailed responses to peer review), this nets somewhere in excess of a quarter million words were produced in final draft form in the course of this project.

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Media

• The Reformers (2023 Documentary) – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
• The Joe Rogan Experience #1191 – Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay | Oct 2018
• The controversy around hoax studies in critical theory, explained | Vox | October 15, 2018
• Grievance studies affair | Wikipedia
• What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia | The Atlantic | October 15, 2018
• What the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Really Shows | The New York Times | October 6, 2018
• What the “Grievance Studies” Hoax Actually Reveals | Slate | October 5, 2018
• Fake News Comes to Academia | The Wall Street Journal | October 5, 2018