What the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Really Shows
This time the hoax was an elaborate, yearlong series of 20 article submissions that resulted in seven accepted papers and four publications, all in journals devoted to fields the hoaxers characterized as “grievance studies.” As they wrote in the exposé published in the journal Areo, “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant,” within certain fields in the humanities, whose “scholars increasingly bully students, administrators and other departments into adhering to their worldview.”
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In either case, because graduate students and junior faculty in the humanities are expected to produce journal articles and citations much in the way graduate students and junior faculty in the sciences are, and because they are discouraged by tenure committees and sometimes by their own ideological provincialism from thinking broadly and connecting their work to larger questions of universal relevance, there is an increasing incentive to publish in journals with narrow purviews that are read by correspondingly few scholars. The proliferation of journals that few people are invested in, along with the pressure to produce ever greater numbers of articles, leads to more work being published with fewer safeguards guaranteeing its quality.
Furthermore, hyper-specialization in the humanities means that the very people who should be thinking broadly about culture and ideas, and teaching students to encounter and engage with a variety of positions and opinions, are becoming accustomed to defining their interests in the narrowest possible terms. They read and exchange ideas in hermetic academic bubbles, in very much the same way that the public has increasingly tended to read and exchange ideas in hermetic news bubbles.
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In either case, because graduate students and junior faculty in the humanities are expected to produce journal articles and citations much in the way graduate students and junior faculty in the sciences are, and because they are discouraged by tenure committees and sometimes by their own ideological provincialism from thinking broadly and connecting their work to larger questions of universal relevance, there is an increasing incentive to publish in journals with narrow purviews that are read by correspondingly few scholars. The proliferation of journals that few people are invested in, along with the pressure to produce ever greater numbers of articles, leads to more work being published with fewer safeguards guaranteeing its quality.
Furthermore, hyper-specialization in the humanities means that the very people who should be thinking broadly about culture and ideas, and teaching students to encounter and engage with a variety of positions and opinions, are becoming accustomed to defining their interests in the narrowest possible terms. They read and exchange ideas in hermetic academic bubbles, in very much the same way that the public has increasingly tended to read and exchange ideas in hermetic news bubbles.
