Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
While this article is interesting, it does start from a pretty strong assumption: that the problem is specific to one branch (or family of branches) of Academia.I remember at least two similar scandals in very much non-social-justice-related branches of Academia. One was in postmodern studies, if I recall correctly, the other one I think in epistemology. In one case, the paper had been written to deliberately mean nothing, in the other one, I seem to remember that the papers had been generated with Markov chains.So, based on the same data, my personal conclusion is that some fields of Academia are vulnerable to bullshit, whether it's sophistry or simply using the right lingo. It is a pretty bad sign, and I suspect that it is correlated with fields in which results are hard to check/reproduce.It may also be correlated with ideology (I remember that this was the accusation towards postmodern studies), which doesn't mean that it is correlated with any specific ideology.In other words: promising research, but the starting hypothesis and its possible limitations need to be expressed more clearly, and much more data needed.