The STEM disciplines are the heavy artillery within the university system and when they act on mass over some issue the other side folds. The problem is that the STEM disciplines rarely act on mass over something like this, but the damage to the whole university reputation is now so great that STEM is at risk of losing public support and funding. It is time to act.
This is such an important point that it needs to be emphasized. Large chunks of the humanities and social sciences operate under a completely different epistemology. This epistemology rejects reason. And I don't mean that as a jab, I mean it literally rejects the philosophical concept of Reason itself.
Everything is about ideology. It has at it's core the notion that there is no objective truth, and that any assertion of truth is merely the application of power of one group over another. Under this epistemology, lying, contradiction, hypocrisy, fallacy, and rhetoric are all acceptable and even encouraged.
Dig a little in to post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction and so much of the Social Justice movement will make sense. You'll start to find very little about Social Justice is about social justice.
Could you please explain? I don't think I misrepresented anything, but I'm open to correction. I'm no expert either, but I have explored these ideas and I feel like I gave fair summary.
> but it's not the whole truth
True, it was a summary of what I felt were the relevant points.
> misinformation
I don't think what I said is even particularly controversial, least of all misinformation. It's just not well known. Most of what I said is explicitly stated by the people who hold those beliefs.
I agree that misinformation can be wielded like a club; I disagree that GP is the one doing so.
For those playing at home: he's quoting stripped of context Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Watch the video here: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/06/ocasio-cor...
It seems to me that saying that Washington Post fact-checkers are "more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right" is one step away from saying they are morally wrong, an example of the "post-fact" attitude that holding the right position is more important than reality.
I suppose it was inevitable that when fact-checkers became inconvenient for politicians, politicians would attack them. How long until the same thing happens in academia and STEM is attacked for caring more about facts than being "morally right" according to someone's personal definition of morality?
People who still care about facts need to stand up to those who don't, lest facts cease to matter entirely.
Edit:
In response to the claim that the WaPo is being "pedantic" and "petty", I should include their response:
> The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her falsehoods. Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s Fact Checker team give out for bungling the “semantics” of something. It’s when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for a singular claim.
...
> What might be most problematic about Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, though, is the idea that people should care less about specific facts and more about being “morally right" — as if this is a zero-sum game in which the two can be weighed against one another. She’s practically saying, “Well, maybe I was wrong, but at least my cause is just.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/07/alexandri...
Sure you can spend your life being pedantic about things and us nerds commonly fall in to that trap, but it doesn't engage the conversation in a meaningful way and is very petty.
The reason I linked it is because the larger back-and-forth with Cooper where she admits facts are important and talks about when she makes mistakes provides colour that is missing from the misleading snipped quote "being morally right is more important than facts".
If you want to have a conversation about military spending vs. civilian spending, fine. Let's have that conversation. But it's only worth having that conversation with people who will be honest and admit when they're wrong.
Instead, she suggested we could pay for Medicare for All just by improving Pentagon accounting, without making sacrifices, which is false. Pointing out the difference is neither petty nor pedantic.
It's also dangerous (but all too common) for her to suggest that her position is "morally right" and anyone who questions it, anyone who supports the military, is "morally wrong" without even considering what happens to the world if Pax Americana ends.
Perhaps journalists have "facts", but, in the sciences, we don't have anything of the sort. We have evidence, and theories that attempt to interpret the evidence. Scientists are often accused of equivocating about the significance of their results, and changing their minds every few years, because the public expects "facts" and absolute scientific truth where all we have is best-guesses given the data, and uncertainty. And this is an expectation bred by the reporting of scientific results in the lay press.
The comment you quote above seems to be about WP fact-checkers; not scientists. I don't see why you have to go from that, to a crisis in scientific credibility. Journalists can be expected to have much less rigorous research processes than scientists. In that light, the comment you quote, that being morally right is more important than being factually correct makes sense: journalistic "fact-checking" is not going to be very accurate at all. So why not make sure it's at least ethical?
In any case, I don't see any, well, evidence of the kind of crisis you're talking about.
Theory is always changing and improving, as it should, but facts are the foundation for sound theory.
AOC is arguing that what's important is that the theory be appealing, whether or not it fits the facts.
If STEM operated that way nothing would work.
> post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction
I've worked in the pre-eminent enemy-of-the-right organisation in Australia, GetUp. I also am/was a postgrad philosopher. I can confidently say I've not heard a single left-wing activist talk about any of those 4 areas in my time working at that organisation, or, truly, in any other activist context.
Additionally, to read these four areas and to then claim that they form the basis of "identity politics" demonstrates a fundamental misreading. Perhaps this misreading is a motivated one.
I've mostly heard these things discussed on Reddit and YouTube because of Jordan Peterson. I've heard postmodernism discussed by a professional counseller but nobody else I've ever talked to. I find it intriguing the intensity which people fight beliefs that seemingly few people believe or have even heard of.
I do find epistemology a very interesting subject in the modern day though. I've heard arguments in Canada about how traditional native forms of knowledge should be acknowledged to be as legitimate as science. People aren't proposing this merely as a thought experiment they want things like oral tradition to hold weight in the court system. They feel that a lack of scientific evidence about possible harms from say natural resource development is being used as grounds to harm the ecology of areas in spite of the warnings and precautions of oral traditions. Epistemology is becoming very relevant politically here in these parts yet it seems to be a subject that both myself and the public at large is uneducated about.
You're right to point to Mr. Peterson regarding these postmodernism complaints. A succinct summary is that he claims in a movement called "postmodern neo-marxism". Marxism is a modernism movement, the phrase itself is already a contradiction. And yeah, almost no activists even know about postmodernism.
https://cirl.ca/files/cirl/david_laidlaw-en.pdf
Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge DOES have weight in the Canadian legal system just not very much especially in the lower courts. A point bought up in the context of using it in the courts is - isn't oral tradition fundamentally built on hearsay?
1. How big is GetUp here in Australia? How many full time staff?
2. How can you be a postgrad philosopher in both the present and past tense?
2. Counter-question: Is it possible to simultaneously hold a post-graduate degree, and be studying one?
2. Yes, but that was not my question.
Traditionally, if you think a scientific field is a bunch of nonsense, you have two options: a) ignore it, and, b) change it from within, by publishing better work yourself, etc.
But, to mobilise some kind of research police to tell other academics what to research and how to research it? I don't think so. Academics should be free to study whatever they like. If this ends up producing a load of garbage like gender studies, then so be it. They can study their irrelevant and useless subjects, so that I can study my all-important subject (AI; and I'm being sarcastic- of course my own field looks more important to me).
In any case, it's really not the job of STEM researchers, or any researchers, to police other fields. I don't see any sort of justification in what you describe.
The comment to which I replied calls for STEM researchers to "do something" - without specifying what. What are you suggesting should be done? Are we talking about writing papers criticising those fields, as they criticise ours, or are we talking about some more radical kind of "self-defense" like making sure their funding is cut and their research and teaching positions cancelled?
It seems sensible, at the very least, to ensure their research meets the highest standards of rationality just as they ensure STEM meets high ethical standards.
I also think it's worthwhile to ensure those departments are completely inclusive and don't exclude Christians, white men, the right wing, etc. A principled, rational approach to inclusion can help ensure that the social departments are truly representative of all the people.
Edit:
This isn't a description of grievance studies as it currently exists, rather it's an answer to the question "what should we do?" - we should advocate and lobby for something like this, I think.
Thank you for clarifying. But, why is that anything to do with STEM researchers, or researchers from any other field, than the fields in question? What are we, the guardians of scientific rationality? If a field is full of nonsense, it's up to its community to fix it. If they don't see the problem- well, that, too, is their problem.
You and other commenters here sound like you think a problem in, e.g., gender studies is a problem for all of academia. I really don't see why.
Edit: to clarify- I don't see how the gender studies etc fields "ensure that STEM meets high ethical standards". If such critique is really common among the humanities, at least my field is completely ignoring it. And I don't see how we can be forced to pay attention if we don't really care to.
In short- they can say what they like. Why should I care?
https://www.bipm.org/en/news/full-stories/2018-11-si-overhau...
I would recommend keeping such rhetoric off of this forum. It doesn’t lead in a direction of productive conversation, and it feeds negative stereotypes about scientists/techies. There are many better venues for venting.
I have insulted no person and I have proposed a positive agenda of having the STEM field step in to get rid of these grievance study areas from universities.
The only one insulting anyone personally is you.
You have called these scholars unintelligent, an infection, gangrenous, an existential threat to the university, etc. who must be “gotten rid of”.
What is your definition of “insult” if this doesn’t qualify? Or are you maintaining that “no person” is insulted if you aim your vacuous broadsides at a group?
You and others supporting your position here haven’t specified precisely who you are talking about, given any concrete evidence/explanation about what you are so mad about, provided any serious analysis, etc.
It’s pretty much “those Sneetches with no stars on their bellies on them are really terrible. We Sneetches with the stars should make sure to keep them out of our hallowed institutions.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie... (Trigger warning to delicate STEM students: Dr. Seuss with his message of diversity and toleration was a famous “grievance scholar”)
Someone used their grant to go surfing and concluded it was racist.
If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?
As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed - "in the areas of cultural, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies." [1]
As for engaging with their work I don’t think that it is possible to have a rational discussion with people that think papers like these are worthwhile academic research [1].
Accepted and published
Helen Wilson (pseudonym) (2018). "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon". Gender, Place & Culture: 1–20. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346. (Retracted)
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding". Fat Studies. 7 (3): i–xiii. doi:10.1080/21604851.2018.1453622. (Retracted)
M. Smith (pseudonym) (2018). "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use". Sexuality & Culture. 22 (4): 1542. doi:10.1007/s12119-018-9536-0. (Retracted)
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant". Sex Roles. 79 (11–12): 762. doi:10.1007/s11199-018-0962-0. (Retracted)
Accepted but not yet published
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire". Hypatia.
Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: A Poetic Portrayal of Lived Feminist Spirituality". Journal of Poetry Therapy.
Maria Gonzalez, and Lisa A. Jones (pseudonyms). "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism". Affilia.
Revise and resubmit
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "Agency as an Elephant Test for Feminist Porn: Impacts on Male Explicit and Implicit Associations about Women in Society by Immersive Pornography Consumption". Porn Studies.
Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "The Progressive Stack: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy". Hypatia.
Stephanie Moore (pseudonym). "Super-Frankenstein and the Masculine Imaginary: Feminist Epistemology and Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence Safety Research". Feminist Theory.
Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy". Women's Studies International Forum.
Under review
Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Strategies for Dealing with Cisnormative Discursive Aggression in the Workplace: Disruption, Criticism, Self-Enforcement, and Collusion". Gender, Work and Organization.
How far do you cast your net? You seem to want to throw out anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, literary criticism, etc. Are you going to scrap history, philosophy, political science, economics, education, religion, design, ... departments too?
Be careful what you wish for: an awful lot of scholarship in lower-tier STEM journals is also garbage, albeit typically a different flavor of garbage: unoriginal, lazy analysis, strong claims unsupported by the evidence, based on incorrect technical premises, making false advertisements of its practical applicability, massaging data in illegitimate ways, etc. (I know this because I spend a lot of time reading math and science papers in my spare time.) Even Nature and Science occasionally need to retract a paper when it turns out the author plagiarized it or falsified the data.
P.S. You didn’t need to copy/paste a wall of hoax paper titles from Wikipedia.
I don't want to throw out any area of research, I want to throw out those that publish papers that pretend to be research.
I am very critical about researchers failings in the natural sciences. I am probably even more critical of bad science because it is so much more damaging.
I think the wall of hoax papers does rather get across the scale of the problem.
That's a pretty pompous thing to say...
>> “Grievance studies” (like “social justice warrior”) is a made up term whose goal is to group together a large group of people with a wide range of interests, ideological premises, methodologies, etc., and dismiss/discredit them collectively without bothering to engage with their work.
> If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?
You're being obtuse. It's obvious to anyone with experience of human society that terms can be made up that have very little utility beyond being insulting to some person or group.
The GP makes a valid point about the use and meaning of those terms. I can admit that even though I'm no fan of many of the ideas and attitudes that are lazily lumped under them.
> As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed
Would you like a system more like the Soviet Union's, where a political authority controls who gets admitted into academia and who gets kept out?
The tactics they use, weaponizing shame and applying post-modern reasoning/critical theory, is a Marxist socialist tactic when combined with his ideology that cuts to the core of the most fundamental human psychological need -- the need for social connection, validation (psychological or scientific), and by using reasoning that cannot be argued with rationally is disarming if not disorienting in a political fight/argument. There's even a word for when they use it against other radical socialist groups -- leapfrog paranoia -- meant to get the different intersectional factions to unite against a common enemy in order to seize power. This is all in their own words.
(sidebar - watch the documentary Hard Times at Douglas High, where an inner city debate team uses critical theory in a debate about anything to make it about racism in order to win. In other words all debates became about their narrative, and these were Baltimore kids in what was the first integrated high school, indoctrinated by their professor back in the 90s).
It's coercive and dishonest, not simply persuasive, and a form of violence. They force people to submit under threat of social disconnection, which research has shown is more brutal than physical violence because it's psychologically traumatic, permanent, and has a biological impact on the individual as well as a sociological impact. Guilt is saying you did something wrong, shame is saying you are something wrong. There is no greater authoritarian or fascist behavior, which needs to be pointed out as distinct from the field of study itself.
So if the words "grievance studies" or "social justice warrior" are offensive, perhaps a better and more historically accurate and verifiable label to apply would be to call them Marxists or conflict theorists? I don't think that would be completely fair because as pointed out, few even know what those words mean let alone the roots and origins of their own beliefs, the nature of the tactics they use, or the nature of reasoning and belief systems themselves. What word wouldn't be offensive that embodies the characteristics that define them to others? The "grievance studies" label seems scientifically accurate and neutral without any attached ideology or behaviors.
If this offends anyone it is not meant to, I take no sides in any of this and seek the value in studying all of it.
I think the trend is for people to leave academia instead of trying to do politics ; besides , a lot of people went into academia to avoid politics in the first place.
Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar?
In the humanities criticism plays a similar role.
A researcher criticizing slavery or modern social structures isn't completely now free of any standards.
The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed.
Using 'greivence scholars' is stupid, and contributes to the STEM superiority complex.
What everyone means when they refer to "grievance scholars" is the same group of people that were popularly called S.J.W. (social justice warrior) only a year ago, except with less popular baggage and a more academic tone (which might not last once popular personalities get a hold of it). I don't know what the technical requirements for something to be a real label are, but I can confidently say that it is a real group of people. As reluctant as we all are to admit it, I think the "Jordan Peterson" reactionary movement has made the jump from YouTube personalities to academia, and although they might not want to be associated with their origin story, all of the language and concepts are coming along.
>Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar?
This is a red herring, because although many off-mainstream scholars have literal grievances, their primary subject of study is not the fact that they do.
I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities.
And I'm not too worried about the legitimacy of this viewpoint from within the academic community.
What is dangerous is that people who are only marginally invested form a dangerous and disingenuous opinion of large fields of research on the basis of "SJWs are annoying".
> On Pearl
Obviously a counterexample within the context of STEM. What this guy hates about the humanities is that it challenges the status quo.
The point I'm trying to make with this relates to communities and the perception of criticism.
Foulcaut would say all the humanities are capable of is to criticize modern institutions.
> I'm just talking about the modern context.
When we say "greivence studies",
This is a phrase this guy came up with, to obviously target a subset of the humanities with a left leaning adgenda (i.e. womens studies, african american studies, and whatever gay studies is called), and target a low quality journal to confirm his preheld belifes.
It's not a useful idea to try to understand discourse or solve any problem within the humanities, but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments.
The choice of the label Grievence scholar is deliberate. If to critically understand anything is impossible, all you're doing is complaining.
> Marring whole fields of study
This is the intended response. Not to expose flaws in the paper to publication pipeline. So people could point and laugh.
It doesn't help that STEM people love to do this anyway.
Until you bring up research fraud in their respective field, and how dumb did that made them all look.
In bio this happens all the time, most often at the top of the research hierarchy.
Associating "grievance studies" with the humanities might be a little too broad, after all the ultimate villain of modern critical thought (Colonial-era affluent Englishmen, probably), loved and generously funded the humanities of their day. To cast the claim in the strongest light I would say that it simply refers to the minority of people that, under the flag of helping, have made horrible accusations towards innocent people (a brief review of the literature will turn a few of these up, after all there's nothing stopping them from being published). In the most pessimistic light, "grievance studies" would just be, as you say, a conservative action word belonging right next to all of the similar liberal action words. The fact of the matter is that it is probably being used right now in both ways, by different camps.
Edit to respond to edit in the parent comment:
>but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments.
The claim that "whole departments" deserve to be marred is exactly what he's saying, and a lot of people agree. In this comment thread, I saw someone call the group of people (which out of respect for your argument against using the term I will not name) a "gangrenous foot." There is no word-mincing going on when someone calls whole departments gangrenous feet.
>> Grievance scholars isn't a real label
> I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities
I think you're agreeing with the quote of your own comment.
>I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities.
Stop trying to associate humanists who care about literature and art, and social scientists who care about truth, with political activists who have academic cover.
They didn't target one journal, they targeted multiple. 7 papers were published and 5 others were in the process of being iterated on, all taken seriously. They cited numerous existing papers to jump off of and build their ridiculous premises. Such as the idea that white students should be chained up in class to understand privilege or that obesity is great. These papers were lauded as exciting contributions and one was singled out with an award.
This work is nearly indistinguishable from real papers in the field, and was constructed to justify ridiculous conclusions, working backwards to find precedent in the fields in question. That's what makes them qualify as Grievance Studies. There are no real hypotheses being tested, it's just the academic laundering of ideology.
Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published? With no real results required? This isn't about real sociology, linguistics, literature or psychology.
The fact that these disciplines are actively trying to break into STEM by claiming a necessity for feminist geography or astronomy really says enough. They're not happy to just sit in their own departments, doing "research" and producing an inbred body of work, they want to compel the hard sciences to take them seriously.
Remember the C+equality parody that went around a few years ago and which ticked off enough gender activists to get it banned from github? Well, they were just lampooning a real thesis someone had written, about how feminism could enrich logic and coding, because masculinity focused too much on rigid categories. This empress already has no clothes.
As a matter of fact, yes.
Google scigen, mathgen - you will find the stories of how computer-generated nonsensical papers were accepted by conferences and low quality journals.
For example: http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185
It seems to me (as was actually pointed out by the hoaxing authors themselves) that either you can take what they did seriously, or not, but not both.
"If the members of your committee of inquiry object to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression, they should come out honestly and say so. But to pretend that this is a matter of publishing false data is so obviously ridiculous that one cannot help suspecting an ulterior motive."
In my opinion, this equally applies to allegations of unethical experimentation.
I think it would be possible to publish a paper in one of the large machine learning venues with completely made up results and techniques, that nonetheless looked very impressive. One would have to take a bit of care to make the paper look legitimate, in other words, copy the style and conventions of a machine learning paper- but it's not that hard to do. After all, a great deal of machine learning research is, well, not quite made up, but for example there are important details left out of papers, experiments are poorly described, data is not available, results are interpreted in fanciful manner, etc etc.
Of course, such a "hoax" would be immediately condemned by the whole field because results would have to be fabricated. Then again, that is what Boghossian is accused of.
But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data.
You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies.
Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures.
I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth.
But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma...
It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models)
In a neural analogy, you don't haven't built a brain, you have a reflex.
Machine learning is rapidly losing its ability to innovate as a field and the reason is the extreme focus on deep learning for classification- and secondarily the fact that the billions of corporate funding now attract researchers from the sciences who have no background in computer science or AI and haven't got a clue what the fuss is about that people like Perl are making.
Here it is from Hinton himself:
One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas.
Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.
https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
You'd probably be best served by reading Pearl himself, his recent Book of Why is good, this much earlier paper[0] kind of lays out a few things too as for his reasoning that causal inference needs different tools. There's also some stuff in the blogosphere about an earlier dispute you might find fun, i.e. the methods of using causal inference tools. Example[1].
[0] https://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r284-reprint.pdf
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/07/05/disputes_a...
Deep learning? It is curve fitting (ie pattern recognition), is there supposed to be something wrong with that?
What are the high impact journals of their fields? My understanding is that Hypatia is a leading journal.
I don't understand- why is it not an option to ignore "it" (politics in various humanities fields) anymore? What are the "career ending events" that could happen to me, if I ignore those politics, as I do?
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...
and this happened specifically because it was pressed to do so by people who, for the most part, subscribe to the same ideology as the editorial board of "Gender, Place and Culture" (author is a "Critical Race Studies fellow at the U.C.L.A. School of Law"):
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendm...
Then you have activist students actually shutting down ACLU presenters on the campus because “liberalism is white supremacy”:
http://flathatnews.com/2017/10/02/black-lives-matter-protest...
So yes, it's definitely affecting things.
This is very similar to Soviet science. Mathematicians and physicists were obligated, unofficially of course, to put Marx or Lenin quote somewhere at the start of their article, and if they did, they were left in peace.
>Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you.
Yes, exactly the same.
Many Soviet scientists were severely punished when they found themselves on the wrong side of Communist dogma. Making empty statements was not possible if, for example, you disagreed with Lysenkoism. If you refused to swallow unscientific nonsense you ran a very real risk of some combination of losing your job, being shipped off to a labor camp and losing your life.
Fortunately, the Grievance Studies folks have not yet figured out how to construct a gulag.
I do agree the students are far smarter than the professors and have been increasingly staying away from these fields. They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.
So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations? Why aren't their tenures and salaries going up, if that's the case?
Administrators don't enjoy staff and budget cuts, they work to prevent them. That's a big part of their jobs, actually. If anything, the sinking of the (as another commenter called it) "wokeness" ship is driving an even larger fraction of that group of people into administration, as their prospects elsewhere dwindle.
The part of the story that I'm trying to emphasize is that the "ranks," although heavily embedded in academia to the point of controlling it, are perceived enemies of the public at large. They hold power within the academic world but are disliked outside of it, and the outside forces are responsible for the declines of enrollment, and so on. True or not it's self-consistent. You could compare it to the executives at a corporation that was notorious for polluting and hiding scientific evidence: they hold power within their company, and even if the public found out what they were doing and started to react it would still be very dangerous for an employee within the company to speak out against them. You can't say, for example, "Kim Jong Un isn't really powerful because the US is sanctioning his country, so you should try to usurp his position" because although he has little power outside of his country, he has a lot of power inside of it.
To further cement the point, imagine a kidnapper defending themselves by saying, "I could not have exerted force on the victim because I am not powerful, and I can prove that I am not powerful because if I was powerful I would not be in court."
I have been a postgraduate in the humanities and I can honestly say I've never seen the conspiracy you seem to be alluding to.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that it is happening, I'm just defending its logical consistency.
Although, I will point out that I have never seen a university where ex-science administrators outnumber ex-humanities administrators. It's quite believable that, as a result, humanities culture would be more common among administrators than science culture. As a result of that, a humanities student might think that the admins have "no culture in particular," because they have humanities culture and that's like water for a humanities student. At the same time, the scientists will be thinking, "nobody around here thinks like a scientist."
>The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person.
Lets be entirely honest here. You do think this conspiracy is happening.
It is just name calling and dog whistling. The reason "grievance studies" is used is that just like "sjw" and "politically correct" its an evasive term designed to be loosely defined, so people can read what they want into it.
If you say to someone "you're engaging in grievance studies" they'll say "no". That's the limit of the debate you'll have with them, by your own design.
No amount of "university cringe compilations" or videos on prageru will get anyone close to the truth of what happens on university campuses. To claim that university students in particular, the people that are most likely to be exposed to different disciplines, are broadly unable to recognize their own academic "cultures" is absurd.
I also used to sit on the university wide committee that allocated PhD scholarships. Part of our job was to try and work out some sort of ranking of candidates between different fields. This wasn’t too hard for most fields, but I can tell you when we got to the grievance field candidates and their proposed projects we would all scratch our heads. In the end we just set aside a faction of the scholarships for these areas and accepted the ranking the departments provided.
Also isn't it strange that while administrations are supposedly stuffed with these "grievance studies" people - not one person on your board was qualified to properly evaluate those fields.
We certainly had people for outside the STEM fields on this committee and they were in no better position than the scientists trying to rank these grievance study students and projects.
> I think you are assuming that the graduates of grevience [sic] studies have some sort of loyalty to their old professors. My personal experience is they don't.
Dismissed due to lack of expertise.
> They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.
Dismissed (and stop listening to so much american commentary, arts degrees don't cost much here).
I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on asserting their importance through these politics.
To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational choice most people take is to try to ignore this.
However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you.
I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as fast as I can.