Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
I&#x27;m not a big fan of this article at all. Firstly, if you want to try and actually persuade people of a point don&#x27;t preface your entire discussion by deciding to use an epithet to describe what you&#x27;re discussing. How can I take seriously someone who goes straight in and goes &quot;This is grievance studies&quot;? It seems kind of funky how meta it is to adopt that epithet and then go on to make the accusation that the people you are talking about are acting in bad faith.<p>Reading through the methodology I&#x27;m really struggling to see what the actual value of what they&#x27;re doing is. For example - the Dog Park study:<p>&gt;What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper.<p>If you want to assert that this is a nutty idea - please back up that claim. Because I feel fairly comfortable arguing that we can learn a lot about social constructs by studying how they differ in other species. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that concept. Maybe there&#x27;s something glaringly wrong in that particular paper, but these authors do nothing to actually demonstrate that.<p>Later on that go into detail with this. That paper is meant to have implausible statistics. Ok, what is peer review meant to do? Reject studies that have implausible findings? We have a word for that - Bias. The correct response to a paper with implausible findings is to publish it and let people follow up and do their own studies. That is the system working correctly.<p>As for advocating for outlandish actions as a result of the study. Well authors are welcome to suggest anything that like as a result of their research. Publishing it doesn&#x27;t imply endorsement. It implies &quot;This is a real study&quot;.<p>So let&#x27;s talk science. I have a confounding variable - bad studies got published because it&#x27;s better to publish lots and let the academic community decide the merits of the study than to censor what you think is either implausible or has troubling parts. That explains all the results of this study without the wildly insulting and vaguely conspiracy theorist assertion that these papers get published because of an agenda on the part of academics.