My previous post explained why “refereed” publications—those vetted by expert academic gatekeepers—do not reliably signal scholarly value, nor “non-refereed” publications a lack of quality—despite the deep structural bias in academia toward assuming that they do. The distinction “refereed or not” is an independent variable with approximately random correlation—in networks where I work—with other variable we could use to distinguish between higher and lower quality, such as originality, effort, optimum word counts, readership, and contributions to public discourse. Emphatically, “valuable” does not reliably correspond to “refereed”—although I grant that it does about half the time. However, since winning and keeping an academic job is largely premised on counting a scholar’s raw number of refereed publications (note that I did not say reading them!) this situation creates serious distortions in crushed morale, misplaced priorities, and incentivizing weaker work that games the system.
I did not expect instant slam dunk support in the New York Times, but last weekend the Times featured this story with the clickbait “dog park sex” in its title. It explores how three writers—a mathematician, philosophy instructor, and journalist—who tried to discredit what they call “grievance studies.” This is their hostile term for a mash-up of identity politics and jargon from leftish cultural theory, with special animus for an idea that should be common sense: that intellectual standpoints and historical contexts matter in debates about truth and meaning.
These authors wrote twenty fake articles and managed to get seven accepted by refereed academic journals. One of their creations interspersed passages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf with academic jargon. Another started from the premise that sports are “fat-exclusionary” and went on to advocate “a new classification within bodybuilding” for “fat-inclusive politicized performance.”
Yet another said it had quantified how often humans in dog parks separated male dogs who were “raping/humping” other male dogs, as compared how often they let the same behavior with female dogs pass. It reported (that is, made up) a 97% rate of people breaking up male-on-male dog sex compared to a 32% rate for male-on-female—although they were not sure how much of the difference reflected “oppression based upon (perceived) gender” since they could not judge from their human-centric standpoint how much of the dogs’ behavior was consensual.
This was one of several times they lied about made-up data sets, as one of the duped editors wrote to complain, but they defended themselves on the grounds that the fabrications were so flagrant that anyone should have known they were jokes. In any case, they framed the dog “findings” with “black feminist criminology” (thus trivializing sexual violence in prisons) and embellished them with jargon like “queer performativity…among dogs,” “disrupt[ing] hegemonic masculinities,” and creating “emanicipatory spaces.”
Tellingly, their piece that was accepted for Hypatia (the most respected journal they duped, among others they failed to break into) was a “critique of ‘unethical’ hoaxes”—that is, an argument against work like their own. The Times offers no detail about its reasoning, but the hoaxsters’ self-report seems to presuppose that Hypatia should have known it was a joke—that objecting to a project like their own could be mocked as obviously bankrupt. Times seems to vindicate Hypatia, since the most valuable part of its reporting addresses the ethical issues at stake, touching on the morality and probable real-world consequences of such hoaxes.
From Mocking Straw Targets to Real-World Effects
It is easy to predict two morals that some will draw from this hilarity: first, that “grievance studies” and/or “identity politics” and/or “postmodern theory”—not their most questionable exemplars but rather their structural essences—fall somewhere between the pathetic and the contemptible. Second, that “adults in the room” concerned for standards should ratchet up their policing of valid vs. illegitimate scholars. The authors support these moves when they call for “separating knowledge-producing disciplines and scholars from those generating constructivist sophistry.”
What is the path of least resistance for this policing? It will not interrupt the logic of quantification along a continuum of “refereed or not.” Far more likely is ramped-up bean-counting, plus discounting of some journals—which would intensify a problem I noted. The spectrum of quality and value internal to most journals, including those duped here, is huge.
Thus two aspects of the hoax that could actually have value—dramatizing the slippage between the refereed and the worthwhile, and underlining how a logic of “publish or perish” nested within a mania for simply counting articles (from all fields, not only “grievance studies”) distorts the university’s mission—could turn out to catalyzing moves in prevision the wrong, counterproductive, direction. During the time I drafted this essay, a thoughtful op-ed appeared in the Times making related points.
Stated another way, we can add two more vectors to the list of continua that, in my last post, I mentioned as independent variables correlated more-or-less randomly with value. We can now add additional spectrums: “‘grievance studies’ or not” and “frivolous arguments based on fake evidence or not.”
The Cultural Work of This Hoax
The continuum, “grievance studies or not,” is almost entirely unhelpful. True, our hoaxsters showed how some examples of “study” on the academic left are lame. Congratulations, everybody already knew that, just as the knew the same about lame parts of… well, how shall we label the other pole of this continuum? Does “complacency studies” seem precise enough?
Still, as Donna Haraway famously wrote,
“Some differences [read: grievances] are playful [read: not without interest but possibly trivial] and some are poles of world-historical domination. Epistemology [read: the exercise of academic judgment] is about knowing the difference.” (From her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” reprinted in many places.)
Perhaps we could re-configure the vector of “grievance studies or not” into something that isn’t bankrupt: “grasping Haraway’s points or not.” I have long felt this was implied in my continuum of “quality or not” but I see no harm in splitting it out for emphasis.
History Repeats Itself as Farce
Anyone who worked in academia during the 1990s immediately grasped that the current hoax is a lame retread of the “Sokal Affair,” in which physicist Alan Sokal pranked the journal Social Text. As the Times’s summarizes, his fake article “mix[ed] postmodern philosophy with the theory of quantum gravity.” More precisely, it mashed up jargon from quantum theory with an abstruse straw version of Haraway’s influential work on the cultural politics of science.
Now as before, the hoaxers consider themselves to be “on the left”—and for that reason are self-satisfied to use deceit and mockery toward what they see as a greater good: defending warranted truth claims against pathetic “critical constructivism.” In practice, Sokal revealed that he either failed to understand Haraway or did not care to engage her with honesty, nuance, or generosity. Relatedly, this quote (from Twitter, cited by the Times) is well matched to the recent episode: “What strikes me is…[the stunt’s] fundamental meanness….No attempt to intellectually engage with ideas you disagree with; just trolling for lulz.”
Poisoning the Well: Editing
The undertows created by such lack of collegial respect have wider consequences. For example, I referee for a journal that falls midway between the main targets of this hoax—what the Times calls “interdisciplinary journals in highly niche fields” such as Fat Studies or the Journal of Poetry Therapy—and top-ranked venues. Once I was unsure whether (option A) I was reading a novice graduate student’s poorly executed but sincere and, if revised, promising piece—which explored an explosive hot-button media discourse and analyzed levels of irony that were open either to highly disturbing or passably commendable interpretations. Conversely (option B) I wondered if a Sokal wannabe was trying to prank the journal with the goal of trumpeting the disturbing reading in its worst light. I keep these details vague because a revised version later appeared and the author turned out sincere. Still, I advised the journal to reject the article until they were certain they were not being “Sokaled.” By extension I fear that I bitterly and unjustly insulted a young author.
Another time I could not tell whether an author had (option A) received bad advice when, for background evidence, she used a textbook that I know well and proceeded to paraphrase a passage clumsily but in good faith—or whether (option B) this was simple cut-paste-rephrase plagiarism. My call came down to a coin flip in a context where accusing a young academic might have done great damage to her career.
In such contexts, it matters a great deal whether we can work from a baseline presumption of trust in the good faith of colleagues and interlocutors—rather than continually being on the defensive against “trolling for lulz,” thus transforming ourselves into police to catch cheaters.
Poisoning the Well: Classrooms
Relatedly, the interpersonal energies that make teaching rewarding take a sickening turn if, every time a student writes a lucid sentence, one must ponder whether to stop and check for plagiarism, rather than responding with joy to the student’s brilliance and engagement.
Undoubtedly hoaxters could expose massive amounts of plagiarized bullshit turned in for A grades, and no doubt the problem of plagiarism is serious. Yet a culture of policing can make things worse. This relates to a point I’ve stressed on this blog: how our current regime of abstract quantified assessment of teaching functions, in practice, to transmute defensible learning priorities into something far cruder, typically linked to speeding up a race to the bottom in standards. Part and parcel of this is creating a context in which teachers face great pressure to dumb down expectations and give students a maximum benefit of doubt—which in turn makes it easier to game the system, not least using plagiarism.
Who cares, as long as our classrooms generate the desired numerical metrics for all? Isn’t that all a classroom is, after all, a lived transmutation of what “good student” and “successful teacher” have come to mean? In this context, even a well-intentioned effort to expose plagiarism—even one that is not solely “trolling for lulz”–-can function to deepen an overall rot.
Standards, Double Standards, and Hidden Assumptions
Now consider this crucial point, easy to forget and likely related to our hoaxster’s hidden assumptions. Standards are not solely a problem for niche “grievance studies” journals. I also referee for top-of-the-field journals. From time to time I reject manuscripts not because I find them insincere, nor lacking in fine prose and non-plagiarized data—but because they have no intellectual “value added” or, worse, contribute to trains of thought that are unfortunate in the first place. For example, they might start from half-true premises, then float along wrongheadedly on a stream of habit. Safely hedged in these premises—let’s shift our metaphor and imagine ourselves suffocating, with a desperate need to break windows and let in fresh air—they restated some minor point that dovetailed with some aspect of (regrettable) common sense.
Such writing is exceedingly common in the world of non-hoax, non-marginal-journals. Also typical, in my experience, is finding that a negative referee report will be overruled if it centers on rationales like the one I’ve just offered, the idea that work work publishing should do more than grind forward in a mediocre way.
However, there are tangible career risks in gaining the reputation for reviewing harshly, supplying less-than-ecstatic book blurbs, or failing in other ways to enact the maxim “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine.” In today’s academic job market there is little margin of error, and one might well lose a whole career by failing to play the game enthusiastically enough. To understand why this culture is so hard to change, consider how grade inflation is rampant and no one can fight it alone–you can’t award F’s for work that would earn B+’s in competing courses, because if you try, then your own course will wither away. Or consider that the most critical thing you can say in a recommendation letter today—unless you want to be read as implying a blunt non-recommendation—is something along the lines of “although X was not in my highest cohort, s/he was well within my top 15 percent”—that is, of something, anything, one can think of to praise. Even so, writing such a thing about someone who actually fell in your bottom 15% might well be taken as excessively harsh.
A variant of this dynamic—translated to holding one’s nose, offering extravagant benefit of doubt, and waving an article through a review process—helps explain why our hoaxsters succeeded. Yes, indeed, there are self-described refereed journals—both high and low status, both “aggrieved” and “complacent”—that do not always publish high-quality work. Everyone knows this. But the question is what to do that doesn’t make things worse. This does not include abstract non-contextual fetishizing of “referees” and counting lines in lists—especially if malicious actors are trying to poison the well.
Back to the Big Picture
The Times provoked me by throwing gasoline on a fire already burning in my previous post. It matters because it relates to the question I just posed. How do we make things better, not worse? Both sides of the coin I’ve noted—mixed quality in niche journals and mediocrity in establishment journals—support my key point. The distinction between interest/quality/value and the lack of it, as well as the distinction between refereed and not refereed, by no means reliably run together. In fact their correlation is closer to random, coming together and falling apart.
Perhaps the dog park case makes this core argument more concrete or at least click-bait-ready. Also, we have added a variable to beef up my earlier “quality or not” continua: “grasping Haraway’s points or not.” That’s always a worthy cause!
Quality is the key issue—how can we defend spaces for worthy intellectual exchange. Everyone can agree to valorize brilliant interventions in top journals. No one wants to wade through more bullshit in niche journals. But after that, what are we incentivizing? Something stultifying or wrong-headed, but with lots of (non-fabricated) footnotes, accepted for a prestigious journal? Something in a niche journal with fewer footnotes but thoughtful innovations, letting air into a stuffy room?
Simply sorting and counting—are they “refereed” and just give me a single numeral—is blind to this and introduces crazy distortions. We need to move toward a more thoughtful way to set priorities: not the mind-set of counting beans and policing cheaters, but one of building collegial trust and seeking warranted quality, engaging with defensible priorities in specific social contexts.
Meanwhile this latest retread on Sokal is likely to increase trends toward non-collegial meanness and mistrust, while deepening the ruts that lead toward sorting articles into abstract categories, random with respect to their value, as a substitute for reading them. It makes the serious problems it mocks more entrenched and distracts from what we desperately need.
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