Why #SokalSquared Will Fail

The hoaxes authored by merry pranksters James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian (later dubbed "Sokal Squared" by Yascha Mounk after the 1996 Alan Sokal paper lampooning postmodernists) require at least brief comment. The criticism frequently seen that they have no control papers (i.e. nonsense sent to journals of other, presumably more rigorous disciplines) may be dismissed immediately on the grounds that it would require a good bit of specialized knowledge to do so that the trio outside of Lindsay (a mathematician) lack, and would in any event be unlikely to succeed. It is exactly the dogmatic and anti-empirical nature of grievance studies that make them so ripe for this sort of lancing:

Mounk, by phone, also said the control-group criticism is misguided. He called it a "confused attempt to import statistics into a question where it doesn’t apply." If the authors were claiming that their work proves that some publications are, say, 50 percent more susceptible to hoaxes than the average, or that 100 percent of articles published are nonsense because these seven articles were accepted, then you would obviously need controls. But the authors "do nothing of the sort. They demonstrate that it’s possible, with relatively little effort, to get bullshit published." It "sows deep doubt" about the nature of the academic enterprise in these disciplines.

In that regard, #SokalSquared has performed an admirable public service in exposing the intellectual rot at the heart of these alleged disciplines. (You can find the entire list of papers and their review process feedback here.)

But "alleged" is the real problem there, because none of them has really established a mechanism for correction. The trio described their hoped-for results in Areo:

 Our recommendation begins by calling upon all major universities to begin a thorough review of these areas of study (gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and other “theory”-based fields in the humanities and reaching into the social sciences, especially including sociology and anthropology), in order to separate knowledge-producing disciplines and scholars from those generating constructivist sophistry. We hope the latter can be redeemed, not destroyed, as the topics they study—gender, race, sexuality, culture—are of enormous importance to society and thus demand considerable attention and the highest levels of academic rigor. Further, many of their insights are worthy and deserve more careful consideration than they currently receive. This will require them to adhere more honestly and rigorously to the production of knowledge and to place scholarship ahead of any conflicting interest rather than following from it.

This is ultimately wishful thinking, for a number of reasons.

1. Administrators have less than no reason to perform such a review. As Camille Paglia observed, administrators hastily cobbled together women's studies departments because they "wanted to solve a public relations problem." That is, it would relitigate the foundations of these departments — reopening the same problems the administrators of the 1970s faced.
2. It would create an existential crisis for members of those departments. Such a review will rightly be seen as a threat to the departments and positions thus created. A review panel including members of even mildly more structured, mathematically-inclined disciplines — say, psychology or biology — would draw shrieking protests, with good reason, because …
3. The current intellectual laxity and dogmatism is a feature, not a bug. This may be seen, not only in their "un-care-about-able" journals pockmarked with intersectional cant, but in the sorts of arguments they and their defenders marshal otherwise. One such came out a few days ago in Inside Higher Ed from Joel Christensen and Matthew A. Sears as a response to the hoaxes. Larded with misdirections, personal attacks, slur-by-associations, and bait-and-switch tactics, it manages to be both underhanded and weak. If this is the best grievance studies defenders can do, it speaks to the infrequency with which they have to actually develop arguments
4. They do not control any of the these departments' journals. Raising the standards of these journals would require a war from inside, which, for reason #3, is not only unlikely but unthinkable.

As much as I agree with their aims, I cannot imagine how this will change anything. They provide no credible, serviceable mechanism for doing so. Because the stated aims of such departments is as strongholds of political activism, it seems obvious that this cannot be any longer tolerated from outside. Political means must therefore be used to dislodge them — as happened recently in Hungary, where all state-funded gender studies programs were systematically defunded.