Yesterday, I complained about academic publishing and how the left is uninterested in reforming it. Today, there is an article in the NY Times (here) that – miracle of miracles – talks of reform. Or at least change. In this case, the change is that of putting articles online before they are accepted in order to get comments and criticisms from as many as possible. Here is the first sentence of one of the choice quotes:
“The traditional method, in which independent experts evaluate a submission, often under a veil of anonymity, can take months, even years.”
No kidding. And you’re supposed to try and get tenure during that period, while your article languishes in some sort of academic limbo, sitting on some cloddish professor’s desk because he or she is too busy with other things to get to it, and you’re a nobody so there’s no pressure from the editor to get it done, either. One woman told me she sent her first article out thirteen times before it was finally accepted, and I can’t help but think that she must have first sent it out her first year in grad school for that to be true. Or else she cheated and sent it to several journals at once.
The quote goes on:
“Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion.”
Yes, yes, it’s all true. I just never thought I’d see it in the Times. But do they have any idea what they have just acknowledged? They’ve just blown the left’s grounds for believing in global warming. If peer review is less than perfect, if there is such a problem here that we need a new way to do it, then why constantly repeat the refrain that those articles showing AGW are backed by peer review?
“Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable.”
You bet. Here’s a story of three women I know who all know each other and consider each other friends. One runs a journal, the second submitted an article to it, and the first sent it to the third for anonymous reviewing. The third woman reamed the article. The second woman, not used to such brutal treatment, was shocked and withdrew the article, even though the first woman said she’d publish it anyway (with a few changes). Whenever I think of the third woman, I always think of how she screwed a friend. She did it unknowingly, but she did it nonetheless.
Here’s another story. A woman who had her article rejected was told that she ought to look at the Ph.D. thesis of X to see real quality writing on this topic. X, as the canny will have figured out, was the woman herself. Not only that, but she hadn’t written on that topic in her thesis. However, she had once said she was going to, so obviously the reviewer was from that small pool of people who knew her original plans. But he or she hadn’t actually bothered to read her thesis to see if she had done it.
“Exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants.”
Exactly. Some of my work concerns both Plato and his nephew Speusippus. Naturally, most people work on Plato rather than Speusippus, so inevitably the reviewers know nothing about Speusippus. When I’ve shown my work to people working on Speusippus, they are quite impressed with it, or even thrilled by it.
It goes almost without saying that the article quotes from the dinosaurs who are going to obstruct changes. Such people, the article tells us, “question whether people would be as frank in public, and they worry that comments would be short and episodic, rather than comprehensive and conceptual, and that know-nothings would predominate. “
Of course, it would be the end of life as we know it if this were to happen. The sun wouldn’t shine tomorrow, or bedbugs would take over the earth, or maybe the financial markets would collapse so completely that all colleges and universities would have to close (and then – heh – all these scholars would have to get real jobs). For heaven’s sake, people, the one journal mentioned in the article is the Shakespeare Quarterly. How awful is life going to be if a few bad articles get published in it? I’m sure plenty of bad ones are published in it already, yet somehow that doesn’t matter to the traditionalists. But it’s not like I’m advocating loose standards for medical journals, where a bad article could mean many deaths. I’m talking about journals in the humanities. A bad article in a Shakespeare journal, or a Plato journal, or a Finnish history journal just isn’t going to mean much.
OK, I’ll admit that the bad history book by Michael Bellisiles, in which he asserted that few early Americans owned guns, simply gave bad ideas to the wrong people. But then this book got published through the traditional peer-review process, which simply proves what I’m saying, namely that bad stuff already gets published.
Anyway, let me continue.
“‘Knowledge is not democratic,’ said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist.... Evaluating originality and intellectual significance, she said, can be done only by those who are expert in a field.”
It’s a short step from saying that evaluations can only be done by those with the expertise, meaning those who were trained for it, to saying that it can only be done by those who were trained for it at the best schools. And as I implied yesterday, once that happens, we get the domination of the poor by the rich, which somehow the left never seems to care about.
Anyway, the very idea of reviewing (or refereeing, as it’s usually called) involves a paradox that no one wants to acknowledge. This paradox says that those who are competent to review an article also have an interest (as in conflict of interest) in it and so can’t be trusted. Those who can be trusted are those without an interest in it, but such people are outside of the field and so are not competent. So, there's a problem either way. One of the problems with the publishing situation in global warming is that some people at the top don't seem too trustworthy because they have too much of an interest in it (although in this case it isn’t so much their own self-interest as their interest in getting their progressive ideas made into public policies). Anyway, the way to be sure that reviewers are both competent and trustworthy is to rigorously screen would-be professors for character, and that just isn’t going to happen.
Finally, the article talks about a junior scholar who was worried that his article in this Shakespeare journal might not count for tenure, so he asked his dean, who assured him it would. I hope he had enough sense to get it in writing because deans come and go, and the next one might object to it.Anyway, this fellow is lucky. I know a man who wanted to start an online journal in his field and was told by his dean that online journals were mere vanity publishing. Like I said, there are plenty of dinosaurs out there.
Let me close with a story that shows how truly absurd academia is. My father-in-law, Boris Blick, was a professor of history, and after his tragic death five years ago, my wife decided she wanted to do a memorial volume dedicated to him. So, she contacted various friends of his and invited them to send us articles to be included in the volume, plus we each wrote one ourselves; we also included some that poor Boris had never gotten published. We knew that such a volume would never interest any academic press, so we published it ourselves via a print-on-demand publisher. Now one of the articles was from a professor emeritus of philosophy. I had read it and liked it, but would have published it anyway even if I hadn’t, out of respect for Boris’s memory. Anyway, this fellow’s dean called him back to his university to teach some classes, and offered him more pay if he could prove he had published something recently. He pointed to our book, and that was good enough for the dean.
So, a book that was basically vanity publishing that included an article vetted by an unemployed philosopher with hardly any publications to his name (namely, me) was good enough for this dean to give the guy more money.
Go figure.
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