A degree of shame as academics fall for grievance studies hoax

They fear it will hobble their career, but academics James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian have a great laugh.

James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian

They fear it will hobble their ­careers in politically correct US universities, but boy, did academics James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian have a whopping great laugh when one after another respected refereed journals agreed to publish their blatant hoax papers on what they call “grievance studies”.

There’s a video on YouTube in which the trio meet and split their sides as Lindsay reads out an email from the managing editor of Gender, Place & Culture. The editor proudly tells them their fake paper written under a false name, arguing how in dog-walking parks “dog humping incidents can be taken as evidence of rape culture”, had been recommended for publication and honoured as excellent scholarship.

It was, of course, more elegantly expressed: the “author” of the paper published online in May, who claimed to have spent a year observing canine sexual misconduct in parks in Portland, Oregon, issued “a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviours, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs”.

In the video, Lindsay quotes the Gender, Place & Culture editor from the email, as his fellow hoax conspirators fall over each other in hilarity: “You have done very good work to address the issues … I hope to be seeing your manuscript in print.”

The paper was one of seven Lindsay, Boghossian and Pluckrose had accepted for publication in academic journals in an 18-month project.

Others included an investi­gation into how “transhysteria” means men rarely insert objects into their bottoms, another into “fat bodybuilding” and one titled ‘Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism’. The latter rewrote chapter 12 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf “with buzzwords switched in”.

The studies were variously praised by academic reviewers as “a rich and exciting contribution to the study of ... the intersection between masculinity and anality”, “excellent and very timely” and — in the case of Mein Kampf — offering “important dialogue for social workers and feminist scholars”.

The exposure of the confidence trick this week by the Wall Street Journal has divided the academic community in the US and elsewhere, with some calling it as an unprofessional prank. Tracy Roberts, a director of Taylor & Francis, which owns several of the journals involved, said “this hoax has taken valuable academic editorial and peer reviewer time and expertise away from genuine research”.

Still, it went down a treat here with Jeremy Sammut, director of the culture, prosperity and civil ­society program at the Centre for Independent Studies.

“It shows that the emperors have got no clothes,” he said.

“The takeover of the humanities by postmodernism, identity politics, and political correctness has completely trashed the intellectual ability of these disciplines.

“Anybody who singles out the right victims and blames the right oppressors — so-called — by name-checking the right identity groups gets a free pass, without any other evidence.”

Rather than a hoax, Sammut said, Lindsay, Pluckrose and Bog­hossian had engaged in “the highest form of scholarship, which is to expose the truth”.

Lindsay said in the video he and his colleagues worked out there was a “religious architecture” to the academic Left in which “privilege is sin, privilege is evil … education is the place it has to be fixed”.

One hoax paper suggested professors rated students’ levels of oppression based on race, gender, class and other identity categories.

Students deemed “privileged” would be kept from commenting in class, interrupted when they did speak, and invited to sit on the floor or “wear (light) chains around their shoulders, wrists or ankles for the duration of the course”.

The three academics who perpetrated the hoax, who call themselves left-leaning liberals, expect reprisals.

Boghossian doesn’t have tenure and expects the university will sack or otherwise punish him. Pluckrose predicts she’ll have a hard time getting accepted to a doctoral program. Lindsay says he expects to become “an academic pariah” barred from professorships or publications.

In the video, Lindsay says “I am not going to lie to you, we had a lot of fun with this project” but insists its objective was to reveal a serious problem in US academia.

“We did this to expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the university,” Lindsay says.

“We think studying topics like gender, race and sexuality is worthwhile, and that getting it right is extremely important.”

The problem, he says, is how they are taught and studied.

“A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed, like those that make whiteness, and masculinity, problematic.”

“The fields we are concerned about put social grievances ahead of objective truth. So as simple summary, we call the problem ‘grievance studies’.”

Additional reporting: Wall Street Journal, The Times