We are a small group of concerned academics who wanted to understand and properly criticize an ongoing problem (described below) we see in gender studies and related academic disciplines. We see this problem having negative social and political implications on a global scale, and we think constructive conversation within academia has become nearly impossible. We hope that this project will reboot that conversation and initiate necessary reforms. Because of the politicized nature of these disciplines, it bears mentioning that all three of us would be best classified as left-leaning liberals.

Project Summary
We engaged in a one-year immersive exploration to attempt to understand certain academic fields as “outsiders within” and test their scholarship at its highest levels. To speak broadly, these include gender studies and other cultural studies fields within the humanities and reaching into sociology, psychology, and, perhaps most worryingly, education.

The specific problem we targeted has various names in various quarters and is difficult to pin down. Careful academics would refer to it as “critical constructivism” and/or “blank slatism” and its scholars as “radical constructivists.” (In this sense, it is the descendants of postmodernist and poststructuralist thought from the mid 20th century.) Pundits have termed it “academic leftism” or “cultural studies” and identify it with the term “political correctness.”

We prefer to call it “grievance studies” because many of these fields refer to themselves as “[something] studies” and because they operate primarily by focusing upon and inflaming the grievances of certain identity groups. We think it represents a significant and influential subset of the scholarship coming out of cultural studies within the humanities, sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences and that is gaining increasing power over our universities, institutions, media, and culture.

[These three are tremendous individuals who have faced some awesome calls for cancellation already with immense courage, dignity and integrity. This should have progressive heads exploding. ~ Beege]