Not all the peer reviews of ‘Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon’ were positive. One thought that the authors had invaded the private space of the canine research subjects. Another was worried about the lack of focus on ‘black feminist animal studies’. But the general premise, that men can be trained like dogs to prevent rape culture, went down a storm at Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. The article, it was claimed, would help readers ‘better understand human a-/moral decision-making in public spaces and uncover bias and emergent assumptions around gender, race, and sexuality’, as one abstract put it.
The article, which has since been retracted by the journal, was one of seven nonsensical papers submitted by three academics who set out to expose what they call ideologically-motivated scholarship, ‘based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances’. What has become known as the Grievance Studies Hoax reveals a regrettably unsurprising willingness to accept absurd, ludicrous papers as long as their conclusions support the prevailing left-wing, identitarian ideology which has become pervasive across academia, especially in the humanities.
Will the expose lead to a hard look in the mirror at the targeted faculties and their ideological bedfellows? Unlikely. The line of defence is clear: play the victim card. The three academics have been accused of being unethical and violating academic norms. Buzzfeed and Slate Magazine both accuse the hoaxers of singling out gender studies and related fields, making no attempt to test whether other fields may have similar problems. True, articles based on manipulated, even falsified, data have surely made their way into peer-reviewed publications in other scientific disciplines. But it wasn’t the dodgy data that sensible people would expect the publications to suspect; it was the preposterous premises and conclusions, which were so outrageous that only people blinded by ideology could accept them. The process of peer review is supposed to root out this kind of gobbledygook. The hoaxers exposed the ‘grievance studies’ exactly because these studies are ripe for exposure. There is little talk of an ideological mono-culture affecting academic standards in cancer research, biology or astrophysics.
But ultimately this line of defence should not come as a surprise. It is founded on a premise inherent in the ‘grievance studies’: that of the virtue of victimhood. The claim is of course that the intention to expose the shoddy scholarship is proof that these studies are under ideologically motivated attack – though the hoaxers are all self-declared leftists and claim to be out to fix the left to allow them to take on the right. An opinion in the New York Times predictably claim that ‘the solution is to ensure that the study of the marginalized not itself be marginalized’. Grotesquely, becoming a laughing stock seems to be no cause for reflection but for doubling down. Most humanities faculties have become bastions of identity politics and are in no mood for self criticism getting in the way of their political quest. So what comes of this? Of course, the hoax is good for a laugh, but it proves nothing which we and they didn’t already know: that in many fields of academia ideology trumps scientific rigour. Sadly, no matter how elaborate and well executed the hoax was, it will change nothing.