Academic grievance studies and the corruption of scholarship

Part III: Why Did We Do This?

Because we’re racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, transhysterical, anthropocentric, problematic, privileged, bullying, far right-wing, cishetero straight white males (and one white female who was demonstrating her internalized misogyny and overwhelming need for male approval) who wanted to enable bigotry, preserve our privilege, and take the side of hate?

No. None of those apply. Nevertheless, we’ll be accused of it, and we have some insights into why.

To many not involved in academia, particularly those who are skeptical of its worth generally, it may seem like we’re addressing yet another obscure academic squabble of little relevance to the real world. You are mistaken. The problem we’ve been studying is of the utmost relevance to the real world and everyone in it.

Alternatively, those who are positively inclined towards academia and ethically and/or politically in support of social science and humanities research that focuses on social justice issues may think the work researchers are doing on these topics is important and generally sound. You’d be right that it’s important but not that it is always sound—some of the work being produced is positively horrifying and surreal while exerting considerable influence on the field and beyond. You also might acknowledge that there are problems arising from the pressures of a publish-or-perish culture driven by broken university business models and taken advantage of by an opportunistic publishing industry, but be skeptical that there are any serious integral epistemological or ethical issues at work.

As liberals, we recognize that you might be resistant to acknowledging that our evidence points to an undeniable problem in academic research on important issues relevant to social justice. The work done in these fields claims to continue the vital work of the civil rights movements, liberal feminism, and Gay Pride. It seeks to address oppression of women and racial and sexual minorities. Surely, you might therefore believe, these bodies of literature must be essentially good and sound, even if you recognize some overreach and silliness.

After having spent a year immersed and becoming recognized experts within these fields, in addition to witnessing the divisive and destructive effects when activists and social media mobs put it to use, we can now state with confidence that it is neither essentially good nor sound. Further, these fields of study do not continue the important and noble liberal work of the civil rights movements; they corrupt it while trading upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker. For us to know anything about injustice in society and be able to show it to those who are unaware or in denial of it, scholarship into it must be rigorous. Currently, it is not, and this enables it, and social justice issues with it, to be dismissed. This is a serious problem of considerable concern, and we must address it.

And the final paragraph is of note too:

As for us, we intend to use the knowledge we’ve gained from grievance studies to continue to critique them and push for universities to fix this problem and reaffirm their commitment to rigorous, non-partisan knowledge production. We do this because we believe in the university, in rigorous scholarship, in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and in the importance of social justice.

so they submitted fake papers to journals and then some of them got accepted for publication.

While I haven't had a chance to read through all of these papers, it's clear that they spent some time designing these studies to highlight some of the issues that should be glaring and called out during the peer review process.

In the end, they were eventually exposed, so the peer review process succeeded, but not until after many papers were accepted and published, which brings into question the institutions that published them.

As far as I can tell it's some conservatives who wanted to lampoon "Social Justice Warriors" in academia

While this is possible, I completely understand and empathize with their disgust in the current state of some scientific journals.

That being said, I can hardly expect the "Journal of Poetry Therapy" to have particularly strong scientific methodology at the heart of its core principles. The reality is a field like that emerged because someone thought poetry could be therapeutic and decided to start gathering science to prove this. While people thinking in this fashion is important, the reality is that it's probably not particularly effective for most people, and therefore in order to show scientific credibility, they're probably more likely to fall back on less scientific methods like autoethnography (thought experiments or self-reflection, in essence) supported by other research or studies to "prove a point" or present a hypothesis with some "evidence".

I'm still working my way through the article and unfortunately I probably don't have the time necessary to try and collect the full text of the submitted articles so I'm not sure what consensus I am going to end up at... but, on the principle of "shoddy" publications and especially the subsequent reporting that happens on them, I'm completely in agreement that it's a problem. It's not only a problem in the social sciences, I see this all the time when another journal article comes out where they did a survey for 20 years and found a correlation between people who ate red meat and cardiovascular deaths, and suddenly there's a front page article about how "red meat will kill you".

My only response to sweeping generalizations about survey data is the standard "yeah, well you use internet explorer so you're a murderer".