America’s colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from the new coronavirus offers opportunities for a bit of remediation.
Let’s first examine what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a recent study, “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.”
The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital magazine. By the way, Areo is short for “Areopagitica,” a speech delivered by John Milton to the British Parliament in 1644 in defense of free speech.
Authors Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian say that something has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields within the humanities.
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They call these fields “grievance studies,” where scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth, but upon attending to social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.
The worldview they promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of disciplines such as sociology; anthropology; gender studies; and queer, sexuality, and critical race studies.
In 2017 and 2018, authors Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian started submitting bogus academic papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine if they would pass peer review and be accepted for publication.
Acceptance of dubious research that journal editors found sympathetic to their intersectional or postmodern leftist vision of the world proves the problem of low academic standards.
Several of the fake research papers were accepted for publication. The Fat Studies journal published a hoax paper that argued the term bodybuilding was exclusionary and should be replaced with “fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicized performance.”
One reviewer said, “I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article, and believe it has an important contribution to make to the field and this journal.”
“Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” was accepted for publication by Affilia, a feminist journal for social workers.
The paper consisted in part of a rewritten passage from “Mein Kampf.”
Two other hoax papers were published, including “Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks.” This paper’s subject was dog-on-dog rape.
But the dog rape paper eventually forced Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay to prematurely “out” themselves. A Wall Street Journal writer had figured out what they were...
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