Maybe the problem with academia is that not enough victim groups have their own political advocacy “studies” programs:

[F]at studies is emerging as a new interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat.

For most scholars of fat, though, it is not an objective pursuit. Proponents of fat studies see it as the sister subject — and it is most often women promoting the study, many of whom are lesbian activists — to women’s studies, queer studies, disability studies and ethnic studies. In many of its permutations, then, it is the study of a people its supporters believe are victims of prejudice, stereotypes and oppression by mainstream society.

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Fat studies is still a fringe area of scholarship, but it is gaining traction. Three years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, which promotes scholarly research of popular culture, added a fat studies component to regional and national conferences.

Professors in sociology, exercise physiology, history, English and law are shoehorning discussions of fat into their teachings and research.

At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the subject has emerged in a course, “The Social Construction of Obesity,” taught by Margaret Carlisle Duncan, a professor in the department of human movement sciences, who takes a skeptical view of the “war on obesity.”

At the New College of California School of Law, Sondra Solovay, a diversity lawyer and author of “Tipping the Scales of Justice,” talks about weightism in her torts classes.

Out of the classroom, students on at least a dozen campuses are organizing groups focusing on fat politics and acceptance.

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As with most academic disciplines that chronicle the plight of the disenfranchised, fat studies grew out of political activism over body size. In 1973, a group of women formed the Fat Underground, a faction of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which was founded four years earlier. In 1983, they published “Shadow on a Tightrope,” a collection of essays, articles and memoirs on fat liberation that’s viewed as the seminal work in this field.

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“How far back does the black civil rights movement go in America before we have a field called African-American studies?” Ms. Koppelman said. “The academic world, like the American government, has a system of checks and balances that makes change very slow to happen.”

Others argue, though, that a movement does not make a scholarly pursuit and that this is simply a way to institutionalize victimhood.

“In one field after another, passion and venting have come to define the nature of what academics do,” said Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, a group of university professors and academics who have a more traditional view of higher education. “Ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies — they’re all about vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That’s not what the academy should be about.

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Or as Big Arm Woman, a blogger, wrote: “I don’t care if people are fat or thin. I do, however, care that universities are spending money on scholarship about the ‘politics of fatness’ when half of the freshman class can’t read or write at the college level.”

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THE destigmatization of fat people is the thread that runs through fat studies pursuits. The subject is most likely to show up on campus as a focus of a paper or thesis, or be incorporated into a broader course curriculum.

Anna Kirkland, an assistant professor in women’s studies and political science at the University of Michigan, discusses it in classes on gender, identity and the law.

“We talk about the classic occupants of antidiscrimination laws — race and gender — and then I bring in transgender discrimination and fat discrimination,” she said, adding that Michigan is the only state where it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of a person’s weight. (The cities of Santa Cruz, Calif., San Francisco and Washington have laws on the books).

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Fat scholars believe they are serving justice and many hope that one day fat studies will be as ubiquitous on campus as Shakespeare. Professor Bucholz said he sees the attention on “groups that have been ignored” as crucial to improving their lot.

“There’s an element of trying to right the balance,” he said. “It’s time for the fat to receive their due.”