Scholar Who Pulled Off Publishing Hoax Defends It: ‘Papers Are Either Sound or They Aren’t’

Three academics — Helen Pluckrose, editor of the webzine Areo; James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University — spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers that illustrate and parody what they call “grievance studies” and submitting them to “the best journals” in the relevant subfields. Seven were published.

When the hoax was revealed this week, some observers, like the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and the Harvard government scholar Yascha Mounk, cheered the project as exposing at least some identity-studies subdisciplines as emperors with no clothes. Other academics decried it as outright fraud, saying it had proved nothing beyond that academe operates on a fundamental assumption of good will and honesty.

The Chronicle on Friday reached Pluckrose, who is writing a book about “grievance studies,” in Portland, Ore., for a hurried chat during her media whirlwind. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. You’ve had quite a week. Is the splash your “grievance studies” hoax made what you and your co-authors expected? It seemed — with your press kit and documentary filmmaker on hand — that you knew what was coming.

A. I didn’t really know what to expect, honestly. It’s a bit overwhelming. It’s very encouraging that outlets which are often quite critical of people who are themselves critical of social-justice academia are being charitable and balanced. We were very pleased to see that BuzzFeed, for example, had some criticisms but was actually quite balanced and brought up some of the criticisms that we were trying to make.

Q. Your Areo bio says you are secular, a liberal humanist, a mother, and a dog lover. But can you tell me more about yourself? Where are you from? Where did you study? What do you do for fun besides shake the foundations of the humanities?

A. I’m from just outside east London. I got my undergraduate in literature from the University of East London and my master’s in early-modern studies at Queen Mary, University of London. I’ve been interested in ideology and psychology, so I’ve looked at religion, how it shaped culture from 1300 to 1700. Specifically, how it affects women, how women use religious narratives for their own authority and autonomy, and also how they are affected by them.

I wanted to be a feminist historian. I’ve also looked at how religion affects people now. I’ve been an ardent secular humanist and critic of religious ideology, and that leads to being critical of other counter-Enlightenment, irrational ideologies. That includes postmodernism and branches of theory that have developed from it.

Q. There are a lot of ways to question things in academe. How did you and your co-authors decide to take the hoax route?

A. We had been criticizing directly, in various, different ways for several years, disciplines and epistemologies that rely on personal perspectives, systems of power and privilege and marginalization, that aren’t really focused on evidence or reason, that step away from any sense of being objective. That’s something of concern to all of us.

I’m not sure how the idea to engage with that in a hoaxish way — to try to write something within it, to try to point out the problems — arose. That kind of developed organically after “The Conceptual Penis” [a hoax her co-authors staged last year] and criticisms of it. A deeper and larger attempt to work within the system, to see how it works and show how it works, sort of emerged.

Q. Did you feel as if no one had heard those criticisms when you made them in that more direct way?

A. I think a lot of people did hear them. My article on postmodernism and how it developed reached quite a wide audience. But working within the whole academic-publishing system was necessary to show people who were not necessarily making the connections.

Because it is quite counterintuitive. We have “white privilege,” “male fragility,” etc. — all these buzzwords, these stay-in-your-lane, lived-perspective, lived-experience things in society — and a lot of people just think those come from nowhere. We’re trying to show where in fact they come from, this idea that knowledge is a construct of power, that it’s formed by ways of speech so we have to be very careful about what is and isn’t said and talked about. It has a 50-year intellectual history which isn’t apparent to the general public.

We really want people to look at the publications that we cited, to look at the reviewer comments to see in which direction scholars who are trying to submit work are being directed. It is complicated, and it needs quite a lot of unpacking.

Q. How did you choose the journals you submitted to?

A. These journals are quite varied. We have one in geography, one in the discipline of social work, but we’re not looking specifically at geography or social work. If there are problems more widely within those disciplines, we don’t know about them, and we’re not criticizing them.

What we’re looking at is the grievance-studies approach to these different disciplines. Gender, Place and Culture is not at the top of geography, but it is at the top of feminist geography. So when we’re researching various ideas, the papers that come up over and over again, the influential, significant papers, lead us back to one or a small group of journals which are where these ideas are strongest.

And then we’re looking at how influential they are, what their impact factors are, and we aim at the most influential and most reputable journals in that kind of subdiscipline, that intersection of grievance studies with broader humanities disciplines. A good example: We found ourselves researching and finding Hypatia over and over again, so we aimed our own work at Hypatia.

Q. One comment I read compared the hoax to passing some bad checks and saying in gross exaggeration that it shows the flimsiness of the world banking system. Does that unfairly belittle what you’ve done?

A. We have to leave people to decide for themselves. Our papers are situated very well, blend in very well, with what is out there. If people don’t think that matters, I don’t know what to say to them really.

Q. Scholars within and outside of gender and ethnic studies wonder why you targeted their disciplines, and suggest various reactionary motives. Why did you target those fields?

A. Identity-studies fields — because that is where the ideas are coming from. We’re looking very specifically at theories which came from postmodernism. We were looking at these theories that came from this particular mind-set and use this particular epistemology and this particular ethics. Other people are looking at different problems with knowledge production, and we also certainly support that.

Q. What about the bad-faith criticism — that academic publishing isn’t designed to screen out pranksters and that the hoax wastes reviewers’ time and poisons the atmosphere. I know how Yascha Mounk responds to that, but how do you respond to that?

A. If we’re talking about bad faith, we’re talking about motivations. We have a principle here. We want to look at how things are being talked about, what is being published, why it’s being published, how people are being directed. This is our project, and we engaged with that in good faith.

I don’t understand the idea that it makes a difference that the scholarship that we wrote, that they accepted as good and published, was meant sincerely or not sincerely. Scholarship should not depend on the identity or motivation of the writers. The papers are either sound or they aren’t.

If journals are finding that they can’t distinguish between who is sincere and who isn’t, they need to change their focus to who the writers are and where they’re coming from, and look at the research itself and whether it’s something they should publish and be proud of publishing.

Q. You and your co-authors describe yourselves as liberal, but the hoax is red meat for right-wing scoffers and anti-intellectuals. You probably anticipated that, but does it bother you?

A. If right-wing reactionaries expect us to support any anti-intellectual aims they have, they are going to be sorely disappointed.

Alexander C. Kafka is a senior editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.