Academia's grievance studies leaches

Andrew Syrios:
At a time when we are inundated with accusations of just about everyone being some form of an ist or a phobe, we have also seen the proliferation of all sorts of victim studies departments at various universities. For example, one count has found over 900 departments of women's studies worldwide. It's not hard to see a connection there.

It's these various grievance studies departments, be they women's studies, gender studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies, whiteness studies (in this case, the whiteness is obviously bad), or whatever, that have done more than anyone else to bring us the modern curse of intersectionalism, where everyone is divided by supposed privilege and then sorted by how much victimhood his immutable characteristics bestow upon him.

It's no longer disputable that the scholarly standards of these departments leaves something to be desired. Three academics, Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, succeeded in hoaxing some of "the best journals in the relevant fields." By the time they were finished, they had seven papers accepted, of which four were published, all in peer-reviewed journals. They also had seven more papers "in play" and had received four invitations "to peer-review other papers as a result of our own exemplary scholarship."

As one might expect, the subjects and methodologies of these hoax papers were utterly ridiculous. One that was accepted by the journal Gender, Place and Culture was titled "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon." Another claimed that men who masturbate while thinking of a woman are committing sexual violence against her. Another was a rewritten chapter of Mein Kampf from a feminist perspective.

None of this should be surprising. Just look at the non-hoaxes these departments churn out like the "study" of "gender and glaciers" or the "Hegemonic Masculinity among Men Experiencing Homelessness." Or just peruse the Twitter account of "New Real Peer Review."
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There is more.

Exactly what jobs are these courses preparing students for?  Is their a demand for professional whiners?  It would not surprise me that graduates of these programs have trouble finding meaningful work except for those who go into teaching the crap to others.  They are a fraud on the students many of whom actually go into debt to study how to be a whiner.  Colleges should focus on courses that lead to productive graduates who can find meaningful work.  It would reduce the overall cost of education if money was not wasted on the grievance studies courses.

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