
Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship - mpweiher
https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/
======
Yoric
While this article is interesting, it does start from a pretty strong
assumption: that the problem is specific to one branch (or family of branches)
of Academia.

I remember at least two similar scandals in very much non-social-justice-
related branches of Academia. One was in postmodern studies, if I recall
correctly, the other one I think in epistemology. In one case, the paper had
been written to deliberately mean nothing, in the other one, I seem to
remember that the papers had been generated with Markov chains.

So, based on the same data, my personal conclusion is that some fields of
Academia are vulnerable to bullshit, whether it's sophistry or simply using
the right lingo. It is a pretty bad sign, and I suspect that it is correlated
with fields in which results are hard to check/reproduce.

It may also be correlated with ideology (I remember that this was the
accusation towards postmodern studies), which doesn't mean that it is
correlated with _any specific ideology_.

In other words: promising research, but the starting hypothesis and its
possible limitations need to be expressed more clearly, and much more data
needed.

~~~
kryogen1c
> I remember at least two similar scandals in very much non-social-justice-
> related branches of Academia. One was in postmodern studies, if I recall
> correctly, the other one I think in epistemology. In one case, the paper had
> been written to deliberately mean nothing, in the other one, I seem to
> remember that the papers had been generated with Markov chains.

The article is very clear in it's methodologies and is interacting with the
community in a long-term peer-reviewed manner. They were invited to peer-
review other papers. This is not one substandard paper that was published in a
no-name journal.

If your field of academia is this vulnerable to nonsense, perhaps we should
start considering the field not academic and purge it from out institutions of
learning.

~~~
Yoric
> If your field of academia is this vulnerable to nonsense, perhaps we should
> start considering the field not academic and purge it from out institutions
> of learning.

I seem to remember that the non sensical paper was in the top journal of
postmodern studies. I don't remember details about the Markov chain papers.

Also, I have seen bullshit papers in established journals in computer science.
Not many, but then, computer science results are somewhat harder to fake than
humanities, and I don't think there were many social engineering attacks on CS
journals such as the one described in the OP.

So, yes, it seems that the OP describes a real problem. For the reasons
mentioned above, I do not believe it is limited to social-justice-related-
branches.

You are right that this should serve as a wake-up call. Personally, I believe
that such wake-up calls are useful for a domain, once in a while. The ball is
now on the side of editors. If they manage to raise the bar for accepting
papers, their field will have benefited from this work.

It is also possible, as you suggest, that the field is not of academic
interest. As I have read exactly 0 articles from the publications targeted by
the OP, I have no factual base to discuss this.

 _edit_ grammar

~~~
beautifulfreak
You might be thinking of the Sokal hoax.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

~~~
Yoric
Definitely am :)

~~~
foldr
Then you are mistaken. The Sokal paper was published in a fairly obscure
journal ("Social Text") where submissions were not even peer reviewed.

~~~
Yoric
Indeed, I just discovered that. My bad.

~~~
UncleMeat
This is how this nonsense spreads. People hear this one example and assume
that all of the humanities are bullshit without ever investigating further.

------
ergothus
> 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.

...

> a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the
> academic and activist left

I'm going to revisit the article later, because the first few paragraphs threw
up many red flags, coming across as someones with a chip on their shoulder
that sought out to "prove" themselves correct. Hopefully this is a
misunderstanding on my part, but I recommend others attempting persuasion to
avoid such signaling.

~~~
waterhouse
To be flippant, it sounds like you're quick to assume bad faith, which would
seem to support the first point you quote.

The experiment they ran was to try to get terrible papers published in
authoritative journals in certain fields. If they succeeded, this would point
towards a serious problem with established practice in those fields; their
suspicion of such a problem might be labeled a "chip on their shoulder" or a
"hypothesis". According to what they say, they succeeded.

As for it being "identitarian madness" and "coming out of the academic and
activist left"—do you think either of those parts is false or is irrelevant to
what they're studying? If not, how would you suggest they talk about it?

~~~
slivym
They literally have a video in the introduction which documents them
deliberately submitting papers that they've engineered to have problems in bad
faith to try and manufacture evidence that bad studies can get into journals.
They establish that they act in bad faith.

~~~
claudius
While authors ideally should act in good faith and only submit good papers,
the whole idea of having journals and editors and peer review is to filter out
bad papers. The problem here is not some people "deliberately submitting
papers" which "have problems", the problem is that those papers were accepted
by "academic" journals. This is not "manufacturing" evidence, this is simply
evidence.

The bad guys here are not random authors but the journal editors and peer
reviewers accepting this stuff.

~~~
slivym
Well firstly, I don't why you're putting "academic" in quotation marks, it
would be a wild assertion to try and claim these are anything other than
academic journals.

The problem with this article is that what it's methodology tests whether it's
possible to get low quality papers into certain academic journals, but it's
stated theory and conclusion are that academic journals are deliberately
publishing bad science to push an agenda that this article calls "Grievance
Studies".

The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment,
deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather than
presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece.

~~~
claudius
> Well firstly, I don't why you're putting "academic" in quotation marks, it
> would be a wild assertion to try and claim these are anything other than
> academic journals.

Not really, given the miserable quality of the papers they publish. Maybe
‘newspaper‘ or ‘journal’ might be ok, but ‘academic journal‘ requires a
certain amount of quality.

> The problem with this article is that what it's methodology tests whether
> it's possible to get low quality papers into certain academic journals, but
> it's stated theory and conclusion are that academic journals are
> deliberately publishing bad science to push an agenda that this article
> calls "Grievance Studies".

Academic journals publish papers deliberately. They don’t ‘accidentally’
publish bad papers, I can assure you that nobody accidentally clicks the
‘publish’ button. Whatever further agenda the article may or may not push
pales in comparison to the actual problems it uncovers.

> The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment,
> deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather
> than presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece.

Claiming these people undermine academic institutions is like blaming your
upstairs neighbour stomping on the ground for your house of cards imploding.
If a journal accepts and publishes such submissions, it was never an academic
institution to begin with. The completely sufficient evidence for this is the
acceptance and publication of those papers.

~~~
Yoric
> Academic journals publish papers deliberately. They don’t ‘accidentally’
> publish bad papers, I can assure you that nobody accidentally clicks the
> ‘publish’ button. Whatever further agenda the article may or may not push
> pales in comparison to the actual problems it uncovers.

Academic journals certainly publish papers (good or bad) deliberately because
the peer reviewers consider them of a sufficient quality and interest for the
domain. It has always been known that it's possible to get low quality papers
in certain journals – sometimes good ones, if one puts sufficient efforts – in
pretty much all domains.

Concluding that these publications are accepted "to push an agenda" requires a
leap of logic. In the past, it has been shown that simply mimicking the
language (using Markov chains) was pretty much sufficient to get into some
journals.

> > The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad
> experiment, deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and
> then rather than presenting real evidence have written a political hit
> piece. > > Claiming these people undermine academic institutions is like
> blaming your upstairs neighbour stomping on the ground for your house of
> cards imploding. If a journal accepts and publishes such submissions, it was
> never an academic institution to begin with. The completely sufficient
> evidence for this is the acceptance and publication of those papers.

On this point, I mostly agree with claudius. While the authors have written
something that looks much more like a poitical clickbait than actual research
findings, they have exposed weaknesses in the process or reviewers of some
journals.

These journals now have the ability to fix their mess, which will make
everybody the winner.

------
karmajunkie
I couldn't get through the preface with a straight face. There's something
really meta about a study which is attacking ideology within academia that is
clearly driven by the authors own ideological bias, which presumably had not
find a welcome audience in these fields. Labeling a wide swath of the
humanities as "grievance studies" belies their ultimate aim, which is to
discredit them on an ideological basis rather than on the merits of the
arguments.

~~~
lallysingh
Ok, but let's not discount the work ad-hominem. Are the fields subject to
problems of behavior inconsistent with principles the fields typically
consider important?

If one important principle is fairness between groups of people, then
substitution of one group for another in matters of treatment shouldn't alter
the results without consideration. If you wouldn't treat group A this way,
then it would be inconsistent to accept treating group B the same way without
discussing why. And that discussion should be held to some rigor. Without it,
we're just talking about group A "vs" group B, instead of principles of how
all groups should be treated.

Yes, clearly grievances of each group are worth study and analysis. But it
deters from the significance of their results if they accept the creation of
isomorphic grievances.

[spoken, rather obviously, as a computer scientist peering into this field of
study from the outside]

------
mrleiter
That is not only an issue in academics, but in society as a whole. There is no
culture of moderate discussion and respect anymore. Arguments are only valid
if they fit the ideology. That is highly concerning.

~~~
aortega
This has happened before. Consider this: Current diversity politics is
diversity of skin color or gender, but not of though. You are only allowed to
think in a certain way if you want to belong to the group. This is not really
diversity, it's superficial diversity.

------
honkycat
Not convinced this study is ethical, but I do find it humorous.

7/20 bullshit studies published is a lot of studies, full stop. The
methodology with which they pursued the publishing of the studies is telling
as well.

I don't think it discredits these fields enough to re-brand them as "Grievance
Studies" but I do think a 35% success rate by pandering to the journal's
obvious biases says something important about the quality of discourse in
these fields.

~~~
buboard
Still though, the study need to control for the opposite hypothesis (submit
right-leaning but sound-looking papers)

------
barry-cotter
The most impressive hoodwinking was of Hypatia which is the top journal in
feminist philosophy. Obviously one sees why other philosophers might be
dismissive of it now.

[https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/philos...](https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/philosophy-
journal-rankings/)

> It can also be difficult to get publications in Hypatia taken seriously by
> one’s department: I know of at least one junior faculty member who was told
> that she needed to get some more ‘mainstream’ publications, despite her
> publication in Hypatia, the top journal in her field

------
mpweiher
Background video by the authors:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVk9a5Jcd1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVk9a5Jcd1k)

------
lukev
If you find yourself in strong agreement with this article, it'd probably be
worthwhile doing some introspection what's actually bothering you -- the fact
that some publications (apparently) lack academic rigor, or that you oppose
them ideologically.

Based on the tone of the original article, it's pretty clear what's motivating
them. Hard to imagine them summoning the same outrage if they'd managed to
sneak in some bogus papers to a physics or medical journal (which, by they
way, has happened.)

~~~
throwaway5250
With due respect, ideology is ultimately the only reason that anything gets
done. RMS would never have created GNU, with all of its fabulously useful
result, had he merely thought that existing tools were of insufficient
quality.

The whole point of academia is that people who oppose you are going to take
their best shot at ripping your work to shreds. If your work can withstand
their worst, we'll all know that it's (probably) really good stuff.

Alternatively, if your work blows over in a light wind, better that everyone
should know as soon as possible.

------
rajekas
We can all agree that cultishness is a general human failing and leftist cults
are as likely to form as Branch Davidians. Historically, some of those cults
have caused immense harm.

Nevertheless, this article strikes me as being deliberately written for its
own cult members. Its air of injured rationality is exhibit A in grievance
studies, the white people version.

Is there some vast underground of fence-sitters waiting to be convinced by
their argument? I doubt it. Instead, the article is catnip for those who share
the same grievances as the writers. Sure, they have one more data point that
the other side is gullible or stupid.

I am more than willing to admit that portions of academia are cultish with
guru figures who can easily destroy your life.

However, all one needs to do is look outside the ivory tower and ask if there
are real injustices in the world, and the answer isn't hard to find. The vast
majority of activists I know, women and men fighting for the rights of women,
people of color, animals and trees have no interest in the battles over
grievance studies.

This is not an article written in good faith. Which is to say, it's
propaganda.

~~~
lallysingh
No. It's an article that's pointing out a problem with a field of study that
points out problems. Which is not just a valid concern, but rather critical to
keeping that field of study from the problems of groupthink.

> However, all one needs to do is look outside the ivory tower and ask if
> there are real injustices in the world, and the answer isn't hard to find.
> The vast majority of activists I know, women and men fighting for the rights
> of women, people of color, animals and trees have no interest in the battles
> over grievance studies.

> This is not an article written in good faith. Which is to say, it's
> propaganda.

I don't know what you're trying to say here. It sounds like you're saying that
because you don't care about the problems listed in the article, and that
there are other problems to talk about instead, that by focusing on these
problems in the article, it must have been written in bad faith?

------
kodis
This looks like Sokol version 2.0. A bunch of hoax papers designed to
demonstrate the lack of rigor in what some of the Social Science journals
accept.

------
slivym
I'm not a big fan of this article at all. Firstly, if you want to try and
actually persuade people of a point don't preface your entire discussion by
deciding to use an epithet to describe what you're discussing. How can I take
seriously someone who goes straight in and goes "This is grievance studies"?
It seems kind of funky how meta it is to adopt that epithet and then go on to
make the accusation that the people you are talking about are acting in bad
faith.

Reading through the methodology I'm really struggling to see what the actual
value of what they're doing is. For example - the Dog Park study:

>What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to
prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper.

If you want to assert that this is a nutty idea - please back up that claim.
Because I feel fairly comfortable arguing that we can learn a lot about social
constructs by studying how they differ in other species. There's nothing wrong
with that concept. Maybe there's something glaringly wrong in that particular
paper, but these authors do nothing to actually demonstrate that.

Later on that go into detail with this. That paper is meant to have
implausible statistics. Ok, what is peer review meant to do? Reject studies
that have implausible findings? We have a word for that - Bias. The correct
response to a paper with implausible findings is to publish it and let people
follow up and do their own studies. That is the system working correctly.

As for advocating for outlandish actions as a result of the study. Well
authors are welcome to suggest anything that like as a result of their
research. Publishing it doesn't imply endorsement. It implies "This is a real
study".

So let's talk science. I have a confounding variable - bad studies got
published because it's better to publish lots and let the academic community
decide the merits of the study than to censor what you think is either
implausible or has troubling parts. That explains all the results of this
study without the wildly insulting and vaguely conspiracy theorist assertion
that these papers get published because of an agenda on the part of academics.

~~~
jlawson
It's not just that they were published with "implausible "results. It's three
things:

1\. That they were published with obviously _impossible_ results (inspecting
the genitals of 10,000 dogs while asking owners about their sexuality).

2\. It's _where_ they were published. e.g. In the #1 "best" feminist journal
Hypatia.

3\. It's the _evil_ in the messages they got published. They got a 3000-word
except of Mein Kampf published, by rewording it in the language of
intersectional theory. They got published recommending that "privileged"
students be physically chained and silenced during class. They got published
by proposing men be trained like animals. (This is not the same as learning
about human behavior by studying dogs; it is to suggest that it's okay to
treat people like dogs if they're born a certain way).

All this demonstrates a field of study that is not just soft in terms of
intellectual rigor ("implausible"), but is willing to _casually_ support
reprehensible policy ideas if they're framed within a specific neo-Marxist
belief system and targeted at men or white people.

Bear in mind that many of the people producing the papers in these fields
receive public funds at public institutions. They project an image of being
neutral scholars to justify those funds. What this hoax has done is given
evidence that they are not neutral scholars. They are moralizers, activists,
revolutionaries working to target a specific group of people, and are not very
concerned about the rigor of the intellectual pathways they use to get there.

A group of people dedicated to a _process_ are called scientists. A group of
people dedicated to a _conclusion_ is called a religion or an ideology. Social
scientists claim to be the former. But the hoax papers demonstrated that, at
least with some regularity and even in the highest journals, the social
sciences act like the latter.

~~~
ForHackernews
> (inspecting the genitals of 10,000 dogs while asking owners about their
> sexuality).

Why is that 'obviously impossible'? How long does it take to look at a dog's
genitals, 5 minutes?

I haven't read the paper, but you could get a team of 10 undergrad (or grad)
students, and send them out to different dog parks in the area. If each
student inspects 20 dogs in a day (say they go to the park for a few hours--I
assume many owners will say no) then you've got your data after 50 days of
work.

Say your students are only free on weekends (when dog parks are likely more
busy, anyway) then it'll take you a little more than six months to gather all
your doggie-dick-data.

That's not at all an unreasonable length to run a study.

~~~
waterhouse
The paper does say this: "While I closely and respectfully examined the
genitals of slightly fewer than ten thousand dogs, being careful not to cause
alarm and moving away if any dog appeared uncomfortable...". The term "I"
implies it was a single person doing all that. Elsewhere, it specifies that
the total time spent observing dogs was 1000 hours.

Elsewhere: "From 10 June 2016, to 10 June 2017, I stationed myself on benches
that were in central observational locations at three dog parks in Southeast
Portland, Oregon. Observation sessions varied widely according to the day of
the week and time of day. These, however, lasted a minimum of two and no more
than 7 h and concluded by 7:30 pm (due to visibility)." It'd be an average of
nearly 3 hours per day, every day.

~~~
ForHackernews
> total time spent observing dogs was 1000 hours

10,000 dogs / 1000 hours = 6 minutes per dog.

Ok, so it's somewhat implausible for one person to look at this many dog-
genitals, but it's certainly physically possible. How many animals does a
veterinary see in a year?

