The academic world used to pretend to care about standards for publishing scholarly works, but these days, ideology has taken over in many fields. You can get away with just about anything as long as you’re a good progressive, and you’ll have a hard time getting into print if you aren’t.
In this Cafe Hayek post today, Don Boudreaux brings to light a truly disgusting instance of that, citing a Facebook post by Phil Magness.
Magness wanted to respond to a thoroughly dishonest article by that pseudo-historian at Duke, Nancy MacLean (and two co-authors), but the journal editor put him through months of torture before finally declining to publish his response:
In no small act of irony, our forcibly truncated 2,500 word comment — defending ourselves against an attack and documenting multiple incontrovertible misrepresentations of fact and evidence by our attackers — was subjected to a far more aggressive peer review process than MacLean et al’s original article. I’ll likely have more to say on this chain of events in the near future, as I intend to press forward with our original and full-length response paper at another venue.
Leftist editors are just as eager to “cancel” the voices of dissenting scholars as zealous students who want to keep people they dislike from being heard on campus. Intellectual honesty is fading into history as the desire to defend “progressivism” from attack comes to the fore.