Both inside and outside academia, across ideologies, people need to ask whether their actions might resemble those of the Führer, whether we celebrate intellectual solidarity or diversity.https://t.co/8LooOtq54g

— New Discourses (@NewDiscourses) November 8, 2021

What The ‘Grievance Studies Affair’ Says About Academia’s Social Justice Warriors

 On April 20, some may celebrate the 131st birthday of a man who helped define the 20th century. An artist, philosopher and successful author and motivational speaker before his election to national office, he valued expertise. Once in office, the leader chose a cabinet of PhDs, lawyers and military officers. A vegetarian in his later years, his government broke new ground in animal rights and wildlife conservation.

For all his (dubious) achievements, in 2018 the long dead Adolf Hitler gained an honor that eluded him in life: publishing in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Such publications earned me tenure at two universities. Given the intellectual climate in parts of academia, nowadays Hitler also might earn tenure. Segments of the Fuehrer’s “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) — rebranded as “Our Struggle is My Struggle,” with postmodern jargon and citations arguing for solidarity among women, rather than Germans as in the original — earned publication in a feminist journal.

Hitler was a posthumous beneficiary of the “Grievance Studies affair.”

[snip]

On this anniversary of Hitler’s birthday, both inside and outside academia, across ideologies, people need to ask whether their actions might resemble those of the Führer, whether we celebrate intellectual solidarity or diversity. We can all do better, and professors should lead the way.

Amherst College Language Guide

This is neither a joke ... nor a parody.

Random examples:

BUTCHAn identity term often used to by queer women, particularly by lesbians, who express themselves in masculine ways. Some consider butch to be its own gender identity. While an identity term to some, it can be used as a pejorative.  

CISGENDERAn identity term for individuals whose gender identity matches their birth-assigned sex. Cisgender people receive benefits that trans and nonbinary people don’t have. 

CISHETERO-A pervasive system of belief that centers, and naturalizes,  

NORMATIVITY heterosexuality and a binary system of assigned sex and gender where there are two rigid, distinct ways of being: assigned-male-at-birth masculine man and assigned-female-at-birth feminine woman.  

CISSEXISMThe system of oppression that values and privileges cisgender people, upholds the gender binary and marginalizes, oppresses and makes invisible the lives and experiences of transgender and nonbinary people. 

MALE PRIVILEGE A group of unearned cultural, legal, social and institutional rights extended to cisgender men based on their assigned-sex and gender. Cisgender men have access to institutional power, make the rules, control the resources and are assumed capable. Masculinity, as enacted by cisgender men, is universalized and viewed as the normative gender. Cisgender men are often unaware of their differential treatment (see Fragile Masculinity). While trans men, masculine-of-center women and nonbinary folks have access to benefits based on their proximity to hegemonic masculinity (see above definition), male privilege is reserved for cisgender men. This is particularly true for white cisgender men.

The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond

NOTE:

For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.”

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

Postmodernists pretend to be experts in what they call “theory.” They claim that, although their scholarship may seem incomprehensible, this is because they are like mathematicians or physicists: they express profound truths in a way that cannot be understood without training. Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose expose this for the lie that it is. “Theory” is not real. Postmodernists have no expertise and no profound understanding.

Read the whole thing.