There’s a Substack post floating around the internet that, to my surprise, hasn’t gotten much attention in the higher press. The work is a joke, a twisted and sexist tirade, polemical and elitist in tone, crude in language and shocking in its resort to that old chestnut – denouncing one’s opponents as communists.
The underlying argument of this deeply offensive piece is evident in its title, “The American Political Science Review Wakes Up.” She asserts that the magazine, among the most prestigious in its field, now “exists only to give savvy Twitter influencers better publications so that SJWs [social justice warriors] can claim to have earned their credentials.” The author also claims that in selecting an editorial team for the journal, the American Political Science Association rejected a more professionally visible application from the University of Texas at Austin in favor of a more “woke” proposal.
According to application materials available online, the proposal that APSA accepted called for the creation of the journal:
- “More representative of the breadth of political science research and the makeup of the discipline and more relevant to a wider readership.”
- “A catalyst for new research topics, breaking ground in identifying core issues and dilemmas that the discipline has not yet recognized.”
What seems to have provoked the emotional outburst at Substack were several statements in the proposal:
- “The editorial team will take affirmative action to provide full peer review for all work submitted by women and people of color and for all papers addressing race, gender, and sexuality in politics.”
- “We will use the desk review phase as an opportunity to take affirmative action to address patterns of descriptive and substantive underrepresentation at APSR—particularly, though not only, of work by women and scholars of color and scholarship addressing the issues of race, gender and sexuality. More specifically, we will adopt the policy recommended by the Women’s Caucus for Political Science (WCPS), which suggests that no manuscripts that fall under these criteria and are not rejected for submission should be rejected.”
- “We will try to increase the percentage of articles that deal with issues of race, gender and sexuality. In particular, following the WCPS recommendation, we will ensure that at least one reviewer of manuscripts addressing issues related to race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and other axes of marginalization and identity is a researcher who has published in that special topic. “
- “In terms of representation, we will collect data and examine how the submission pool, author pool, reviewer pool, and citation pool represent the race, gender, sexuality, national origin, and institutional diversity of the discipline’s home .”
- “We will also follow the WCPS recommendation that journal editors read and absorb the lessons of the growing body of research about racist and gender bias in the editorial and publishing process, using it to develop a protocol for themselves and for reviewers.”
I, for one, am unable to appreciate many of the factual claims of the Substack controversy. However, it is clear that every member of the editorial team that APSA accepted has experience in editing journals, special issues or books; that the team includes researchers with expertise in a wide range of methods (quantitative, ethnographic and archival, among others); and that the editors have substantial knowledge of standard subfields of political science (such as comparative politics, international relations, American political development, political theory, public policy, and state and local politics) and also areas of growing interest, such as “immigration and migration, gender politics and sexuality and racist and gender-based violence.”
For all its abusive and isolating language, Substack’s piece raises two questions worth discussing:
- How should scientific journals in general, and humanities and social science journals in particular, respond to growing calls for greater representative diversity among authors and reviewers and greater substantive diversity in terms of actual coverage?
- How political or apolitical should these magazines be?
I must emphasize here that scientific journals have always been political. Those who accuse scholarly journals of politicizing their field must recognize that editors’ choices about which articles to publish do not simply reflect an assessment of an essay’s depth of research, research design, theoretical and methodological rigor, clarity of writing , the accuracy, precision, or timeliness and relevance of its findings.
Editorial decisions are often colored by the perceived authority and expertise of an article’s author and by a host of subjective factors, including the centrality of a particular topic to the journal’s field and the value attached to objectivity or a particular methodology or conceptual and analytical framework. . .
In the past, it is certainly true that many topics now recognized as central were dismissed as peripheral or irrelevant. It was also the case that editors, under the banners of objectivity and disinterested scholarship, sometimes rejected scholarship that was more personal, passionate, or present. In other words, those decisions were really political.
So what should academic journals do?
1. In today’s publication-overabundance academic environment, journals eager to maximize readership and readership engagement must rethink their priorities.
It is my subjective impression that many of the scientific journals I read regularly, in their desire to increase readership and reader engagement, are publishing more articles designed to provoke controversy and trigger tweets.
There is nothing wrong with that. But I totally agree with them APSR editors who argue that leading journals should “be a catalyst for new research topics, breaking ground in identifying core issues and dilemmas that the discipline has not yet recognized.” To these ends, I urge the editors to consider publishing more articles in recent areas and especially more pieces relevant to classroom learning.
2. The diversity of a scientific journal should occur in multiple dimensions.
In addition to seeking diversity in authorial representation and subject matter, there should also be methodological and theoretical diversity. I understand that academic journals must perform a wide range of functions, including publishing very specific studies that are the building blocks of scholarship. But I would urge the editors to:
- Include more literature reviews and scholarly retrospectives that can help readers keep up with subfields that are growing by leaps and bounds.
- Feature more big picture essays that offer “new ideas or concepts, offering new perspectives on old questions, or asking new questions about established topics.”
3. Journals should consider supplementing 600- to 800-word reviews of individual books with somewhat longer essays that review two or more volumes in a given field of study.
As scientific disciplines become increasingly fragmented, it is becoming increasingly difficult for individual researchers to keep up. Somewhat longer review essays can place new books in broader contexts and explicitly compare and contrast interpretations.
4. Evaluate scholarship based on its excellence, not whether or not it is political.
Denigrating scholarship as politicized is a not-so-subtle way of dismissing it as biased, ideological, unprofessional, and thesis-driven. But most academic research has clear or implicit political implications, and journals should not deny authors the opportunity to determine these connections.
5. Make the review process more transparent.
Note deadlines for manuscript revisions. Keep authors informed of delays. Report regularly to the journal’s board and its sponsoring organization on any trends or problems the journal is experiencing. Most important of all, give authors helpful tips:
- A reasoned explanation of why a manuscript has been rejected.
- The editor’s sense of the manuscript’s potential for publication elsewhere.
- Specific reviews the journal requires.
6. Consider ways to make the magazine scholarship free.
Wouldn’t it be better if non-researchers used verified articles instead of whatever comes up in a Google search? I understand that many subscribers pay for a scientific journal in order to receive reviews. Items are a bonus. If this is indeed the case, let’s make articles more accessible. Don’t you want the information to be free?
7. Encourage more interactions between authors and readers.
A letter to the editor of a journal usually appears six months or even longer after an article is published. Many journals do not print answers at all. Why not create online forums where articles can be discussed and debated?
Even in a book-based discipline like mine, history, scientific journals, regardless of flag circulation, continue to occupy a crucial space. Not only do the articles and reviews of these journals help determine who does or does not receive tenure and promotion, the journals also signal which fields are most vibrant and provide status indicators that determine which researchers achieve professional visibility.
In thinking about how academic journals could be strengthened, President Clinton’s phrase endorsing affirmative action came to mind: “Think about it. Don’t finish it.” Of course, no one is talking about the discontinuation of scientific journals. But if these publications are to thrive, they must evolve.
It does no one any good if our journals continue to be what I fear they are becoming today: less contributors to scientific discourse, experimentation, and innovation than little-read repositories of scholarship, valued mostly as points on the CVs of academics.
Steven Mintz is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
