Posted on 03/01/2026 11:39:37 AM PST by karpov
The report “Peer Review Gone Wild”—co-released by the Martin Center, the Goldwater Institute, and Defending Education—makes for compulsive reading. In it, Goldwater’s Timothy K. Minella details the dumpster fire that is the self-described “Feminist Collective,” an editorial board of activist reviewers at the American Political Science Review, one of the most prestigious political-science journals in the country.
Several years ago, attempting to secure control of that journal, the Feminist Collective declared its intent to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure [political science].” In practice, these intentions meant that the board pledged to create a two-tiered system of peer review whereby they “screen[ed] submissions differently based on the authors’ race and sex” and published “articles focusing on race, gender, and/or social justice” at a rate “40 times greater than the number focused on American constitutions.”
In response to this and other academic-journal politicization, Minella’s report recommends the creation of an alternative pathway to tenure. Traditionally, publication records are the currency that garners lifelong employment on campus; Minella and the partnering organizations instead recommend that excellence in teaching be introduced as an alternative route. This shift would incentivize quality instruction and open a pathway for professors who care deeply about teaching but not about publishing ideologically suspect rubbish.
There’s much to recommend in this proposal. First, there’s arguably far more social utility in a professor’s teaching students about America’s civic order than in his publishing another obscure, esoteric essay that no one reads. Second, such a move would reorient universities toward a more traditional, liberal-arts conception of higher learning, whereby the primary purpose of a university would be education, not research.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
This makes a lot of sense to me, reorienting tenure and advancements at universities based on teaching and not just research. As an engineering student at Michigan State and (especially) the University of Michigan, I felt like students were considered an annoyance by research-oriented professors who spent as little time actually teaching as possible. No professor ever knew my name, and most teaching got done by grad student TAs who could barely speak English.
And my father was a kinesiologist at another major state university, but always felt the pressure from administrators to "publish or perish." He thought of himself as a teacher, not a researcher, and as a result was sidelined and received little in the way of resources to equip his classrooms. He often said he doubted he would ever have gotten tenure if he was 20 years younger.
Isn’t that an oxymoron these days?
The whole point of a genuine scholarly journal is that it’s apolitical.
The whole point of a genuine scholarly journal is that it’s apolitical.
Having worked at the U of Dayton for 31 years, I can tell you the flaw in that reasoning.
The REST of the profession, including the vast majority of your colleagues in a department, will not recognize publications as legit that they do not want to recognize.
We used to have pretty intense fights about what in fact was a
scholarly or academic journal. For example, Ohio has a state glossy mag called “Timeline” that includes history pieces. Is that legit for an “academic” publication? I’d say no, and I published in it.
A second big problem is that the number of submissions-—which I think will include for conservatiev journals-—is overwhelming. Tenure calendars are six years, meaning a prof has to get 2-3 articles OUT in his first year for them to be properly reviewed, revised (takes about a year at least) then resubmitted, then published. In short, IF a prof is industrious, he can get the articles out just in time for promotion tenure. Some journals now are taking 3-4 years to REVIEW.
Finally, so much is moving digitally, I think any such “journal” is going to have to be digital in nature. Hard-copy journals will cease to exist.
bump for later
I sympathize, but it would only reinforce the bad principle.
Peer review should be a process for weeding out objective flaws and improving the weak points in papers. But invariably the process becomes a filter that censors out POVs that the reviewers dislike for political/religious/cultural/personal reasons. That isn't going to change, human nature being what it is, no matter how much we browbeat the reviewers.
The only solution is to allow diversity and competition in the publication process, so that marginalized factions and perspectives can publish their work in friendlier settings. Christians have had to do this for decades as actual Christians with a biblical worldview have been largely shut out of most academic publications. I'm a member of several scientific societies that run peer-reviewed publications that exist for this purpose.
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