The Grievance Studies Affair (2018)

The Fires of History — Episode 42

Twenty fake papers. Seven accepted. The dog park paper won an anniversary award. The Mein Kampf rewrite was accepted by a feminist social work journal — the title was a bilingual pun on the German and nobody caught it. The only hoaxer with a faculty position was the only hoaxer punished. The institution could not touch the argument, so it punished the person.

The Predecessors

Alan Sokal had fired a single shot in 1996 (see Episode 41). The academic establishment had responded by patching the specific exploit — Social Text began using proper peer review — while insisting the broader system was sound. Twenty-two years later, three people decided to find out if it was.

The Team

Helen Pluckrose was a British writer and editor of Areo Magazine, with a background in medieval religious writing and a particular interest in how postmodern theory had migrated from the academy into broader culture. She held no faculty position, which made her both more expendable and harder to punish.

James Lindsay was a mathematician and author who had written on atheism and the philosophy of science. He operated outside the academy, with the same insulation as Pluckrose.

Peter Boghossian was an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. He was the only one with a faculty position. He would be the only one to pay for it.

The Method

Where Sokal had written one paper and submitted it to one journal, the trio conducted a proper experiment. Over ten months in 2017–2018, they wrote and submitted twenty papers to peer-reviewed journals in fields they collectively termed “grievance studies” — disciplines built around the study of systemic oppression, where the conclusion (oppression exists and is bad) preceded the research.

Their hypothesis was specific: that these fields had become so committed to particular political conclusions that they would accept work supporting those conclusions regardless of whether the underlying research, data, or reasoning was real. They were not testing whether individual reviewers could be fooled. They were testing whether entire editorial ecosystems had lost the ability to distinguish scholarship from ideology dressed as scholarship.

Each paper pushed a specific absurdity to find the acceptance threshold. Every paper contained fabricated data, invented methodology, or conclusions that followed from no coherent reasoning. Several contained deliberate red flags — signals that should have triggered immediate rejection if the reviewers were reading critically rather than sympathetically.

The Scorecard

By October 2018, when Wall Street Journal reporter Jillian Kay Melchior began investigating and the trio decided to go public:

• 7 accepted (4 published, 3 awaiting publication)
• 7 under review
• 6 rejected

A 35 percent acceptance rate for papers that were, by design, complete fabrications.

The Papers

The titles are the argument. They require no commentary.

Published

“Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon” — Gender, Place & Culture. Claimed the author spent one thousand hours observing dogs at Portland dog parks to study “canine rape culture.” Argued that dog parks are “rape-condoning spaces” where men could be trained to behave better by observing how we correct dogs. The journal selected it for a special recognition award honoring the journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The park did not exist. The observations did not happen. The award was real.

“Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use” — Sexuality & Culture. Argued that straight men should use anal sex toys to reduce transphobia and homophobia.

“Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding” — Fat Studies. Proposed bodybuilding competitions judged on “health at every size” principles rather than physique.

“An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity” — Sex Roles. A fake ethnographic study of Hooters with entirely fabricated data. Every interview was invented. Every observation was fiction. Published in a journal whose editorial process is supposed to verify fieldwork methodology.

Accepted

“Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” — Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. A feminist rewrite of Chapter 12 of Mein Kampf. The vocabulary was substituted — Jews became white men, Aryans became feminists, Germany became feminism — but the argumentative structure, the rhetorical patterns, and the eliminationist fervor were left intact. The title is a bilingual pun on Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). Nobody caught it.

“When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire” — Hypatia. Argued that satire reinforces existing power structures unless performed by marginalized groups.

“Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood” — Journal of Poetry Therapy. A paper about feminist lunar rituals that never happened, written under a fake name, describing a coven that did not exist.

The Defense

Critics of the hoax made four arguments:

1. Any field can be fooled. A sufficiently determined hoaxer with domain expertise can get past peer review in any discipline. The hoax proved nothing specific about grievance studies.

2. The rejections prove partial quality control. Six papers were rejected. The system was working, if imperfectly.

3. The project was ethically compromised. Boghossian had involved human subjects — the peer reviewers — without IRB approval.

4. The hoaxers had ideological motivations. Lindsay and Boghossian were known critics of social justice scholarship. The project was activist debunking dressed as methodology.

The Counterarguments

Scale matters. One fooled reviewer is an anecdote. Seven accepted papers out of twenty is a pattern. The 35 percent acceptance rate is not an accident rate; it is a systemic failure rate.

The rejections do not vindicate the system. If 35 percent of the hundred-dollar bills in circulation were counterfeit, we would not celebrate the 65 percent that were real. If 35 percent of the bridges designed by a school of engineering collapsed, we would not praise the ones still standing.

The IRB argument is a procedural deflection. Peer reviewers are not human subjects in the sense the IRB framework was designed to protect. They are professional gatekeepers performing a professional function. Treating an anonymous reviewer’s evaluation of a paper as a protected research interaction requiring informed consent is a novel and conveniently self-serving interpretation of research ethics.

Motivation does not determine results. Sokal was a leftist. These three were not. The papers were still fake. The acceptances were still real. The journals did not publish the papers because of the authors’ politics; they published them because the papers confirmed the journals’ priors.

The Cost

Portland State University’s IRB investigated Boghossian — the only one of the three with a faculty position. The investigation focused not on whether the hoax papers were legitimate scholarship (they were not, and the hoaxers had said so) but on whether Boghossian had violated research ethics by conducting an experiment on human subjects without approval.

Boghossian was found in violation. He was placed on academic probation. He resigned from Portland State in September 2021, writing a public letter accusing the institution of abandoning its commitment to free inquiry.

Pluckrose and Lindsay, who held no faculty positions, suffered no institutional consequences.

Why This Matters

Where Sokal was a sniper, the trio conducted a siege. The methodological upgrade was deliberate — they knew Sokal’s critics had dismissed a single hoax as an anecdote. By submitting twenty papers and tracking acceptance rates, they produced data that could not be waved away. They applied the logic of penetration testing: you do not test a lock once. You test it systematically, document the failure modes, and present the results.

The Sokal hoax found one cavity. The Grievance Studies Affair performed a full-mouth x-ray. The results were not pretty. And the patient’s response — investigating the dentist for practicing without a license — told you more about the patient than about the dentist.

The most revealing aspect of the affair was not the hoax itself but the response. The target institutions did not respond by examining their peer-review processes, revising their editorial standards, or acknowledging that a 35 percent acceptance rate for fabricated papers represented a systemic problem. They responded by:

1. Investigating the hoaxer (Boghossian’s IRB case)
2. Questioning the hoaxers’ motives
3. Arguing that the experiment proved nothing because it was unethical
4. Retracting the papers while leaving the editorial judgment that accepted them unexamined

This is the institutional immune response: attack the foreign body, do not examine the infection. It is the same pattern that follows every whistleblower, every auditor, every penetration tester who finds a vulnerability the organization does not want to acknowledge. The system protects itself, not its integrity.

Ern Malley (1944) → Sokal (1996) → Grievance Studies (2018) → SCIgen (2005+). Each generation of academic troll exposes the vulnerabilities that the previous generation’s reforms were supposed to fix. Each time, the system patches the exploit and declares itself secure. Each time, someone finds a new way in.

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