The Grievance Studies Affair - REVEALED
OK Is the light OK in here? I just read my e-mail we have our first win. The dog park paper has been accepted they don't know, we're about to tell them. I've got to read you something. Dear Dr Helen Wilson I've now closely considered the revision of your manuscript, Dog Park And will recommend its publication in Gender, Place & Culture. You've done very good work to address the issues that were raised and then clarified your arguments. Thank you for your contribution to Gender, Place & Culture and I hope to be seeing your manuscript in print. Yours truly, PhD, Managing Editor, Gender, Place & Culture We have an accepted paper in the number 1 feminist geography journal. : Since approximately June of 2017 I along with two other concerned academics Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, Have been writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them to highly-respected journals in fields that study gender, race, sexuality and similar topics. We did this to expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the universities. By this point several of these papers have been accepted in highly-respected journals. and one, that claims that dog-humping incidents can be taken as evidence of rape culture, has been officially honoured as excellent scholarship. I'm not going to lie to you, we had a lot of fun with this project. The reviewers were worried that we didn't respect the dogs' privacy While we were inspecting their genitals But don't let that lead you believe that we're not addressing a serious problem. If you have a few minutes, I'll try to explain. To be clear up-front, we think studying topics like gender, race and sexuality is worthwhile. And getting it right is extremely important. The problem is how these topics are being studied right now. A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed, like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic. The fields we're concerned about put social grievances ahead of objective truth. So as a simple summary, we call the problem grievance studies.
To test the depth of this problem my collaborators and I dedicated ourselves to a one to two-year secret project Targeting top grievance studies journals with an agreement to publicly release our findings, no matter what the outcome. We started officially on August 16th, 2017 and by Thanksgiving we were in trouble. We'd begun ambitiously and mostly stupidly Our first papers were really only suited to test the hypothesis that we could penetrate their leading journals with poorly researched hoax papers. That wasn't the case, and we were wrong for thinking that we might be able to. So by late November it looked like all we had accomplished was ruining our reputations. Peter: If this doesn't achieve anything, it would actually frighten me. : We needed to change our approach So we walked back from the hoaxing and began to engage with the existing scholarship in these fields more deeply. This led us to learn a lot more about the inner workings of grievance studies. Jim: The best I can tap into is there's this kind of like religious architecture in their mind where privilege is sin. Privilege is evil. And then they've identified education at the place where it has to be fixed. So you can come up with these really nasty arguments, like let's put white kids in chains on the floor at school as an educational opportunity. And if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege, and you frame their resistance that they won't this to happen to them, that they would complain about this If you frame that in terms of 'oh they only complain about that because they're privileged and they can't handle it because their privilege made them weak.' Then it's right in. : Papers started getting in. Jim: You f**king have got to be s**ting me that this happened! : By March, with 2 papers accepted and 1 published it would be fair to say that we had become accepted grievance scholars. By June, it was 3, with 1 having been officially honored by the journal as excellent scholarship.
By July it was 5. By August, 7. This shouldn't have been possible. So far what we're learning is rather astonishing, but the data we've gathered requires more analysis to fully comprehend. What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies. Jim: We rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism and this journal has accepted it. Social work. : This is deeply concerning because the work of grievance scholars goes on to be taught in classes, to design educational curricula, to be taken up by activists to influence how media is produced, and to misinform journalists and politicans about the true nature of our cultural realities. No one tolerates this sort of corruption when they find out an industry is funding biased research to make itself look a certain way. The same scruitiny should apply to research when it pushes a political agenda and we have uncovered enough evidence to suggest that this corruption is pervasive among many disciplines, including women's and gender studies, feminist studies, race studies, sexuality studies, fat studies, queer studies, cultural studies, and sociology. Truth will set us free : You may be thinking that the work done in these fields must be good, because it seems to continue the noble work of the civil rights movements. Well after having spent a year immersed in it, and becoming recognised as experts in it we have to disagree. Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movements it corrupts it. And it trades upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker. Progress is easier without grievance studies. My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can now say with confidence these people don't speak for us. This is now a plea to all the progressives and minority groups these people claim to speak for We suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and decide for yourself whether they speak for you.
To test the depth of this problem my collaborators and I dedicated ourselves to a one to two-year secret project Targeting top grievance studies journals with an agreement to publicly release our findings, no matter what the outcome. We started officially on August 16th, 2017 and by Thanksgiving we were in trouble. We'd begun ambitiously and mostly stupidly Our first papers were really only suited to test the hypothesis that we could penetrate their leading journals with poorly researched hoax papers. That wasn't the case, and we were wrong for thinking that we might be able to. So by late November it looked like all we had accomplished was ruining our reputations. Peter: If this doesn't achieve anything, it would actually frighten me. : We needed to change our approach So we walked back from the hoaxing and began to engage with the existing scholarship in these fields more deeply. This led us to learn a lot more about the inner workings of grievance studies. Jim: The best I can tap into is there's this kind of like religious architecture in their mind where privilege is sin. Privilege is evil. And then they've identified education at the place where it has to be fixed. So you can come up with these really nasty arguments, like let's put white kids in chains on the floor at school as an educational opportunity. And if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege, and you frame their resistance that they won't this to happen to them, that they would complain about this If you frame that in terms of 'oh they only complain about that because they're privileged and they can't handle it because their privilege made them weak.' Then it's right in. : Papers started getting in. Jim: You f**king have got to be s**ting me that this happened! : By March, with 2 papers accepted and 1 published it would be fair to say that we had become accepted grievance scholars. By June, it was 3, with 1 having been officially honored by the journal as excellent scholarship.
By July it was 5. By August, 7. This shouldn't have been possible. So far what we're learning is rather astonishing, but the data we've gathered requires more analysis to fully comprehend. What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies. Jim: We rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism and this journal has accepted it. Social work. : This is deeply concerning because the work of grievance scholars goes on to be taught in classes, to design educational curricula, to be taken up by activists to influence how media is produced, and to misinform journalists and politicans about the true nature of our cultural realities. No one tolerates this sort of corruption when they find out an industry is funding biased research to make itself look a certain way. The same scruitiny should apply to research when it pushes a political agenda and we have uncovered enough evidence to suggest that this corruption is pervasive among many disciplines, including women's and gender studies, feminist studies, race studies, sexuality studies, fat studies, queer studies, cultural studies, and sociology. Truth will set us free : You may be thinking that the work done in these fields must be good, because it seems to continue the noble work of the civil rights movements. Well after having spent a year immersed in it, and becoming recognised as experts in it we have to disagree. Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movements it corrupts it. And it trades upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker. Progress is easier without grievance studies. My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can now say with confidence these people don't speak for us. This is now a plea to all the progressives and minority groups these people claim to speak for We suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and decide for yourself whether they speak for you.