Hey guys, your social construct is messing up the world. h::yes(1): What's Going On With That Big New Academic Journal 'Hoax' - Digg
I think that the point of this is that academic standards in the humanities have declined so dramatically in the last few decades that people can write virtually anything, no matter how bizarre or incoherent, and get it published in the journals, provided only that it expresses a "correct" race-class-gender line. Much of it is worthless in my opinion, yet it succeeds as a dissertation topic, gets people published, gets them hired and gets them tenure at the prestige universities. I recently purchased a used copy of the long out-of-print 1959 edition of Kathleen Freeman's The Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Companion to Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker and the contrast couldn't be more stark. Freeman was a humanities scholar of the old school who actually knew what she was writing about. The detail and analysis in that book is extraordinary and even in 2017 a graduate student in early Greek philosophy probably still needs to read it. When the general public starts to get the impression that many contemporary university professors' work product is oftentimes simply bullshit, respect for academic opinion in general starts to decline.
I pretty much agree with all of that. I think it started with a lot of the second generation post-modern writers. Half the time you can't even decipher what they're saying.
Only too true. However, in each humanities discipline, there are the venerable “traditional” journals that are mostly insulated from nonsense and fluff, and the trendy new journals created to provide a venue for just such fluff, which is where most of the postmodern rubbish winds up, there and non-peer-reviewed edited collections. Considering that most of the traditional scholarship is never touted in the media, I can’t blame the public for thinking that it’s all a pretentious game for ideologues. This situation has pitfalls in more way than one. A talented colleague was submitting a paper for a conference while still a graduate student. He believed, probably rightly so, that he wouldn’t get it accepted into that particular conference if he didn’t at least touch on the sacred issues of the moment, so he made a note in parenthesis in his draft, “Insert Identity shite here,” which of course, he forgot to remove!
Foolishness and academic misconduct A researcher from a state university in California gets a piece published in a “Feminist Geography Journal” on a feminist posthumanist analysis of fat-shamed squirrels in Southern California. https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/more-academic-madness-published-feminist-analysis-of-squirrel-diets-and-reproduction-that-shows-that-squirrels-liked-marginalized-human-groups-are-otherized-and-gendered/ An untenured feminist supporter of transgender rights is mobbed for publishing an article about the parallels between transgenderism and transracialism in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia, and the editorial board capitulates and excoriates her for her ideological sins. Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Philosophers (and others) speak out about the unprofessional conduct of the Hypatia editors and the defamation of Rebecca Tuvel A senior Duke professor is pressured into quitting for encouraging colleagues not to waste time at diversity training. Duke Divinity Crisis: The Documents Are Out | The American Conservative
It seems that the linked article is correct: all this seems to show is "Cogent Social Sciences" is a fraudulent journal. It is no more an indictment on "postmodern" than an article titled "Get me the f@ck off yur mailing list" accepted to a Computer Science journal an indictment of that field. Actually happened btw.
The irony, of course, is that if half of these poorly sourced and nearly unreadable articles had been written by graduates of, say, the University of Sedona, we'd be having a field day.
It may have real research in it, but it's still a "pay to play" journal. Normally I'm happy to jump on the dogpile when it comes to the cultural far left, but this incident isn't quite the Sokal-style indictment of academia that it's been reported to be.
I think that the intellectual problems in academia are a lot larger than the existence of journals that damnably fail to charge their readers exorbitant fees. In the sciences: "Why Most Published Research Findings are False" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ and "1,500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility" 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility : Nature News & Comment In that one, the surveyed scientists top two reasons for why they think so many reported findings fail to replicate were 1. selective reporting, and 2. pressure to publish. And that's in the hard sciences, where objective methodology actually exists and where research can theoretically be repeated by others. In subjects like 'gender studies' or 'critical race theory', it's far worse. These days, what's published in many of the trendier areas of the humanities is often nothing more than the author's opinion. In other words, 'selective reporting' is going to be built in, simply by the nature of the thing. There really isn't anything factual there that can be objectively tested or replicated. And conclusions in these areas are usually going to have far more direct relevance to social/political issues than papers in the hard sciences. So there's going to be far more motivation for authors to bias papers towards desired conclusions (even if the arguments leading up to the conclusions don't make very much sense) and the papers will more likely to be reviewed by the journals' reviewers according to how 'correct' those conclusions are.
Heirophant, That type of serious, focused, high-quality scholarship still does go on, although admittedly not in the trendy academic limelight. You mentioned the field of philosophy – perhaps you're already familiar with it, but here's a link to a recent free issue of Phronesis: A Journal of Ancient Philosophy. (Phronesis**»**Brill Online).
It's not about the business model of "gold open access". It's just this particular implementation of it isn't that high quality. It's a third tier for profit megajournal of a particularly broad scope; failures like this are not that surprising here.
Indeed. And this reminds me of one of the better ideas I once had, during my involvements with Columbia Pacific and Greenwich University. The idea was to invite a neutral third party to randomly select five doctoral dissertations in a given subject from the shelves at Harvard and at Columbia Pacific, remove all identifying marks, shuffle them, and submit them, for evaluation, to senior faculty at various traditional schools, who would be asked to rank or rate them. To the best of my knowledge, this was never done. I'd love to know how it would have turned out.