James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose

Opinion contributors

Do you think putting white and male students on the floor in chains as a form of “experiential reparations” is a good educational opportunity? How about inviting them to listen and learn in silence throughout their course? We don’t.

Within the academic fields utilizing what we’ve called “grievance studies,” however, these ideas are perfectly acceptable. We discovered this by submitting a paper on feminist educational theory to arguably the most respected feminist philosophy journal in the world, Hypatia.

We did this as a part of a year-long probe to find out how much certain political biases have taken root within a small but powerful sector of academia. Over the course of that year, we submitted 20 papers to journals that study topics of identity like gender, race, and sexuality, which we feared has been corrupted by a form of political activism that puts political grievances ahead of finding truth.

Academic literature

Seven of our papers were accepted, many in top-ranking journals. These include an adaptation of Adolf Hitler’s "Mein Kampf," which was accepted by a social work journal. Another develops the concept of “fat bodybuilding” for a discipline called fat studies, and a third claims to address “rape culture” by monitoring dog-humping incidents at dog parks in Southeast Portland, Oregon.

But how was this possible? We succeeded not so much because we tricked the journals, but because our papers fit in with what they consider scholarship.

Our paper suggesting we put privileged white and male students on the floor in chains takes only a small step forward from the existing literature we used to support it. For example, we were encouraged by the peer reviewers for that paper to follow Barbara Applebaum’s work to ensure we didn’t show too much compassion to those mistreated students, which would “recenter" the needs of the privileged.

The peer reviewers encouraged us to frame it in terms of Megan Boler’s “pedagogy of discomfort,” which recommends that overcoming privilege requires being made uncomfortable and left to sit with that discomfort.

More: I'm a liberal, Democratic teenager in a family of pro-Trump partisans. Don't worry, I'm safe.

Does my wheelchair make you uncomfortable? How my disability may have cost me a job.

A survivor's story: Yes, boys can have anorexia, too

It’s difficult to know whether the correct response here is to laugh or cry. Either way, we believe we’ve uncovered evidence that points to a significant cultural problem that starts with scholarship and extends far beyond the academy. This is because what’s taking place within certain university disciplines is a kind of idea laundering. Under these circumstances, aggrieved academics can put broken, biased, and even openly racist and sexist ideas through the peer-review process, and have them come out the other side legitimized as though they are established knowledge.

As we observed in our own research for this project, the laundered ideas often take a cynically biased perspective on men, masculinity, heterosexuality and whiteness.

So far, this process has been going on within certain politicized corners of the university without adequate checks and balances for decades. As a result, many of these broken and hurtful ideas have seeped out of the university and become part of our everyday lives.

Today, fringe theories. Tomorrow, buzzwords.

Concepts like “toxic masculinity,” “white fragility,” “cultural appropriation,” and “microaggressions” are now familiar to many of us. Most people, however, don’t realize that these concepts originated within academic journals just like those that accepted our papers. Those journals laundered them through a broken system, leading them to be picked up by journalists, activists, HR departments, and policy makers as though they’re some kind of established truth.

If our project shows anything, it’s that we have very little reason to trust the concepts coming out of grievance studies. Because we have little reason to trust them, we have every right to question them. These topics are important, and they must be done right. Currently, they have come into our lives via a broken academic sector that doesn’t even know it’s not okay to put students in chains.

James Lindsay (@ConceptualJames) is an author and mathematician. Peter Boghossian (@PeterBoghossian) is an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. Helen Pluckrose (@HPluckrose) is editor-in-chief of Areo Magazine.