If research chiefly confirms a department’s political beliefs, it is not much of an inquiry. And if those beliefs cannot seriously be questioned by the scholarship the department produces, perhaps it is time to ask whether we are still funding academic departments—or state-sponsored churches.
There is nothing wrong with dogma. Churches have dogma. They are supposed to.
You do not attend a Christian church on Sunday expecting the minister to announce that today’s service will reconsider whether Christ was actually Lord. Christianity begins with articles of faith. Without them there is no Christianity.
Perfectly respectable.
It is a church.
A university is supposed to be different.
Scholarship must possess one quality that dogma cannot tolerate: the possibility of being wrong.
A scholar may begin an investigation convinced that X is true. But the methodology must permit the evidence to produce Y. Otherwise the researcher isn’t investigating a proposition. He is defending one.
This seems so elementary that it hardly requires saying.
Yet some contemporary academic departments openly describe themselves in language that blurs scholarship and advocacy.
Queen’s University’s Department of Gender Studies says its research and teaching advance a commitment to “social justice and social change.” It explicitly places “scholarship, activism and community work” together.
The University of Victoria’s Gender Studies department says it “actively pursues social justice.”
Waterloo’s Peace and Conflict Studies program says it seeks to develop “social change agents” and promote a “culture of peace and justice.”
There is nothing necessarily objectionable about any of those objectives.
But they are objectives.
Greenpeace has objectives. Amnesty International has objectives. Churches have objectives. Political parties most certainly have objectives.
An academic discipline is supposed primarily to have questions.
That difference matters when we examine the extraordinary proliferation of research on racism, oppression, colonialism, intersectionality, whiteness and “lived experience” across parts of Sociology, Gender Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Education and Peace and Conflict Studies.
The problem is not qualitative research.
That distinction matters.
A serious researcher can interview fifty people and produce excellent scholarship. Responses can be systematically coded. Categories can be established. Patterns can be compared. Contradictory cases can be investigated. Researchers can analyze tone, sequence, frequency and relationships among responses. Different researchers can independently code the material. Interview findings can be compared with administrative data, surveys and competing explanations.
None of this requires a laboratory coat.
Qualitative research can be rigorous research.
The problem begins when the method becomes something closer to intellectual autobiography: reflecting upon one’s own “lived experience,” combining it with the experiences of similarly situated people and then drawing sweeping conclusions about institutions, society or structures of power.
Your experience may be fascinating.
It may be moving. It may be horrifying. It may even be completely accurate.
But describing your own experience and interpreting it through your own political assumptions does not magically become scholarship because the resulting document contains footnotes.
The scholar has to do something that the memoirist does not. He has to attempt to prove himself wrong. And here we encounter a deeper problem than methodology.
The jargon itself can contain the verdict. Consider “systemic racism.”
The concept does not ordinarily require a racist person deliberately operating the machinery. Indeed, its central proposition is that institutions and systems can produce racial disadvantage without anyone consciously intending to discriminate.
That proposition is perfectly capable of being investigated.
But something changes when systemic racism stops being the hypothesis and becomes the analytical starting point.
A researcher studying whether racial disparities within an institution result from systemic racism is asking a question. A researcher studying how systemic racism manifests itself within that institution has already answered one.
The difference is only a few words. Epistemologically, it is enormous.
If I announce that I am studying how ghosts influence human behaviour, I have rather inconveniently smuggled the existence of ghosts past peer review.
And much contemporary academic vocabulary can function this way.
“Structures of oppression.”
“White supremacy.”
“Colonial violence.”
“Patriarchal systems.”
“Racialized institutions.”
“Systemic racism.”
These concepts may describe real phenomena.
But when they are embedded in the research question as established facts rather than propositions requiring evidence, the conclusion begins colonizing the methodology before the first interview.
Then comes lived experience.
Interview people who believe they have experienced systemic racism. Interpret their experiences using a theoretical literature premised upon systemic racism. Describe the institution through the vocabulary of systemic racism. Conclude that systemic racism has been demonstrated.
Everyone involved may be completely sincere.
That is what makes confirmation bias so dangerous.
It does not require dishonesty. It requires conviction.
Suppose instead that the researcher finds no explicitly discriminatory policy.
That doesn’t necessarily challenge the theory because systemic racism need not be explicit.
No racist intent?
Systemic racism need not be intentional.
Successful members of the supposedly disadvantaged group?
Individual success does not disprove systemic disadvantage.
Some members of the group report never experiencing racism?
Their experiences do not invalidate the experiences of those who did.
Each response can be perfectly reasonable individually.
Collectively, however, they produce an awkward question:
What evidence would establish that systemic racism was not an important explanation in this particular case?
There must be an answer. Otherwise, we are no longer dealing with a proposition that can be seriously tested. We are dealing with dogma.
This is the intellectual onion.
The researcher begins peeling after having already decided what every layer contains. Peel. Racism. Another layer. Systemic racism. Another. Colonialism. Another. White supremacy.
Another.
Intersectionality reveals another structure of oppression concealed beneath the previous structure of oppression.
Eventually there is no onion left. Yet somehow racism remains. One begins to suspect that it wasn’t discovered inside the onion. It arrived with the knife.
This is where the late Jason Arday becomes interesting.
Not because Jason Arday proves that Sociology is fraudulent. He doesn’t. Sociology contains excellent empirical researchers, quantitative and qualitative, and one controversial academic cannot invalidate an entire discipline.
Arday is interesting because his case raises a different question:
What happens when weak scholarship tells an intellectual community exactly what it already believes?
His work has dealt extensively with race, education, inequality and Black experience, frequently through qualitative approaches. His academic record later became the subject of serious allegations of plagiarism and other misrepresentations of his achievements, allegations he has disputed.
The important question isn’t simply how Jason Arday advanced.
It is whether an academic culture organized around certain political assumptions becomes less capable of detecting weak scholarship when the conclusions recite the prevailing creed.
That danger is hardly imaginary.
José Duarte, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, Philip Tetlock and their colleagues warned about political homogeneity in social psychology. Their argument was not that liberal academics are stupid or dishonest. It was much more interesting: ideological uniformity can affect which questions researchers ask, which assumptions become embedded in those questions, which findings seem plausible and which subjects become professionally uncomfortable to investigate.
In other words, confirmation bias can become institutional. And once it does, peer review does not necessarily solve the problem.
If the researcher, reviewers, editors and department broadly share the same foundational assumptions, everyone may inspect the methodology while nobody thinks to inspect the creed.
Which brings us back to the university’s little churches.
Could a Gender Studies department hire an outstanding scholar whose research seriously challenged major propositions of contemporary feminism?
Could Black Studies enthusiastically hire someone who rejected critical race theory?
Could Sociology appoint a scholar whose research repeatedly found that racial disparities attributed to systemic racism were better explained by other variables?
Could Peace Studies hire someone whose research concluded that military deterrence and overwhelming force sometimes preserve peace better than non-violence?
If the answer is effectively no, then something has gone badly wrong.
Indeed, hiring may set the bar absurdly high. Ask a simpler question: would such a dissenter even be invited to speak?
Could a prominent critic of critical race theory address a Black Studies department? Could a severe critic of contemporary feminism be invited by Gender Studies? Could someone fundamentally opposed to DEI speak before a Sociology department without demands for cancellation, protests, security concerns or administrators deciding that the event was simply too dangerous or “harmful” to proceed?
The question is no longer whether the heretic could become a priest. It is whether the heretic would even be permitted inside the church.
