"You don’t get to claim that you’re not attacking the university when your first few sentences read like that. It suggests a lack of clarity in the argument—a sentence I would have written if I had been asked to peer-review this essay". Dan Drezner mocks the anti-humanities industry, and, boy, is it mockable: Daniel Drezner: A Paper That Would Never Have Gotten Past Peer Review Criticizes the Academy. Film at 11: "Last year scholars James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian proudly declared that they had hoodwinked a peer-reviewed journal into publishing nonsense.... That... was riddled with problems, not the least of which was that the journal they had hacked was a pay-for-play scam...
...A year later, however, the two are back with another co-author, Helen Pluckrose.... The authors attempted to discredit a range of humanities journals by submitting more than 20 papers cloaked in the jargon of their subfields. They were pretty successful in their later efforts despite zero initial training in the cognate fields.... This shouldn’t be exaggerated... only two of the seven... “could be considered mainstream”.... This paper reminded me of a... stor ... high-schoolers who thought they could program a computer to do a lot of their homework.... The principal didn’t punish them, because... to pull this... off, the students had to master the subject well enough to program the computer.... When the authors of this paper acknowledged that it took them several months of failure to learn how to craft a paper that would merit being sent out for peer review, I wondered if they had read that story and recognized the plot....
This paper would have never passed... peer review....
Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian contend that the fault lies with, “at least fifteen subdomains of thought in grievance studies".... The authors contradict themselves on several fronts. In their conclusion, they warn that in response to their findings, “[The] wrong answers are to attack the peer-review system or academia overall."... That’s great, but here is how Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian start their paper:
Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.
You don’t get to claim that you’re not attacking the university when your first few sentences read like that. It suggests a lack of clarity in the argument—a sentence I would have written if I had been asked to peer-review this essay....
#shouldread
