What the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Means

Illustration by Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle

Over the summer, the Wall Street Journal’s Jillian Kay Melchior became suspicious of a bizarre-sounding academic journal article, “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon,” published in the journal Gender, Place & Culture. She started investigating, and discovered that the article’s author, “Helen Wilson,” did not exist. The article was part of an elaborate hoax cooked up by Helen Pluckrose, the editor of the online magazine Areo, James A. Lindsay, a Ph.D. in math, and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. “Sokal Squared,” Yascha Mounk called it, and the label stuck.

The trio of hoaxers, Melchior discovered, had written 20 fake papers and managed to get seven of them accepted at peer-reviewed journals, including “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism,” composed of passages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten so as to appear to be a theoretical argument about social justice. As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they targeted fields they pejoratively dub “grievance studies” — “gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy” — which they consider peculiarly susceptible to fashionable nonsense.

Does the hoax identify something uniquely rotten in gender and sexuality studies, or could it just as easily have targeted other fields? Is it a salutary correction or a reactionary hit job? And what does it portend for already imperiled fields? The Chronicle Review asked scholars from a variety of disciplines. Here are their responses.

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The Circling of the Academic Wagons

By Yascha Mounk

To hoax morally suspect fields like economics, one of the fake papers concocted by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian and accepted for publication in Hypatia argued, is morally righteous. To hoax morally righteous fields like gender studies, on the other hand, is morally suspect.

This hilarious little piece of meta-textualism shows that the scholars behind Sokal Squared are more conversant in postmodern discourse — and more attuned to its lighter modes — than some of their critics seem to assume. It also shows that they know their enemies well enough to predict their reactions with uncanny accuracy.

What is most striking in the intense debate which this hoax has already occasioned is the sheer amount of tribal solidarity it has elicited among leftists and academics. Virtually the whole debate has focused on the supposedly malign motives, or the supposedly evident stupidity, of the authors. I don’t find these criticisms to be particularly persuasive. Like Alan Sokal, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian locate themselves on the left. And while it did them no favors to write up their hoax in the style of a social-scientific experiment, thus inviting the wrong standard of judgment, their mastery of postmodern jargon and their sly humor is evident in the corpus of work they have produced in the past year. If you don’t believe me, dear “Sokal Squared” critics, I beseech you to actually skim some of the papers: you may even, despite yourself, end up having a good chuckle.

But what I’ve found most striking — and debased — about this grand circling of the imperiled wagons is the ad hominem nature of so many of the reactions. So let me concede, for the sake of argument, that the motives behind the hoaxes were nasty; that they provided succor to the anti-intellectual enemies of the academy; that their hoax was, by its very nature (or, as Hypatia would have it, by its impermissible choice of target), immoral. What would follow from all of this?

Practically nothing. Because, after all, it is possible to glean valuable information from the immoral actions of evil people. And even if all of the charges laid at the feet of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact: Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit.

Perhaps this does not mean that we should celebrate the perpetrators of the hoax as moral heroes. Perhaps it would have been possible to hoax other fields in similar ways. And as the hoaxers themselves emphasize, there is no reason to conclude that all of academia is rotten, or that we shouldn’t devote serious attention and resources to studying sex, gender, and race.

But for all of the caveats, one thing remains incontestable in my mind: Any academic who is not at least a little troubled by the ease with which the hoaxers passed satire off as wisdom has fallen foul to the same kind of motivated reasoning and naked partisanship that is currently engulfing the country as a whole.

Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University.

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A Hollow Exercise in Mean-Spirited Mockery

By Carl T. Bergstrom

At the University of Washington, I teach a large undergraduate course entitled “Calling Bullshit.” We cover topics ranging from fake news to misleading statistics to the so-called replication crisis in science. So, when the “Sokal Squared” hoax was announced, I was intrigued — but as I read the article and associated papers, my intrigue turned to dismay.

Ethically, the project is indefensible. Numerous editors and dozens of unconsenting peer reviewers invested large amounts of time on bad-faith submissions. The hoax, described by its architects as a “reflexive ethnography,” appears to lack IRB approval for ethnographic work with human subjects. Two of the four published articles were based on fabricated data or field notes; the fraud was not immediately disclosed. This is straight-up academic misconduct.

The worst thing, though, is that the project is uninformative. For self-styled critics of academia, the hoaxers appear woefully naïve about how the system actually works. The entire force of their stunt lies in the fact that they managed to get several satirical papers published. But it makes no sense to judge the health of a field by looking at what an insincere author can get through peer review. Publishing a bad-faith paper based on fraudulent data proves nothing more about the state of a research field than passing a bad check proves about the health of the financial system.

Peer review is simply not designed to detect fraud. It doesn’t need to be. Fraud is uncovered in due course, and severe professional consequences deter almost all such behavior. Nor is the peer-review process designed to weed out every crazy idea. Given the self-correcting nature of scholarship, it is far better to let through a few bad ideas than to publish only those that are so self-evident as to be without controversy.

The purpose of peer review is first and foremost to improve manuscripts. A skilled referee approaches a paper with a constructive touch, not a censorious one. In places, the language of the hoax articles appears as obvious parody; in other places the papers present outlandish suggestions. Fine. It is not a peer reviewer’s job to protect authors from their own willful stupidity. Basic logical or mathematical mistakes must be fixed, of course. But when an interesting manuscript takes what I consider an intellectual wrong turn, I point this out and explain my reasons — yet I explicitly permit the authors to take or leave my suggestions. It is not my job to dictate what paths of inquiry they may explore.

Attacking a field with satirical nonsense is ineffectual — and just plain lazy. If a field is intellectually vacuous, it is so because its central papers and most exciting conclusions are unjustified or even absurd. To effectively criticize a field, one must engage with its central tenets, its core assumptions, its accepted methods, and its primary conclusions. And then one must show where these are mistaken, incoherent, or preposterous. Sadly, the hoaxers chose a different path. They may have created a media splash, but their stunt is a hollow exercise in mean-spirited mockery rather than a substantive critique of the field.

Carl T. Bergstrom is a professor of biology at the University of Washington.

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In Defense of Hoaxes

By Justin E.H. Smith

Quite apart from whether “Sokal Squared” has accomplished what its authors claim, I confess I am astounded, though I really should not be by now, by the moralism and the piety toward rules and procedures that so many academics are expressing, as if hoaxing were always unethical and lacking in any potential salutary effects. These academics seem entirely unaware of the distinguished history of hoaxing, and to assume that it dates back no earlier than Sokal.

They seem never to have read, for example, Anthony Grafton on the importance of playful deception in the learned culture of the Italian Renaissance. They seem unaware of the rich and fascinating 19th-century genre of the “mystification.” They seem unaware of the often-high-minded theoretical ambitions of documentary metafiction and of the vague gradations between this broad genre of writing and outright fraud.

They do not know about the French fraudster Denis Vrain-Lucas, who was eventually arrested, in 1869, for having passed off numerous falsified letters as authentic documents. Vrain-Lucas continued to defend himself, from prison, on the grounds that he had breathed new life into the carcass of history by making past characters, including Newton, Galileo, Vercingétorix, and Jesus Christ, more interesting than they actually were.

They do not know about Ken Alder’s ingenious piece in Critical Inquiry in 2004, which was a purported translation from the French of a prison letter by Vrain-Lucas. I learned more about the history and historiography of science from Alder’s piece than from any other single scholarly text I could cite.

They do not know about Paul R. Coleman-Norton’s equally ingenious “An Amusing Agraphon,” published in Catholic Biblical Quarterly in 1950, claiming to be the description of a newly discovered saying of Jesus that the author had happened upon in a Greek manuscript while serving in World War II in Morocco. According to Coleman-Norton, the agraphon has Jesus warning his disciples: “In the furnace of fire there will be moaning and gnashing of teeth.” One of the disciples asks: “But Lord, what if we have lost our teeth?” To which the Lord answers: “Teeth will be provided.”

It was 20 years before one of Coleman-Norton’s students informed the world that this had all been a joke. The author had produced a rigorous scholarly apparatus, had himself composed the agraphon and the relevant paratexts in Greek — had, in short, displayed his scholarly expertise. His hoax, I would contend, counts as great scholarship, and I would much rather read it, to learn both about Biblical philology and about the potentials of creative metafiction, than I would read just about any “real” article ever published in any of the journals lately punked in the “Sokal Squared” hoax.

I myself have written no small amount of documentary metafiction in which la règle du jeu is a strict poker-faced silence about the truth-value and the purpose of the undertaking. Is it hoaxing? Is it dishonest? Is it bad practice for an academic? I don’t care.

Any academic who thinks hoaxing as such is unethical or nugatory is a dull and petty functionary, and evidently has no interest in participating, or reveling, in the ongoing life of ideas.

Justin E.H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris Diderot.

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A Limited Intellectual Vision

By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

The “Grievance Studies” hoax is so unsettling because it seems to confirm a sneaking unease we may all sometimes feel. For me, this happens when I come across a conference program or a table of contents that sparks equal parts skepticism and jealousy: Did this prof really parlay procrastination via Netflix binge-watching or social-media cat videos into a peer-reviewed paper?

Of course, the hoaxers did not simply spin scholarship from the prosaic — hanging at the dog park, pumping up at the gym, or popping into a Hooters — they made outlandish arguments founded on fake data. And because of that, their experiment apparently confirms a more disturbing conclusion: The right admixture of social-justice ideology and trussed-up theoretical jargon is sufficient to pass muster in peer review, the process we trust to weed out unoriginal or ideological work.

On the one hand, the fact that any of the papers were accepted absolutely reveals some of the excesses of academia. We must do better. The tendencies the hoaxers purport to reveal are real — there’s a reason I’ve started to assign the essay “Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice” on my left-leaning campus.

And there is no doubt the hoax is embarrassing to scholars in the social sciences and humanities in general. It is also especially enraging to academics who, like myself, strive to show how experiences of everyday life merit serious attention — research that often helps shed light on the perspectives of those marginalized from mainstream narratives. (I’m writing a history of working out.) Just as a previous generation of scholars labored to prove that studying topics like homemaking — from cooking to cleaning to TV-watching to toilet training — was a meaningful way to incorporate the experiences of those excluded from the historical record and to more fully appreciate the lives of those already there, today scholars of gender and race and class (and more) are making the same kind of claims to defend apparently intellectually unimportant topics like social-media use and sexual identity.

But these particular pranksters also grouped the outright asinine (canine rape culture) with the totally plausible (fat people bodybuilding). In targeting journals that focus on women and minorities, they also channeled their ire at groups still struggling for representation in the academy, from faculty hiring to footnote citations, a quantitative reality that challenges the core assumption of the “Grievance Studies” crowd: that lockstep obeisance to social-justice orthodoxy is corrupting academia. This suggests more about the hoaxers’ arrogance and the limits of their intellectual vision than it does about any inherent flaw in, say, taking seriously feminist spirituality.

This is exactly the sort of opprobrium that women’s history and ethnic-studies scholars faced nearly a half century ago when the fields first emerged. There’s no excuse for shoddy peer review, and perhaps “Sokol Squared” will inspire new, more intense forms of scrutiny that will move these subfields forward into the main of the humanities and social sciences. That’s a best-case scenario.

And that’s because the greatest crisis in academia is not the peer-review process of some small, specialized journals, but the defunding and devaluing of the humanities — including not just feminist and ethnic studies, but also history, philosophy, literature, and other fields these pranksters would likely deem worthy of continued existence. It is a sad fact that this process will only accelerate, thanks in part to a new rhetorical weapon: “grievance studies.”

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is an associate professor of history at the New School.

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A Strange Start to Peer Reviewing

By David Schieber

Academics of all ranks and disciplines live in fear of “Reviewer 2.” This publishing trope refers to the dreaded anonymous peer reviewer who gratuitously disparages your paper, curtly dismisses it, or seems to have not read it at all. These fears are, to an extent, justified — such peer-review stories are not uncommon. As a graduate student, I have received “Reviewer 2"-type reviews. This past June, when I peer-reviewed a paper for the first time, I decided I would try to be different.

The paper at hand attempted to theorize masturbation as a form of violence. I told my wife and my adviser that I was reviewing a strange paper and remember sitting at my desk trying to figure out what to do with it. Strange is not — in and of itself — bad, and simply calling a paper strange is not a review. So I dug in, read the paper, and tried to decipher what was going on. The paper was bad, and I quickly decided on a rejection.

But how to approach writing the rejection? I looked at a rejection I had received. The reviewer had read my paper carefully, offered substantive and detailed critiques, and offered directions I might be able to take the paper. I remembered how much I liked that reviewer, and so decided to take the same approach. I critiqued the paper substantively, while offering potential avenues the authors might be able to pursue. I hoped that, despite the rejection, the author might benefit from the review.

In their article announcing the hoax, the writers used selected quotes from my review to argue that I supported this paper (despite recommending a rejection). This selective use of my comments seemed disingenuous. They were turning my attempt to help the authors of a rejected paper into an indictment of my field and the journal I reviewed for, even though we rejected the paper.

As the initial embarrassment and frustration of reviewing a hoax article has worn off, and through an outpouring of support on Twitter, I am still glad I chose not to be “Reviewer 2.” It is impossible to know who is on the other end of blind peer review, and it is reasonable to assume the person has good intentions, even if the paper is mediocre or worse.

My first reviewing experience has been strange, and, if nothing else, I am moving on confident in my decision to be a critical yet constructive scholar.

David Schieber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

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Exposing the Madness of Grievance Studies

By Heather E. Heying

The left and the right agree, at least in the abstract, on the desirability of a fair world and the fact that we have work left to do to get there. But increasingly, some academic fields are claiming to be about justice and equality for all, while indoctrinating students with a militant and decidedly unequal message. These fields — dubbed “Grievance Studies” by the authors of the hoax — prize victimhood, repudiate science and logic, and extol activism over inquiry. Some of us, myself included, have left academia as an indirect result of this madness.

Will the Grievance Studies hoax sufficiently expose this dangerous farce, and give courage to those who have remained silent, those who hoped that the purge would pass them by? I hope so. If you are a faculty member who has been observing from the sidelines — watched as safe spaces and requests for trigger warnings proliferate on your campuses, endured implicit-bias training, observed your colleagues bully others into silence, felt the lure of self-censorship — please speak up.

Consider what led you into academia in the first place. If you have anything of the creator or discoverer within you, remember those drives and recognize that the rising quasi-religious zealotry from those in Grievance Studies has liberty, creativity, and discovery in its cross hairs. For the practitioners of Grievance Studies, the scientific method is a tool of the patriarchy, while beliefs outside of the narrow band of conformity required by the authoritarian left are evidence of fascist, alt-right leanings. This will sound like hyperbole to those without direct experience, but I and many others have observed it firsthand.

What will it take to return our institutions of higher education to places of scholarship and of inquiry?

Projects like the hoax reveal character, both good and bad. Whether out of error or expedience, many in the academy will dig in on behalf of Grievance Studies. Others will be driven by fear into silence. But if you share a deep commitment to rigorous inquiry, be one of the people who stand up and say: “This is wrong. It must stop. I will help.” Speak up in faculty meetings and in hallways. Join Heterodox Academy. Support FIRE. And when you encounter this distorted pseudo-scholarship delivered as insight, proclaim as loudly as you dare: #TheyDontSpeakForMe.

Heather E. Heying is a former professor of evolutionary biology at Evergreen State College

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Only a Rube Would Believe Gender Studies Has Produced Nothing of Value

By Laurie Essig and Sujata Moorti

Turns out the media is mighty gullible. “Fake News Comes to Academia” ran a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Fox News reported on the hoaxers’ view that “biased research” is “pervasive in higher education.” Even The New York Times and The Chronicle wrote about the hoax, affirming it, in a sense, by giving a platform to its critique of academia.

Others outside gender studies gleefully celebrated the hoax on social media. Steven Pinker tweeted “Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?” Yascha Mounk described the hoax as “hilarious and delightful.” These are not the words we would use to describe a political project that calls gender studies a “political corruption,” “pushing a social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker and sicker.”

This bandwagon celebration of the hoax comes, of course, from people outside and largely unfamiliar with gender studies. But whether it’s the philosophical depth of an Angela Davis or the beauty of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theories, only a rube would believe that the field has produced nothing of value.

What was missing from these news reports and outside critiques? The question of who in the world is funding a project that was intended to last roughly a year and a half, involves a documentary, and led one of the hoaxers to focus on writing “nonsense about genitals.”

Have the hoaxers cooked their data? Have they failed to reveal all the rejections they received? Journalists should not assume people who are professional manipulators would be honest.

Finally, even a cursory reading of the hoaxers’ work shows that much of what they’re claiming as proof doesn’t in fact implicate the field in anything but collegiality. Their claim that their article on the pedagogy of chaining white students received positive feedback? That’s just untrue. It was rejected. Perhaps the reviewers were simply trying to be helpful. That point gets lost in the media coverage and academic trolling from outside the field.

This “Grievance Studies” hoax belongs in a larger political and historical context. Feminist and gender studies are under attack, in Hungary, Russia, and right here in the U.S. As scholars working in the field, we should know. Our own program was attacked by the right for “causing riots” when Charles Murray came to give a talk on campus — which was untrue. This allegation was then used to bring a broader attack on the field, demanding it be shut down.

Many of us in the field receive death threats, rape threats, and calls for our non-existence. The “Sokol Squared” attack sits squarely within this larger assault, whatever the hoaxers profess of their political views or goals. One of the trio has written that “feminism has lost its way and should not have public respectability.” Instead of celebrating the hoax, the first thing journalists and outside commentators should have done was to put this into a larger context of attacks and the deep but often anonymous money behind them.

Laurie Essig is a professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College. Sujata Moorti is director and a professor in the gender, sexuality, and feminist studies program at Middlebury College.