Arguments, Conclusions, and the Policies of Religious Academic Journals
“We do not publish any work advancing views that are clearly contrary to the established teachings of the Catholic
Church.”
That’s in the submission guidelines for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (NCBQ). Also in those submission guidelines:
The NCBQ seeks to foster intellectual inquiry on moral issues by publishing articles that address the ethical, philosophical, theological, and clinical questions raised by the rapid pace of modern medical and technological progress. Inspired by the harmony of faith and reason, the NCBQ unites faith in Christ to reasoned and rigorous reflection on the findings of the empirical and experimental sciences. While the NCBQ is committed to publishing material that is consonant with the magisterium of the Catholic Church, it remains open to other faiths and to secular viewpoints in the spirit of informed dialogue.
What does it mean for a journal to say that it will not publish “views that are clearly contrary to the established teachings of the Catholic Church” but that “it remains open to other faiths and to secular viewpoints in the spirit of informed dialogue”?
Recently, a philosopher whose work was critiqued in an NCBQ article found out.
[“Snake Jug” by Cornwall and Wallace Kirkpatrick]
…this is one of several of our regular columns by a regular columnist that reports on, reviews, and responds to select publications in philosophy and theology, especially but not exclusively in journals… You can decide if this column warrants a reply. Since our principal scope is Catholic bioethics, we do have an editorial policy in our submission guidelines that “the NCBQ is committed to publishing material that is consonant with the magisterium of the Catholic Church” and “We do not publish any work advancing views that are clearly contrary to established teachings of the Catholic Church.” Basically, we wouldn’t be willing to publish a defense of the permissibility of direct procured abortion, for example, but we would be willing to publish a letter critiquing the columnist’s argument, defending yourself against misrepresentation or misunderstanding or the like, or pointing to other publications where you have already responded to his concerns.
Professor Nobis submitted a reply article, “Reply to Christopher Kaczor on Abortion”.
He soon heard back from the journal’s editor-in-chief, Edward (Ted) Furton, who said:
We have received your reply to Dr. Christopher Kaczor concerning abortion.
Your reply generally argues that moral arguments offered in opposition to the killing of unborn human beings are false and that therefore the practice should be permissible (except, if I understand, for late term pregnancies). Our journal does not print submissions that contradict established Catholic teaching on moral matters.
The Managing Editor has suggested that your reply and perhaps a further response from Dr. Kaczor might be published in another journal so that the discussion can continue. We would be happy to facilitate that effort, if we can.
Nobis replied, in part:
Thank you for your response but your evaluation here doesn’t seem to be correct. This was a response article that showed that Kaczor’s objections to our arguments and claims were poor. This was not any new defense, or really any defense, of our positive claims: it was just “these critiques are weak and here’s why.” I was told earlier that such a response would be allowable.
Furton replied:
The claims of weakness in Dr. Kaczor’s arguments are difficult to separate from the substance of your position. You hold that his arguments fail. Therefore, it follows that your position in defense of abortion is untouched and so remains true.
To which Nobis wrote:
…your conclusion does not follow here:
“You hold that his arguments fail. [yes] Therefore, it follows that your position in defense of abortion is untouched [yes, untouched by those objections] and so remains true. [no: that does not follow: that some claims/arguments are poor objections to some arguments for conclusion p does not entail that p is true or that p is supported by good arguments: that’s a separate matter, requiring a separate “positive” defense].
I do want to share what I was told earlier:
we wouldn’t be willing to publish a defense of the permissibility of direct procured abortion, for example, but we would be willing to publish a letter critiquing the columnist’s argument, defending yourself against misrepresentation or misunderstanding or the like, or pointing to other publications where you have already responded to his concerns…
What I am unclear on now is whether your policy means that really pretty much any critique of these critiques would be considered a defense of the permissibility of abortion—since any saying “well, this was a poor reason to think that this pro-choice argument was a bad argument” is, in a way, a kind of defense of abortion—and so this is pretty much an impossible task here, for this forum.
Furton replied:
Thanks for your observations, but this is not merely a matter of logic. Perhaps I erred in encouraging a response from you and Dr. Dudley, but I wanted to see if it might work…
This response by Nobis was the last bit of the exchange:
You are correct that this is not merely a matter of logic.
Presumably, you want people to think abortion is wrong, on the basis of good arguments. And you want people to have responses to pro-choice arguments that are, or are based on, good arguments.
Kaczor’s responses to our arguments were very poor. Not considering publishing something that shows this because of the (logical) error of not distinguishing “these objections to arguments for p are poor” and “here are good arguments for p” is bad. This results in your readers missing an opportunity to have a stronger understanding and better arguments on these issues.
Now, we have no “right” to a reply here, or even a reply being considered, but some offer for a reply was given. If this really was an impossible task, since almost any response would have been perceived as a positive argument for abortion, then that offer should have never been made.
Nobis shared the exchange on his website (and via email, Furton confirmed its accuracy). Nobis prefaced his account of it with a brief discussion of premises, conclusions, arguments, and criticism, reminding readers, for example, that “One can critique an argument’s premises without taking any stance on whether the conclusion is true or false.”
To sum up, in this case, Nobis (and Dudley) had first, in Salon:
(1) argued against arguments against the permissibility of abortion.
Then Kaczor, critiquing Nobis in the NCBQ:
(2) argued against arguments against arguments against the permissibility of abortion.
Then Nobis, in his reply to Kaczor:
(3) argued against arguments against arguments against arguments against the permissibility of abortion.
The editor-in-chief of the journal took 3 to be equivalent to arguing in favor of the permissibility of abortion and rejected it because the journal does not publish work advocating views “that are clearly [!] contrary to the established teachings of the Catholic Church.”
Like some other journals, the NCBQ publishes peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed writing. My understanding is that Kaczor’s piece was not a peer-reviewed submission; it’s a regularly appearing column in the journal. But had it been, presumably, the same policy invoked in rejecting Nobis’s reply, interpreted in the same way, would have applied.
The episode raises interesting questions about the policies of religious and other ideological journals and their role in the academic ecology. Discussion welcome.
ADDENDUM: Some criticisms of the journal and the editor are rolling in, and that’s fine, but it may be useful for people to also think about how to do an ideological journal well. I understand that on the face of it such a journal may seem to many people at odds with the academic enterprise, but need it be? Isn’t there room for robustly academic inquiry and debate that takes for granted certain assumptions? (Doesn’t most academic inquiry and debate take for granted certain assumptions?)
After reviewing this situation, the only reasonable position is to call for the immediate implementation of a disjunction: EITHER (i) Professor Fulton should remove the description on the journal’s submission page that describes the NCBQ in a normal way (e.g., as aiming to foster dialogue, open to different perspectives) and include instead text that clarifies that this is a not an academic research journal, adhering to standards that are the norm for academic research but instead a periodical for dogmatic Catholic proselytising. OR alternatively (ii) Professor Fulton should continue to keep the journal’s submission description as it, intact, and resign so that the journal can proceed as an academic research journal in line with its own mission statement. One of the above two things needs to happen immediately.
It is really surprising that Dr. Furton cannot recognize an instance of the fallacy fallacy and that the invalidity or otherwise inadequacy of an argument for p has no bearing whatsoever on the truth of p. It is quite troubling that the editor-in-chief of such a journal gets this wrong.
It is even more mystifying that Dr. Furton would expect something other than a critique of Kaczor’s argument after inviting Nobis to provide exactly that. I can only surmise that the Managing Editor for NCBQ made a mistake in inviting a contribution that would not toe the party line. This suggests problems in the editorial office.
Here’s something interesting: NCBQ seems to have taken down their editorial policies page, presumably in light of this coming scrutiny: https://www.ncbcenter.org/ncbq-policies
You can find the content previously there via Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20220615165144/https://www.ncbcenter.org/ncbq-policies
Although NCBQ doesn’t appear to be a member of COPE, they reference COPE on the archived policy page. Arguably NCBQ is in violation of COPE principles, which require transparency concerning publishing and peer review practices. Insofar as this incident shows that NCBQ is not, in fact, “open to other faiths and to secular viewpoints in the spirit of informed dialogue” in good faith, and given that they have removed their page of editorial policies entirely, they are not being transparent.
Matt, while it is true that one link on their site to their editorial policies is dead (I initially ran into the same problem as you), another link is working and visible. It’s on this page: https://www.ncbcenter.org/ncbquarterly. Just scroll down and you’ll see a mustard-colored button that says “submission guidelines.” I don’t think the broken link we noticed is an attempt to hide anything.
From the Wayback Machine, you can see that there’s much more detail in terms of editorial policy at the dead link than there are in the submission guidelines document. Still, probably you’re right that I’m making a kind of paranoid assumption and reading too much into what is probably just an IT problem. But there are a lot of things that, from a publication ethics standpoint, NCBQ should really post publicly that were on the now-dead page that are not in the submission guidelines.
I came across something similar recently in a forthcoming paper: “We have avoided citing other arguments here because we take them to be openly transphobic, and we resist giving them more uptake.” For “openly transphobic” read “sex realist” or “gender critical”. Having gender critical views is a protected category under English law. The authors of the article avoid dealing with the arguments of their critics altogether.
This seems somewhat/entirely different, unless the editors of the journal invite you to submit a response piece to that paper, and then reject it on the grounds that any response piece is eo ipso transphobic?
My point is this: the tertium comparationis is that in both contexts the opposing position is suppressed.
Far from being suppressed, the transphobic position is specifically acknowledged as one pole of a dialectic (the other being a trans-inclusive gender-realist position) that the paper in question seeks to obviate. Engaging in detail with the position is otiose to the paper and platforming the morally deplorable versions of the position is as unnecessary as it is undesirable.
This is incorrect. The paper does not treat the “transphobic” position as one pole of a dialectic. It acknowledges that there are views that arrive at the same conclusion vis a vis gender identity as the “transphobic” one but which do so while remaining committed to the political project the authors endorse (the latter, politically allied sources get cited, of course, since they are the good guys). Plenty of GC philosophers are gender realists. They just have a view on the nature of gender different from the one favored by the authors of the paper in question (link here. Note 1 contains the text at issue).
https://philarchive.org/rec/HERMAA-8
And here is a recent paper arguing for the suppression of certain views on sex and gender (mischaracterized, of course, as “transphobic”)–including at the level of editorial decisions. If we were to assume that abortion is the murder of innocent persons, as Catholics believe, then what the Catholic journal has done is no different from what is being advocated for here with respect to views on sex and gender.
https://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/4237
I believe what Brown was pointing out is that in this paper, no _position_ is excluded, but certain _arguments_ are noted to be unsuitable for serious engagement.
That is (1) very different from the editorial position of NCBQ, which maintains an exclusion of certain positions, and (2) a very normal thing, since no paper addresses all arguments for all the positions it mentions, and unserious arguments are routinely ignored.
But that would mischaracterize NCBQ’s policy, which is not that certain positions be entirely excluded from discussion/engagement, but rather that they not be advanced.
Fine. NCBQ’s position is that certain positions may not be advanced. This is still different from the position of the authors of the Ergo paper who seem to claim that any position may be advanced, but that some ways of advancing a position (arguments that are odious, unserious) are not worthy of discussion.
They say, “We have avoided citing other arguments here because we take them to be openly transphobic, and we resist giving them more uptake” (emphasis mine).
So it’s not that they merely think some arguments “are not worthy of discussion” (though perhaps they do think this, too). It’s that they do not want people to read certain things, and in order to ensure that people don’t read these things they avoid citing them (while righteously announcing that they are doing this).
Not citing is what you do with sources or arguments you regard as unserious / unworthy of discussion.
Announcing it may be a bit gauche, but this isn’t in principle different from a medical researcher noting that they won’t engage with the anti-vax crowd.
Why does it matter here that something is a protected category under some law?
So-called “sex realists” seem to have many of the same complaints as so-called “race realists.” I’m not sure why it being a “protected category under English law” matters here; the view that marriage is “only between one man and one woman” is also a similarly “protected category” of “philosophical belief.” That in no way entails that we have to publish pieces expressing that belief or that we cannot form our own views about that belief, including criticism of it as homophobic. Similarly, I don’t see why we’d have to publish “sex realist” takes (as if they aren’t already widely published in mainstream press outlets anyway) or that we can’t form our own views about that belief, including ones critical of its homophobia, transphobia, and so on. That is to say, merely having such views be “a protected category under English law” does not entail what you seem to think it entails.
Forstater v Centre for Global Development Europe established that gender critical beliefs are “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Meaning, they are not per se ‘transphobic’ – contrary to what some trans allies claim.
That same court ruling likened “gender critical beliefs” to other “protected” beliefs, including the belief I mentioned above (that marriage is only between one man and one woman). A belief being “worthy of respect in a democratic society” does not entail that a belief is not homophobic, transphobic, etc.
Not quite. The Tribunal referred to ‘[t]he Supreme Court’s decision in Lee v Ashers Baking Co Ltd [2020] AC 413, in which it was held that it was not unlawfully discriminatory for a bakery to refuse to supply a cake iced with the message “Support Gay Marriage” because of the belief of the owners that gay marriage is inconsistent with Biblical teaching’.
It is interesting that you need to support your position by likening gender critical beliefs to ‘race realist’ and ‘homophobic’ beliefs. Socrates warned us against the Sophists. It is pernicious to scholarship to suppress opposing views (see J.S. Mill), and it is an act of bad faith to impute a vile disposition to critics.
The editor of NCBQ acknowledges that there are contrary views – but they clash with Catholic doctrine. Supporters of the trans viewpoint(s) wish to suppress the opposing view(s) and/or refuse to engage with it. But in addition, they smear gender critical authors and their work as ‘transphobic’, etc. The Catholic position seems more honest to me.
> The Tribunal referred to ‘[t]he Supreme Court’s decision in Lee v Ashers Baking Co Ltd [2020] AC 413, in which it was held that it was not unlawfully discriminatory for a bakery to refuse to supply a cake iced with the message “Support Gay Marriage”
Or, in other words, just because a court affirms a right to a certain belief or action, it does not follow that that belief or action is not odious.
If you don’t like being likened to “race realists” or homophobes, you might want to get some arguments for your view that aren’t also made in favor of “race realism” or homophobia.
Or in the words of JS Mill:
“We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one … We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates.”
[While this isn’t your main point, it seems worth addressing since it arises elsewhere, including our (and sci’s) exchanges about the Gaza petition.]
Whether views are hegemonic, suppressed, etc. in society, at large, does not negate concerns about views being hegemonic, suppressed, etc. in academia or philosophy. It wouldn’t be appropriate to dismiss concerns regarding view hegemony, suppression, etc. in academia and philosophy on the grounds that it would counterbalance view hegemony, suppression, etc. in society, at large (though I’ll concede that more precision is needed to avoid the counter-example of counterbalancing gerrymandering).
I like the last segment of this post, suggesting that the journal’s response seems to require conflating arguments against arguments against p with arguments for p, and arguments against arguments against arguments against p with arguments against p.
I myself am happy with this conflation (just as I conflate Governor Abbott’s ban on municipal mask rules with an intentional causation of some number of deaths, even though he was just preventing municipalities from preventing businesses from allowing customers to enter without wearing masks to prevent transmission of a virus, one of whose effects was to prevent adequate oxygenation of the blood, leading to death – quadruple prevention is a kind of causation). But I don’t think this is a kind of conflation that deontologists generally, and Catholic thought in particular, tends to countenance.
Looks to me like a perfectly reasonable invitation, and that the reply satisfies the conditions outlined.
Suppose the Catholic Church teaches that P. Nobis argues that not-P. Columnist criticizes Nobis’ argument in Journal. Journal offers Nobis opportunity to reply, reminding him of policy of not contradicting Church teachings. Nobis accepts, and argues that Columnist’s objections to P are bad. Journal says publishing reply would violate their policy.
Unfair? If they’d have said that to *any* reply, then certainly. Here’s another possibility. Nobis offers some responses to Columnist that are themselves inconsistent with Church teachings (eg, “Columnist’s argument is vulnerable to a reductio, since it would imply the inpermissibility not just of abortion, but also of IVF…”), and so are considered directly in violation of Journal’s policy, rather than just because they’re objections to objections to P.
Seems to me hard to have a strong view here without having read the pieces in question.
The post links to Nobis’s reply, so if you think that bears on the discussion you have the ability to read it and then assess whether Nobis is being unreasonable in raising this issue, or whether he is correct to suggest the opportunity to reply was not being legitimately extended.
The section on killing and letting die would be the bit I’d think most likely to trigger the “we don’t publish stuff inconsistent with Catholic teachings” policy.
Fwiw, in my view it would have been really really tricky to write a robust reply that stuck to the journal’s policy. If I were in Nobis’ position, l probably wouldn’t have tried.
To be clear, I probably also wouldn’t have invited an invitation to reply if i were in the position of the journal editor, if I was intending to apply the policy as strictly as it seems like he does; it seems to me to amount to asking Nobis to walk a really fine line.
In response to the addendum, my view is that an ideologically-oriented journal should publish all well-argued, well-researched papers concerning the ideology, no matter what position they take. A Marxist-Leninist specialist journal should not only include interpretations of Marxism-Leninism, applications of Marxist-Leninist assumptions to various issues, etc.; it should also include thoughtful, productive critiques of M-L’ist positions. Perhaps the standards for publishing such a critique should be higher in such a journal compared to other venues, in that the author will be expected to know many of the more nuanced moves made in the M-L’ist literature. Certainly the editors would be much more selective about how many such critiques would be published, and would focus on critiques that were productive “Devil’s advocates” for advancing M-L’ist theory. But to say as a matter of policy, “We do not publish any work advancing views that are clearly contrary to the established teachings of [Marxism-Leninism],” or to do as much in practice, seems to me to be beyond the pale and take the journal out of the realm of scholarship entirely. The same should go for journals on any religious or political ideology. Heck, the same should go for journals in the sciences – if the International Journal of String Theory refused in principle to publish critiques of string theory, that would not be a scholarly let alone a scholarly venue anymore.
More generally, I’ve enjoyed pairing Amia Srinivasan’s “Does Feminist Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” with Thomas Kelly’s “Following the Argument Where it Leads”, in teaching, as both defend very different positions from the charge that they are unphilosphical because they take too much for granted, and not open to serious question (sunstantively feminist philosophy in Srinivasan’s case, Thomist catholic philosophy in Kelly’s case). I find both papers quite persuasive; while I wouldn’t find it rewarding to try to write for NCBQ– I’m not Catholic–I think it’s a lot harder than you might think to make the case that this sort of editorial policy is misguided.
I also thought of the comparison to feminist philosophy when I read about this journal’s policy. As long as there are enough journals out there committed to content neutrality, it does not strike me as objectionable to have specialist journals with substantive commitments. Hypatia, for example, describes itself as a “forum for cutting-edge work in feminist philosophy”. We can disagree about whether this is a wise choice or not, but we should not expect the journal to publish papers that argue against key feminist assumptions. Such papers could be published elsewhere and a feminist journal is free to reject them. So the real issue, I suppose, is that Catholic, feminist, and other journals with such substantive commitments ought to be precise and transparent about their editorial policies.
In my opinion, ideological journals should not exist—they run completely counter to the very point of academic inquiry. In this specific instance, I find the behaviour of this journal and its editor quite disreputable. However, I at least give them credit for owning up to their ideological bias and stating it plainly for all to see (consider that they might instead have feigned openness to viewpoints inconsistent with Catholic faith and yet had a policy of always finding some “scholarly flaw” in submission defending such viewpoints).
One of the pressing problems for academia right now, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is that many mainstream journals are now effectively run like NCBQ when it comes to various leftwing ideological commitments, except that, rather than owning up to their ideological editorial practices, they hide them. These journals present themselves as committed to open intellectual inquiry and diversity of perspectives, yet, when push comes to shove, they enforce their ideological stance by misusing legitimate editorial practices to make it seem like it was “scholarly concerns”, and not ideological bias, that motivated their decision. Furthermore, in contrast to NCBQ, which is a low-prestige journal that is not taken very seriously in academia, various levels of leftwing ideological capture has occurred at several high-prestige, influential academic journals.
Predictably, this abuse of editorial power is backfiring quite badly. Rather than adding the prestige and authority of academic excellence to the leftwing causes the editors are committed to, it instead is eroding the prestige and authority that academia once enjoyed. A powerful tool that we once had at our disposal—”academic experts have rigorous investigated this questions and found that …”—is no longer very effective in public discourse because the bias is now so blatant and obvious to many.
It is also worth noting that, as with most bad trends in higher education, the US is leading the way. It is no coincidence that both rightwing ideological journals and leftwing ideological journals are heavily concentrated in the US, where cultural wars reign supreme and sully every aspect of society. The lesson here for the rest of us is to accelerate our divorce from the US. Reject the US dominated parts of academia and seek to build various academic bodies (journals, scholarly organizations, etc.) with an international focus that minimizes US influence.
> A powerful tool that we once had at our disposal—”academic experts have rigorous investigated this questions and found that …”—is no longer very effective in public discourse because the bias is now so blatant and obvious to many.
This has been said about the academy ever since rigorous investigations led first to a truth that was unpalatable to conservatives. The only answer is to stand strong and to continue our rigorous pursuit of truth on our own terms.
Giving in to the “bias” propaganda cannot be the answer. The day we give up on the truth in order to appease those who shout “bias” or “balance”, we might as well close up shop.
There were plenty of findings by researchers in the mid-20th century that either the left or the right found unpalatable. Yet overall public confidence in higher education and academic research remained high. So, the question to ask is: What has recently changed? Something clearly has changed:
Something appears to have changed, but it doesn’t follow that it’s a change in academia. Trust could decline for other reasons, e.g. to do with social media or political polarisation.
I’m seeing in this chart that right-wing propaganda works better on right-wing people.
Or do you think that dwindling confidence in the science of vaccination is also the fault of medical scientists for being biased against anti-vax junk science?
I think the more interesting / worrying question is: how much is that dwindling confidence connected to other prima facie biased behavior by epidemiologists (and, perhaps, academics more generally)? The most obvious and most widely discussed example is the rapid shift of advice on outdoor gatherings around the George Floyd protests, and the real-time-visible evidence that scientists were being pressured to toe the line. I was deeply troubled by that at the time, in substantial part exactly because it risked undermining scientists’ credentials on clear-cut cases like vaccination.
Getting the public to accept expert advice on vaccines isn’t really based on presenting the public with the first order evidence. It’s based on the public accepting the general trustworthiness of domain experts. That can be undermined by evidence of expert bias in other areas, even if the actual advice on the area in question is impeccable.
Insofar as we take JTD’s graph as authoritative, it seems that the events of 2020 made no dent in an already existing trend. For Republicans, it didn’t even speed up. So I’m somewhat suspect of your explanation for the trend.
By contrast, the steep decline from 2015 onwards coincides with an over-representation of accusations of “bias” in the media (2015 is the founding year of the HxA).
This is all very rough, since the graph is coarse with only three data points. It could be that the drop for independents between ’18 and ’23 is caused by events of 2020.
I tried finding better data, but to no avail. However, the latest Gallup poll (link below) shows a steep decline in trust for 2024 but then an even steeper rise in trust for 2025.
This suggests to me that this is a largely political phenomenon, with 2024 election coverage / propaganda being a driving force.
Source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/692519/public-trust-higher-rises-recent-low.aspx
I was mostly responding to your comment on vaccines specifically, not to the original graph. I think (I haven’t checked – I’m on vacation!) that the pandemic is an inflection point for attitudes to vaccination specifically.
On the broader point, your impression of the overall timing matches mine. But of course that doesn’t separate out causal factors. Maybe increased public skepticism in academia is caused by increased media coverage of accusations of bias, or maybe both increased public skepticism in academia and increased media coverage of accusations of bias are caused by an increase in actual bias.
(For myself, I think it’s somewhere in the middle. Certainly actors hostile to academia have weaponized accusations of bias, and absent that weaponization I don’t know how the public would have reacted; but there actually is a lot of groupthink and bias in some areas of academia; that’s bad in itself; and it is much harder to rebut bad-faith criticisms when they contain a grain of truth. So we should get our own house in order regardless.)
Yes, this is also my view. Thanks for saying it more eloquently than I would have.
Another factor to consider is that there’s been a bit of “airing of dirty laundry” across various fields in recent years. The vast majority of that discourse has been taken up by people working in the given fields who want to improve practice. That’s how we got into discussions of open science, reproducibility, etc. That has largely been a good thing, I think. However, some have also taken it as an opportunity to consolidate their own “anti-establishment” branding. Even tenured academics working in prestigious institutions who could realistically be considered “establishment” themselves have sometimes found it profitable to cast themselves as defiant Galileo’s, whose bold, visionary takes are being suppressed by some shadowy academic elite. Or, in some cases, untenured academics who’ve invented a whole mythology for why their groundbreaking ideas aren’t taken seriously (e.g., the “DISC”).
How is the public supposed to process all this? On the one hand, legitimate issues with incentive structures in academia that lead to less than desirable behaviours, ones that lower public trust. On the other, academics who are incentivized to sell exactly that image of academia to the public because it benefits them personally to be thought of as one of the few Brave Truth-Tellers, sticking to the DISC, the establishment, or whatever on their YouTube channel, podcast, etc.
We’ve fallen behind, I think. The discussions most impactful on public trust aren’t happening in journals; they’re happening on social media platforms. And some who hold a large presence on those platforms aren’t bound to the incentive structures of academia (structures themselves deserving of criticism), but to the incentive structures of algorithmically driven social media engagement and the revenue streams that produces.
If I recall correctly, one major driver of covid vaccine skepticism was the allegation that the vaccine contains 5g chips that mind control you and/or rewrite your DNA. (Alongside less fantastic claims about vaccine injuries and, let’s say, inconsistent messaging from the government.)
I think it is itself biased to zoom in on failures of message discipline by scientists while eliding the firehose of utter bullsh_t that was and remains aimed at undermining the collective trust in science.
The view you are taking is effectively the pundit view: scientists must maintain perfect message discipline. But while this view is buttressed on a lot of opinion, it is not supported by a lot of data (cf. JTD very confidently posting a graph that shows nothing.)
Perfect message discipline is great for pundits and professional busybodies, since you can chatter about it forever. You can’t keep 200,000 professors at 6000 colleges on message all the time. But if one stupid thing happens, you can have weeks of media chatter. If you want to actually improve things, you need to look elsewhere (including at the pundits themselves).
That said, I agree that causal factors are difficult to separate. And I agree that we cannot just turn a blind eye to our own failures. But ignoring the external attacks on our credibility is so much worse. I’m pretty sure the disproportionate coverage of comparatively minor failures of message discipline (or outright misrepresentations thereof) has done the lion’s share of damage to the trust in science.
I don’t think expert failures in the pandemic are correctly described as “failures of message discipline. In the particular case of the George Floyd protests, the message discipline was excellent: most public-facing epidemiologists communicated the same line, and the occasional dissenters were put under heavy pressure to recant. The problem is that the message being communicated was highly politicized. (And I think this is true more generally, though defending that claim would overflow a blog comment – factual disagreements about the degree of academic political polarization aren’t really separable from normative disagreements about its significance.)
Beyond that, I at least focus on the problems internal to academia not because I think they are the dominant reason for decreasing public trust (I’m agnostic on that, and I think it’s probably better modelled as a vicious feedback loop rather than separated-out causes) but because (i) I think they are at least somewhat important, (ii) they are epistemically and ethically bad in their own right independent of their effect on wider politics, and (iii) most importantly in this context, I have exactly zero causal influence on Fox News or the White House, whereas I do have some very modest opportunities to influence fellow academics.
I think we want the same thing: that academics stick to the truth.
My worry is that we might not tell certain truths because we fear we’d be seen as “biased”.
Your worry is that we might not tell certain truths because they’d go against some liberal agenda.
Here’s why my worry concerns me more than your worry. As a matter of evident fact, no supposedly liberal institution (e.g. the NYT) has succeeded at re-gaining trust from the right by platforming right-wing positions, softening truths that discomfit the right, or tell outright lies on the right’s behalf. The firehose of propaganda just continues.
“As a matter of evident fact, no supposedly liberal institution (e.g. the NYT) has succeeded at re-gaining trust from the right by platforming right-wing positions...”
After years and years of alienating people on the right AND people in the center AND people on the moderate left AND rather committed leftists who don’t quite agree with all the points of orthodoxy, through a more and more blatantly biased editorial direction, the NYT has to some extent attempted to win back the trust of those readers by featuring a few dissenting voices. I, for one, have come to give more credibility to the NYT’s reporting on some issues because of it, and I know many others who feel the same way.
But according to you, none of us exist or matter, and the NYT’s attempt to earn back its credibility was an utter failure, because there are still some people on the political right who are not yet convinced and perhaps never will be.
And this is your argument for failing utterly to address or even acknowledge any of the biases that are driving away anyone to the right of you, which seems to be about 99% of the polpulation.
If telling lies for the sake of “balance” is what it takes to win back your trust, I think we should find ways to do without your trust.
And I know of many others who have abandoned the NYT altogether—people in the centre AND people on the moderate left AND rather committed leftists. So it’s earned back its credibility among some, and lost it among others. What should we make of this?
I, for one, trust the NYT more in 2025 than I did in 2020.
Now, I was never going to vote Republican anyway, because (among other reasons) I would prefer that the US nuclear arsenal was not controlled by a maniac. But plausibly there are people slightly to the right of me and slightly less worried about nuclear war for whom it matters. Elections are won on the margins.
“I’m seeing in this chart that right-wing propaganda works better on right-wing people.”
That interpretation ignores a number of factors.
One of them is that the percentage of academics who are conservative, libertarian, or even centrist has plummeted steadily over the last three decades, while the percentage that, even by their own self-identification, are radically left-wing has shot upward. This has led, in many disciplines, to echo chambers that are quite easily seen by those who do not share the sensibilities of most insiders. Since academics are far from remarkably good at separating out what is well-established from what is accepted merely for partisan reasons, many academic disciplines have acquired blind spots that are increasingly evident to outsiders, and often in places that will be apt to rankle them.
Another is that the direction of causation can go in the other direction. Many people who accepted these partisan presuppositions without much questioning fifteen years ago have, after seeing the echo chamber at work, lost faith in their original political affiliations. I, for instance, was a fairly radical leftist throughout the first decade of this century, but came to see increasingly in the 2010s that many of the people I trusted were simply no longer engaging in fair reasoning, if they ever were, so I came increasingly to see myself as politically homeless, in a sense: if I had to pick one of the three categories in the diagram, I guess I’d have to go with ‘independent’ now. I’ve spoken with many others who, unlike me, became Republicans after losing faith in the Democrats. Once you begin to ask questions seriously about your own political group, the best thing to bring you back in would be a conversation with someone who takes your doubts seriously and shows that others do, as well. But one doesn’t get that in an echo chamber, so once the questioning begins, it tends to lead to a landslide forcing one out.
A third is that this model presumes that the only thing that could cause anyone to lose faith in higher education is “right-wing propaganda.” This is a perfect example of the overconfidence of insiders that serves to accelerate the cascade of doubts in anyone who steps outside of the echo chamber for a moment.
If we want to ensure a total collapse of confidence in the integrity of higher education, continuing to deny that anything whatsoever has gone wrong in academia is a great policy. The farther academia goes down that road, the more moderates will be driven out or into self-censorship, and the narrower the range of acceptable opinion will be within academia, perpetuating and accelerating the trend.
I don’t think anyone is “deny[ing] that anything whatsoever has gone wrong in academia.” But there’s a difference between thinking that what’s gone wrong is that the incentive structures of academia promote ways of working that aren’t necessarily well aligned with the mission of a university (which is itself contested) and thinking that what’s gone wrong is that academics are too “liberal” and are “corrupting the youth” with critical theory or whatever the new boogeyman is.
Regarding blindspots, which you mention, I don’t think that’s so easy to evaluate. Academics may be “far from remarkably good” at that, but what’s claimed to be “increasingly evident to outsiders” may or may not be warranted. It’s of course possible for so-called outsiders to be coming up against the limits of what they know and thus “acquir[ing] blindspots” of their own. This is also where cranks and charlatans are able to operate most successfully: By fomenting mistrust in some establishment and casting themselves as the only Brave Truth-Tellers left, they can muddy the waters enough to make themselves appear facially credible. And with that image set, if their crank ideas turn out to be, well, judged to be as crank ideas, they can then turn to saying that they’re being suppressed and so on. I mean, maybe. Or maybe it’s a hackneyed rhetorical manoeuvre that plays very well on podcasts, even if it doesn’t reflect the reality of academia. Maybe elements of both. Either way, I don’t think we can judge it so straightforwardly without considering the particulars of what’s claimed to be evident or what’s seen as a problem and why.
I don’t know, Justin. Maybe go read “God and Man at Yale” and then tell me whether this is any different from the current conservative complaints against academia.
I think it is not; throughout the last century, conservative complaints about academia have largely remained the same. There’s no reason to think they track reality. Reality changes merrily underneath them, while the complaints remain the same.
Your claim is that today, through sheer circumstance, the complaint has become valid.
Your claim is moreover that if we’d address the complaint, we can restore trust.
But since the complaint does not track reality, there’s little reason to believe either claim.
(I have a personal bugbear about people who “left the left”. They are usually people who were quite satisfied to call out other people’s biases, but depart in a huff when their own biases (aka “reasonable concerns”) are problematized. You will find these people in each new civil rights movement.)
Where to begin…
First, it is an error to think that the complaints against academia today are all still the ‘conservative’ ones of yesteryear. Yes, conservatives continue to make complaints (many of which are quite different from Buckley’s seventy years ago, despite what you claim). But academia has drifted, very demonstrably, from a leftist bias decades ago to a concentration of self-described radical left professors today. The criticisms of today’s conservatives are now supplemented by criticisms of libertarians, centrists, and moderate left-wingers. That is a major difference.
Second, one of the key differences today is that the concerns of many left-wingers on campus a few decades ago — academic freedom, and civil liberties more generally — have been repudiated by today’s orthodox campus leftists. One of William Buckley’s most famous interlocutors was Ira Glasser of the the ACLU in its heyday. Today, Glasser and the other earlier luminaries of the ACLU are pushing in the opposite direction, because of the universities’ embrace of intolerance. If, as I suspect, you are somewhat younger, you may well have missed how significantly academic culture has been transformed since the ’80s and ’90s.
So, your short response misses the mark in at least two significant ways.
I don’t know whether it’s possible to restore public trust by addressing the complaint. Sometimes, if a group of people betrays the public trust over and over again, it becomes impossible to repair the loss of faith. I hope that that has not happened.
What I am saying is that, if we do not collectively address the complaint, then we will definitely not regain the public trust. And the utter lack of interest you exhibit in even giving the question a second look — even a first look, actually — helps me see that the Trump victory last year was not sufficient to make you and many others enough of a jolt to take an iota of responsibility for how badly we are losing that faith. And if enough of us approach this as fecklessly as you continue to here, without being able to admit to a single fault or excess on the part of the universities, I must admit that I occasionally feel that we deserve what we’re going to keep getting.
what you are reproducing here is a narrative, not a factual account. that doesn’t mean there isn’t any basis in fact to some of what you say, of course.
rather it means that you are telling a particular story about academia and its influence that is simply one account among many.
personally, i think it’s an account that misrepresents important aspects of how the left has changed since roughly 2008 and evades the bankruptcy of center coalition governance and the increasing radicalization of the right fueled by media that is far more irresponsible than the the nyt (to jump upthread) has ever been.
if the left changes, and the academy leans left, the academy will change. those changes may not be felicitous in any number of ways that are absolutely worth negotiating. i personally think that identity politics writ large is poisonous ideologically as well as rhetorically.
having said that, if you think that the left is ultimately to blame for what we are seeing under brexit, orban, poland’s leadership, trump, etc. rather a part of complex of issues produced *by the center coalition,* you have a large burden of proof that a paint by numbers narrative like this one doesn’t provide.
sure, it’s a blog comment section so i’m not sure this is the time or the place to develop that narrative. but i assure you that many scholars and thinkers who do not claim to be or consider themselves radical, who might even not dig the identitarian left, who can tell a different story with many of the same reference points.
I can really only say the same back at you.
I am genuinely baffled that the last election was not sufficient to make you and your fellow “centrists” realize the following facts.
– The right is by far the greater threat to academic freedom or free speech than the left.
– Rather than merely reacting to leftist excesses, the right is exercising its own agency to destroy education and access to the truth.
– Demands for “heterodoxy” are often than not attempts to garner respectability for discredited views under the guise of “brave truth telling”.
I’m happy to admit that there are some excesses in academia that we’d be better off without. We owe it to ourselves, as truth-tellers, to minimize them. But there really is only a handful of stories over the last decade or so that then have been blown up to enormous proportion by a propaganda machine that is invested in denying these facts.
Restoring trust begins with dismantling the machine, not with acquiescing to the dismantlement of our institutions.
I am trying, but I am really having a hard time accepting that someone who would deny these facts is not engaged in disingenuous reactionism.
I think the basic issue is whether there really are just a handful of stories. I, and I suspect others who disagree with you here, feel that the problem is much more systematic than this: that quite large chunks of academia have been quite significantly affected by these excesses. (I invite you to accept that I and others are sincere here, even if we might be mistaken, even as I accept that you are sincere in your disagreement, even though I think you are mistaken.)
It would far outstep the bounds of a comment thread on a different issue to adjudicate the issue systematically; still, as a concrete example, consider diversity statements in the University of California system. In my view this was an unacceptable de facto requirement for ideological conformity. You might disagree, and I could certainly rehearse the case for disagreement: it’s not a completely slam-dunk case. But my point isn’t that the diversity statement requirement was unacceptable: it’s that it was important. It very substantially influenced hiring decisions (the most important decisions in academia), over a period of several years, at the University of California, arguably the most important academic institution in the world. It’s not just an isolated story.
You say: “I am really having a hard time accepting that someone who would deny these facts is not engaged in disingenuous reactionism.” Take this as some attempt to persuade you otherwise; take the fact that I am speaking fairly frankly under my own name as a further reason. I am engaging with you because (unlike some people I engage with on DN) you seem to be a good-faith discussant. I would like to persuade you that some of those who disagree with you on method still agree with you about the existentially serious issues for US academia at present, given this disgraceful and lawless administration. (I would also be very happy to engage in a less public manner; I keep confidences.)
I’ll respond to both of your comments in one.
> Buckley … was describing a genuine mismatch between the range of views typical / acceptable in academia and the range of views in the country.
Perhaps you should read “God and Man at Yale”. It is interesting for how unabashed it is about its complaint.
That complaint is not that academia is biased against conservatism, but that it is (at time of writing) insufficiently biased towards conservatism. This complaint has not changed. But while Buckley advocated that conservatives should leverage their cultural dominance to establish the proper amount of bias, today the rhetoric turns on the cultural cachet of liberalism.
> [the they/them ad] worked in part because there *was* a grain of truth in what it accused Harris of; he didn’t just invent some pure fantasy about her views)
Then again, many attack ads on Harris were pure fantasy, and I highly doubt that this particular ad supervened at all on the little support the showed for trans people.
I wonder what lesson you want me to draw here. That we should calibrate our message so that there is no grain from which an attack ad could be constructed? That would mean to just concede each and every culture war issue. That can’t be the lesson here, no? (As I write this, Felix gave a more extended account of the issue.)
> I think the basic issue is whether there really are just a handful of stories
I agree. For what it’s worth, I don’t have quantitative data, but qualitatively it is rather plain to me that the amount of media attention on “campus free speech” was disproportionate to the situation on the ground. There also were cases where entirely different facts were revealed after a media storm (e.g. about why OUP rejected AB’s book).
Diversity statements: murky issue, I agree. As I see it, equitably dealing with diverse groups of students is just part of the job. That’s not an ideological claim, that’s just what it is like to teach today. It is not prima facie unreasonable to request that a dossier contain evidence for a candidate being able to do so. Maybe the UC system in particular went a bit overboard with this idea, but that’d be one of these excesses. (That’s not to say that I like diversity statements; I find them equally as uninformative as teaching statements.)
I would add that conservatives seem to have a problem with it being the case that equitably dealing with diverse groups is a part of the job. Their current project seems to be to reduce the diversity of these groups. Diversity statements are just a proxy.
I suppose you’ll now say again that we needlessly opened ourselves up to an attack by having the statements, in particular the UC version of them. I’d agree but respond that the right would have found another proxy. Perhaps, however, diversity statements lost us the support of some liberals, and another proxy would have retained that support? I’d doubt that — liberals (in the pejorative sense, but present company excluded) have proven to be rather gullible in such matters.
> You say: “I am really having a hard time accepting that someone who would deny these facts is not engaged in disingenuous reactionism.” Take this as some attempt to persuade you otherwise; … I would like to persuade you that some of those who disagree with you on method still agree with you about the existentially serious issues for US academia
I have no doubts about your good faith and that we have a sincere, and difficult to resolve, disagreement about method and political strategy. (Neither do I have doubts about Kalef as an individual, but he seems to be uncritically accepting media narratives that I believe to have been created in bad faith.)
But where you quoted me, I listed three facts, the sincere denial of which would seriously confuse me. Do you deny any of these facts? (To wit, that the right is the greater threat; that the right isn’t merely reacting but pursuing its own agenda; that “heterodoxy” is sometimes used to defend discredited views).
I think this is overspilling what a blog discussion can handle (we would have to get quite into the weeds of the various factual issues). But fair enough on those three facts: here goes.
“The right is by far the greater threat to academic freedom or free speech than the left.”
Agreed (at least if we’re talking about the US). There is currently a major asymmetry in the willingness to use coercive state power between the Democrats and the GOP, and coercive state power is much more dangerous than any other threats.
The caveats I’d give are (i) the right is not a monolith, and there are longstanding pro-science and pro-university strands in the GOP; leftist excesses in academia have contributed to disempowering those strands and empowering more hostile factions of the right; (ii) the present administration is at least somewhat constrained by public opinion, and leftist excesses in academia have contributed to universities’ unpopularity (among independents too), and so increased the administration’s room for maneuver; (iii) a somewhat underrecognized issue in the various negotiations between universities and the administration is that many universities probably have reason to fear lawsuits and discovery over their approach to DEI in hiring and admissions.
“Rather than merely reacting to leftist excesses, the right is exercising its own agency to destroy education and access to the truth.”
Agreed, subject to similar caveats: a certain faction of the right is doing this; that faction is empowered by a general decline in confidence in the universities among GOP actors and supporters; that decline is at least partly due to leftist excesses.
“Demands for ‘heterodoxy’ are [more] often than not attempts to garner respectability for discredited views under the guise of ‘brave truth telling'”.
That depends if you mean ‘among people in general’ or ‘among academics’. If the former, then agreed: the majority of demands for heterodoxy are from vaccine denialists, creationists, and similar cranks. If the latter, I don’t agree it’s more often than not the case, though I do agree it happens sometimes.
(I suppose you might also mean ‘among politicians and other party actors. Then I’m not sure: many demands for heterodoxy fit your model, many do not, and I don’t know what the ratio is or how much it matters.)
PS I will read ‘God and Man at Yale’!
I think we can set these down as our common ground. I’d have some caveats to your caveats (e.g. that we’ll have a subtle disagreement on how the “universities’ unpopularity” has come about, with you saying that we made broadly unpopular choices, and me saying that we made choices that were made unpopular by targeted campaigns) but we can save this for another time. Next time I’m at Pitt, I’ll come say hi.
We both have work to do, but I’d really like it if you could quickly respond to this:
> I wonder what lesson you want me to draw here. That we should calibrate our message so that there is no grain from which an attack ad could be constructed? That would mean to just concede each and every culture war issue. That can’t be the lesson here, no?
I understand that your claim is that some of the bad-faith critique we are subject to is grounded in a kernel of accuracy. That some things we do in universities really are questionable, and that if we’d not do them, it’d be harder to target us. That’s fair.
But what about the things we do that are not questionable and that we are still being attacked for?
The things that are not questionable and that we are still being attacked for: we should 100% keep doing them. Teaching evolution will do as a clear example: the correct level of concession to give to creationist criticism is zero.
Good, good. My go-to example was going to be vaccine research.
I’d wager now that the reason we find ourselves on opposings sides here is that we draw the line for “questionable” differently. We can agree on the core cases (creationism, anti-vax, flat earth), but perhaps not on much else. Your example suggests that you think that “being for they/them” is on the iffy side of the line, which I strongly reject.
This may explain our disagreement about method. I think that there are a few questionable things, whereas you seem to think there are many more. It makes sense, then, that you think that we should more often fix our own behavior, whereas I think we should more often stand our ground. (This is a sincere attempt at understanding.)
Perhaps this just means we are political opponents. If so, fine. But we seem to want mostly the same things. I would ask you to consider that some things you may consider questionable aren’t so at all. Maybe there is just a media machine that is hell-bent on ginning up controversy. Maybe this machine runs on a centrist ideology that always scolds left and coddles right.
On ‘they/them’: I didn’t intend to convey anything about whether Harris *should* have advocated the policies on trans rights that the Trump campaign targeted. (I think this kind of forum is a terrible place to discuss deeply contested first-order questions like that, so I have a policy of not expressing first-order opinions on some issues on DN, this among them.)
But more broadly, I agree that the disagreement is about the scope of ‘questionable’. I do think large chunks of the life sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities have reasonably serious issues with the narrowing of the defined mainstream, the suppression of academic freedom, and the politicization of science, in a range of loosely-connected areas. I think those areas, but also others, have struggled to separate the epistemic from the political (even epidemiologists, I think, made many mistakes like this in the pandemic, failing to separate out narrow questions within their expertise from broader questions of values.) I think that while animus towards conservatives on campus is exaggerated, there is often something akin to a hostile environment towards them, along with a not-negligible level of overt discrimination. And most directly, I think well-intentioned attitudes towards DEI right across the sector have led to pretty widespread violations of the law. You probably disagree with most of this to a substantial degree, and we won’t resolve that here.
I also agree that this explains the disagreement about method. If there are quite widespread failings in academia then there is at least no harm in correcting them, and it might help with the broader political issues. But if you think the internal state of academia is largely fine (maybe with a few isolated exceptions) then on principle you shouldn’t corrupt it to appease its critics, and you are also likely to have a more cynical view of those critics. (I think unfortunately that if that is your view, your situation is quite dire, because I don’t think academia thus construed can recover bipartisan political support: you will either lose an internal battle within universities for the soul of academia, or you will win that battle and eventually get crushed by the government. But that’s a dismal prediction, not a reason to change principled views.)
As for your last: I do consider it; I should and will continue doing so. The only thing I’d say in response is that to at least a large extent my concerns about academia are driven by direct observation and the reports of friends and colleagues, not by the wider media.
I understand your reasons (and I agree on the difficulties of this medium) for not engaging in the first-order debate. Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a point where our disagreement comes down to the first-order issues.
The last thing I can say here, with bemusement, is this.
> you will either lose an internal battle within universities for the soul of academia, or you will win that battle and eventually get crushed by the government.
That’s what I was about to say to you! You’ll either lose your battle with my side, or you’ll win and find that once you start acquiescing to the government, it will go on to crush you wholesale. At best, we’d be left with universities in Buckley’s vision.
I think that the events of the last few months support my bleak vision over your bleak vision. We’ll know for sure in a few years, I guess. But since you brought up conservatives on campus, I do have a more theoretical argument here. Perhaps this will help, even though it veers into a first-order issue.
The presence of racists/sexists/homophobes/transphobes makes one a less attractive employer for an increasingly large and upskilled group (and tuition-paying students). So it is only prudential for any large organization to keep such views at bay. In a sense, conservatives have lost the meritocracy game.
This isn’t a moral argument and so moralizing towards the left won’t change it. The conservatives’ only option is to change the calculus itself. Either through punishing legislation (the currently ongoing plan) or through changing the demographics that underwrite the calculus (also currently ongoing). Both are highly detrimental to the mission of the university. But that is where we are headed. And, apparently, with your blessing.
I’m really confused by the last paragraph. The Trump administration isn’t passing any legislation: it’s extorting universities into compliance with its wishes through lawless coercion. And its war on non-citizen students is just as lawless and would be disastrous for the country even if done through lawful means. I’m horrified by both; I don’t bless either. Don’t mistake a (deep) disagreement on how to respond to this ongoing disaster for support!
Beyond that I think we’ve reached the end of what this somewhat hijacked discussion thread can sustain; thanks for the exchange.
Sorry, I got carried away in my last sentence. By “legislation” I meant the weaponized DOJ, that was inexact. I hope my point was somewhat clear nonetheless: that the situation of conservatives on campus is an emergent phenomenon that cannot be moralized away.
Thanks for the conversation. I really meant it when I said I’d say hi when the opportunity arises.
Looking forward to it.
I don’t think this sort of commentary is new.
I think the nuanced response here looks something like: Buckley was exaggerating and weaponizing but he was describing a genuine mismatch between the range of views typical / acceptable in academia and the range of views in the country. The same is true for modern conservative critics, but the mismatch has become larger and, partly as a consequence, the complaints have become louder. (Not fully; perhaps not even primarily; I appreciate that the conservative faction was a fringe part of of the Republican party in 1951; the dominant part today.)
I’m not 100% confident that’s the right story (I haven’t read ‘God and Man’; I probably should) but at least at a logical level it demonstrates that this need not be pure happenstance. Conservative criticisms of academia can be (are!) bad-faith and yet it can still matter what academia’s own failings are for how successful those criticisms can be. (As a parallel example: Trump’s ad about Harris being for ‘they/them’ while he was for ‘you’ was an outrageous distortion of what Harris actually said, but it worked in part because there *was* a grain of truth in what it accused Harris of; he didn’t just invent some pure fantasy about her views.)
I’m confused by your last paragraph. It reads at first like an acknowledgment that propaganda works. But then reads as though we ought to concede that there’s truth to the substantive claims the propaganda makes with regard to its targets. It “distorts” on the one hand, and yet has merit, or a “grain of truth,” on the other.
If, by the latter, you simply mean that it references something real, then yes, I suppose it does. But this is just “CRT” all over again. There is a real field called Critical Race Theory; it certainly wasn’t invented by right-wing propagandists. But their “CRT” need not have any substantial connection to the real field at all; it need only function as the appropriate rhetorical prop on the propagandized stage—a stand-in, a boogeyman meant only to elicit the appropriate reaction from the audience, not to prompt them to think about critical race theory or even to think about the things that critical race theory thinks about.
Because of this, it becomes impossible to talk about the thing that’s supposedly at issue—a particular field or, maybe more generally, academic work examining racism, or maybe even more generally, racism itself. The propaganda works by keeping that all at a distance and, crucially, making it unapproachable.
As others have mentioned repeatedly, academics aren’t very good at dealing with this (i.e., with their work or subject of study being propagandized). And I’m not sure that any option available to them is more desirable than any other. Not engaging allows it to go unchallenged. Challenging it can be used to consolidate the politicisation—to claim that, by virtue of pushing back against politicised claims one has confirmed the politicised nature of the whole thing. That then gives the propagandist grounds to say that academia should be “apolitical,” which serves them well because their own position is placed rhetorically outside the bounds of politics, as “common sense” or whatever. As above, it becomes unapproachable; its commitments invisible, its justifications unexaminable. To make them visible then, to examine them then, itself becomes political.
We have a factual disagreement about how conservative critiques of academia work. My view is that they (in general) criticize exaggerated and distorted versions of real, widespread, and often egregious features of contemporary academia, and that the critiques gain power in substantial part *because* those features are real, widespread, and often egregious (that is, they are not just placeholders). Again, use of diversity statements in hiring will do as an example: that really was pretty widespread until very recently, was legally questionable at best, and is often used as an example by Rufo and others.
I’m not sure how this amounts to anything but a concession on all points (a concession, that is, to their critiques)? After all, what they see as the problem isn’t, say, racism. But that academia talks about it, makes it visible, and thereby makes the systems that perpetuate it vulnerable to change, which they oppose. If that is the issue, that academia does that, then what more are we to say other than, yes, of course it does. That’s our job, or part of it. To stop academia from doing that is to degrade it. If, on the other hand, the critique is narrower; for example, that prevailing ways in which academics have examined racism and endeavored to dismantle the systems perpetuating it are ineffective, then that’s different—that’s the sort of claim that invites us to continue the inquiry. It’s the sort of narrower type of claim you can see academics themselves making. For the likes of Rufo and Walsh and others, I don’t think the critique is of the narrower type. Their disagreement runs deeper and is more fundamental, having to do with the legitimacy of the inquiry itself, not merely specific outcomes of it. (This is where I think Queer Philosophers previous comment regarding presuppositions is useful to consider as well. If they are an important part of the epistemic ecosystem, then what Rufo, Walsh, et al. are really aiming at is the destruction of the ecosystem that allows us to ask certain questions with regard to race, gender, and so on.)
In the particular case of my example (diversity statements), the criticism isn’t that academia “talks about [racism], makes it visible, and thereby makes the systems that perpetuate it vulnerable to change”; it’s that universities are violating Title VI, Title IX, and the 14th amendment (and also the 1st for public schools).
Are Rufo, Walsh etc in bad faith in making that criticism? Very possibly. Do they have wider goals than just protecting equal opportunities and free speech? For sure. Are they hypocrites? Again, very possibly. But that is all compatible with the facts that they are criticizing widespread practices in academia which, accurately characterized, are legally dubious and highly unpopular, and that their attacks on universities would be less effective if those practices were not widespread.
(Separately, I don’t agree that it’s my job qua academic to dismantle the systems perpetuating racism, or to pursue any other political goal, however noble. And if it was part of my job to pursue certain political goals, I’m not sure why it would be democratically illegitimate for the elected government to defund me if it opposed those political goals, as long as it did so within the law.)
I’m not going to comment specifically on diversity statements, as I’m not familiar enough with them—although I think QP’s previous comment reflects my attitude to that broadly. But it strikes me that this account, applied to other examples, probably puts the cart before the horse. We should ask why is it unpopular. It being unpopular did not just happen; it arose in the context of years of sustained and well-funded campaigning from the right. I’m not sure why we can’t give them the credit (or is it blame?) that they deserve for their efforts. Acknowledging their role in actively making something unpopular, in setting up a narrative in which it is cast as toxic, unAmerican, “degenerate,” and so on, as a means of furthering their political goals, seems to get closer to the truth than simply presenting them as passively responding to something already unpopular.
Regarding effectiveness, I share QP’s concern here:
The lesson can’t be that, to make their attacks “less effective,” we need to degrade the value of universities by limiting academic activities to only those not seen to threaten the traditional hierarchies that these conservative commentators are seeking to uphold. We can maybe try to make ourselves a small target, but so long as the epistemic ecosystem that allows those structures to come under examination exists, we will always remain a target—there will always be a “grain of truth” large enough for them to view universities as a threat to be contained.
On the specific issue of diversity statements: race- and sex-based preferences in admissions and hiring have been unpopular for a lot longer than the present political moment: California passed a ballot initiative against it in admissions in 1996 by 10 percentage points, at a time when general support for HE was pretty bipartisan (and when Clinton beat Dole in CA by 13 percentage points, and when Fox News had been running for less than a month). So I don’t think this is just manufactured or propaganda-induced outrage.
More generally: I ought to stop responding after this and get some work done, but there’s a specific point I think is worth bringing up (I touched on it in replying to QP): namely, it’s a mistake epistemically and politically to talk about ‘the right’ as if it’s a single unified force, and to suppose that there’s a simple dichotomy between ‘the right is just responding to left-wing excess’ and ‘the right hates universities and wants to destroy them’.
On JTD’s earlier graph, ~55% of Republicans were pro-HE in 2015. So ~45% were not. Presumably some of those 45% were implacable Rufoesque opponents of HE, and some were not. Now it is 18%, and so the environment in primaries and general elections is more favorable to anti-HE GOP candidates, and less favorable to pro-HE candidates. But there are still competing factions in GOP politics. 18% of Trump voters is fourteen million people.
If you did a secret ballot of the Republican caucuses in Congress, what fraction would be pro-HE, or pro-science? Lower than 18%, probably. Not zero, probably. Lower than eight years ago, almost certainly. LIGO had bipartisan support only a couple of decades ago. Operation Warp Speed had bipartisan support five years ago. The CHIPS act had bipartisan support two years ago. There are shifts happening inside the various factions of the Right that are empowering the implacable enemies of HE and science who have always been there, weakening the allies or partial allies of HE and science, and converting allies or neutrals into enemies. It’s vital to identify the causes of those shifts and try to reverse them, but any analysis that starts with a unified and perpetually anti-science Right will miss the mark.
Or think about the competing pressures on individual politicians. Universities are big employers in their locales. That doesn’t matter for the GOP in Boston, a very blue city in a very blue state; it matters a lot in Pittsburgh, where Pitt and the associated medical system employ and serve a lot of people in western PA. Any Republican wanting to run statewide in PA is going to have to balance the advantages of serving red meat to HE-skeptical primary voters against the votes they’ll lose in the general. Pitt’s own conduct can affect that balance. Maybe this hypothetical PA republican is passionately anti-HE, but maybe they’re just trying to win a primary and then a difficult general. (And even if they are radically anti-HE, it’s *still* true that what they say and do publicly is subject to those political pressures.)
Ironically I think many on the left are mirroring a very common mistake many on the right made in the War on Terror. Yes, the most fanatical members of a terrorist group are implacably committed to their cause; no, probably there is little point trying to persuade *them* to change their mind, or supposing that your conduct will change those terrorists’ hearts and minds. But it does not follow that your country’s wider behavior is irrelevant to the fight against terrorism. Formally non-radical people can radicalize; others may be embittered against you and give partial support to the terrorists; others still may ally with the terrorists against you; those who might want to ally with you against the terrorists may be put off from doing so by your behavior. Behaving differently can move the needle on those things, and so your own behavior is not a distraction from the terror threat but part of a strategy to oppose it – especially when it comes to changing behavior that was wrong on the merits anyway.
(Usual caveats: no, I am not saying that Chris Rufo is comparable to Osama bin Laden; no, I am not suggesting that wokeness in universities is comparable to US foreign policy; no, I am not suggesting that the university/GOP power balance is like the US/al Qaeda power balance; no, I am not attempting to say anything at all about Israel and Palestine; etc, etc, etc.)
I think what QP and I are getting at is that your analysis appears somewhat asymmetrical in how it treats behavior as a factor, assigning greater agency to some and less to others. This isn’t unusual; it’s a common trend in wider political commentary: Democrats encouraged to behave differently (and, crucially, in ways that are intended to increasingly placate the right, ostensibly to make the right “less effective”); MAGA Republicans feeling at liberty to ignore the outrage that comes their way and proceed right on anyway, knowing that their bad behavior will come to be explained with reference to some flaw, real or imagined, in their opponents. The agency of the latter is minimized; the notion that it acts the way it does because it wants to yields to the notion that such actions must ultimately be understood as the fault of the former or, more often, as the fault of some other that the former is said to represent.
It seems clear that this asymmetry would advantage one party over the other, leaving them to act unaccountably while, at the same time, allowing them to shape the wider narrative on how the other party, if only it had behaved differently (i.e., more like them), could have prevented the party in power from doing what it always intended on doing.
Many Democrats, for their part, seem all too willing to accept this, and to alter their behavior accordingly. The problem there is that this leaves them at the mercy of narratives that are largely set by their opponents. As QP alluded to earlier, there will always be another proxy, and whether it’s charges of “socialism” or “wokeness” or “DEI,” Democrats can never change their behavior enough to make them go away, because that’s a narrative largely set by others, in particular their opponents.
I don’t agree but I think we’re reaching diminishing returns: I’ll let you have the last word. Thanks for the exchange.
I’m not trying to have the last word, but I wanted to say that I appreciate the exchange as well. I know you disagree, but I think we may at least be able to locate the disagreement better (or more precisely) as a result of the conversation. And that at least brings clarity, if not agreement.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news/
Thanks for this. This is similar to some of my final reflections on this exchange:
Logical errors and confusion are not surprising from people who have no formal education about argumentation. I hear things like this all the time from people online, about many claims p:
“You say this is a bad argument for p? Why don’t you believe p?! You must think not-p!!!”
But academia and scholarly inquiry are under increasing pressure from various cultural and political forces. Irresponsible engagement—especially by those who should know better—only adds to this problem. When accomplished scholars or institutional authority figures fail to uphold standards of clear reasoning, fair engagement, and intellectual honesty, they undermine the very credibility of scholarly expertise.
Tentatively, I would argue that it’s more of a scale than a simple categorization of “ideological” journals and “non-ideological” ones. Some journals are nominally “non-ideological,” but the consistent themes in their output show the journal to bend one way or another. Some are explicitly “ideological,” but often resulting from them being very niche and special interest, such that those inclined to publish in these journals are already on board with certain commitments. I think this is fine, too. In fact, it seems to me that it just follows from very basic notions of academic freedom that there would be journals across the whole spectrum of “ideological” and “non-ideological,” and that even within journals themselves we would see shifts along that same spectrum over time.
For me, the more interesting question is how this interplays with public perception and, crucially, public trust. We encourage the public to revere peer-reviewed journal publications. But we know that peer review is fallible, that journals range in how “ideological” or “non-ideological” they are, and that, regardless of where a given journal is on that spectrum, rubbish can still end up making it into the peer-reviewed literature. I think many here might relate to a situation where you have to explain to someone why they shouldn’t trust what a paper is saying, only to be told that, well, “it’s been peer reviewed”—as though that fact itself closes the discussion and no further evaluation of source credibility need follow.
It’s worrying that we’ve seemingly set up a situation where the public is encouraged to revere academic work, particularly that found in journals, but not to engage with it, or to engage with it only superficially, such that they are likely to miss the details that, in the end, do matter for whether the work should be taken seriously, whether its claims have merit, whether it’s likely to have the impact it purports to, etc. I don’t know how we go about fixing this, but it seems to me that the consequences for public trust can be quite dire, and that it leaves opportunity for grifters and charlatans to take advantage when trust turns to mistrust.
I think there is an important difference between a journal deciding not to publish articles that deny some position P, and a journal deciding to allow arguments for P but not against P. The former might be a matter of producing a journal for people with special interests.The latter looks like bias.
I agree. A journal that publishes articles that presuppose P has epistemic value in at least an if-then-ist sort of fashion. Rigorously argued defenses of “if the catechism, then X” might be of interest to Catholics and others.
There is no similar value in a defense of P published in a journal that presupposes P, since that is just apologia. “If the catechism, then there are good reasons for these parts of the catechism” is vacuous.
In a lengthy exchange with Justin K the other day, I defended a similar view: that it is legitimate for a scholarly community / a field / an area / a journal to make presuppositions, as long as there is a forum (possibly outside that community/field/area) where these presuppositions can be examined.
Presuppositions, I think, are a central part of an epistemic ecosystem, as they permit the exploration of the consequences of hypothesis without getting bogged down in foundational disputes. Sometimes, consequences must be pushed quite far before there are opportunities for falsification or verification (cf. string theory). Arguably, then, presuppositions are vital for specialization and divisions of labor.
If there’s a problem here, it’s not that there is a Catholic bioethics journal publishing exclusively Catholic bioethics. It’s that the editor of that journal commissioned a reply piece under an impossible–or at the very least, extremely difficult and opaque–set of parameters, and therefore wasted the time and efforts of the author. For that, the author is owed an apology.
There is room in the discipline for intra-tradition discussion (e.g., among Catholic bioethicists, for instance) as well as inter-tradition discussion (e.g., between Catholic bioethicists and other bioethical traditions). A discussion can go deeper and resolve tensions internal to a tradition through a focused discussion carried out by people who subscribe to the shared set of beliefs/assumptions of that tradition. There should be a space permitted for that. As we all know, it can be far more illuminating to talk to people with whom you (for the most part) agree—because then you can get to the really interesting stuff, rather than arguing endlessly, often superficially, about basic beliefs.
This discussion in the comments here has focused on tacit exclusions from journals of beliefs that are considered “beyond the pale”. This strikes me as an unrelated phenomenon, since the motivations of the NCBQ are presumably to provide a space for a certain kind of discussion (within the Catholic bioethical tradition), rather than to shut down other kinds of discussions or “not give them any uptake”. The editors of NCBQ have the authority to curate that discussion according to their editorial policy. Whatever one thinks about this particular case, it’s wrongheaded to think that a journal of this kind should not exist.
I disagree. It fine for a journal to say:
This is called “scope” and all journals do some version of this. However, NCBQ has done something very different here. They have effectively said:
This is not scope, its propaganda. Insofar as the journal has an audience that wants to be fed a one-sided debate like this, they are anti-intellectual. Academic journals should not engage in propaganda or cater to anti-intellectualism.
Contrary to what you say, it also seems analogous to what has happened in other parts of academia with leftwing ideological capture. At some mainstream academic journals you will regularly see articles defending the leftwing position on some topic, yet find that it is almost impossible to get articles that challenge these positions, or critique the leftwing defenses of them, published. The editors of these journals obviously realize that challenges to the leftwing position will find a home elsewhere in other journals, popular media, etc. Their motive seems to be to create a “safe space” for people in their ideological clique, and lend the prestige of the journal they have captured to boosting the credentials of their ideological stance. But NCBQ is also in the business of creating an ideological safe space, and although it lacks the prestige, the editors would obviously be thrilled if it could gain academic prestige and that could be harnessed to boost the credentials of the Catholic perspective they take.
I think there’s a case to be made that maybe the first article ought not have been published at NCBQ. I haven’t read the original article but it seems like standard talking points from the pro-life side, unlikely to be of any use to people who already are convinced. Maybe the journal should make more of an effort to exclude popular level defenses of Catholic positions against broad secular consensus, since that’s not going to be particularly useful to its readers.
But I think there’s a lot of gray area in between “exploring the contours of this tradition, its internal coherence, etc.” and “making arguments on the basis of this tradition” … Obviously there are cases that are clearly one or the other, but in other cases, it’s hard to draw a line between “drawing out the implications of the view/pointing out its inconsistency with x, y, z” vs. “making an argument against x, y, z from the perspectives/views of this tradition”. In any case, browse the recent issues. You’ll see that the original (pro-life) article is extremely idiosyncratic, that nearly all articles could be described as squarely intra-traditional, meaning that they are aimed at resolving tensions or exploring implications of views within that tradition.
Catholic bioethics is among the most robust and well-developed ethical traditions within philosophy, well-respected by those sympathetic with it as well as by those who disagree fundamentally (if they take the time to engage with it); it’s not at all anti-intellectual or an ideological clique. It’s not possible for most Catholic academics to exist in an echo-chamber. One of the benefits of holding minority positions in academia is that you are constantly required to engage with opposing viewpoints.
One test of how analogous this is to what you call “left wing ideological capture” is how able the practitioners are to articulate opposing viewpoints in a sympathetic way, such that those who hold those opposing beliefs would endorse that articulation. Left-wing ideologues (of the sort who regularly get morally outraged by those who make arguments contra the status quo) cannot do this. But talk to someone well-versed in Catholic bioethics; they will absolutely be able to articulate the opposing side in an accurate and sympathetic way.
It does take some chutzpah to wade into a discussion about a Catholic journal suppressing the publication of an opposing argument and assert as a matter of course that unlike those leftists, Catholics are famously tolerant of dissent. Chapeau.
I’m a bit taken aback by the implication that leftists would be “morally outraged by those who make arguments contra the status quo.” Does Prof L think “leftism” is the status quo? How does that reconcile with the earlier claim that (traditionalist?) Catholic bioethics is “well-respected” by everyone, including those who disagree with it fundamentally? Or is that not a claim to a status quo? It’s hard to follow the argument given how rapidly it shifts from appealing to a purported status quo to set up a sympathetic frame and then again to set up a critical one.
I’m not seeing the inconsistency. The status quo is “left”, isn’t it?
This is compatible with what I claimed, that Catholic bioethics is respected by those who disagree fundamentally with it (I did not say “everyone”!). People can have respect for positions that are outside of the status quo.
Maybe you are interpreting me to say that all left-wing academics, and thereby all adhering to the “status quo”, are what I called there “left-wing ideologues” who are incapable of engaging sympathetically with opposing viewpoints. That would introduce some kind of inconsistency. But I don’t think that at all–maybe that wasn’t clear. I think the ideologues are a vocal minority.
Just narrowly: I don’t see a conflict between ‘X is well respected’ and ‘X is not the status quo’. In less contested areas, Lewisian modal realism and Williamsonian epistemicism are advocated by a tiny minority of philosophers in the analytic tradition, but well respected by most.
(Come to that, most philosophers of physics (wrongly!) reject the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but mostly they respect it.)
Yes, I must admit that, as a left-leaning moderate, this has been my anecdotal experience, even though in this particular instance, the Kaczor article appears to have failed to “articulate the opposing side in an accurate and sympathetic way”.
I was going to agree with you, but then I went and read it, was able to get behind the paywall. What’s strange about this whole episode is that the “essay” Kaczor is responding to is an old Salon article: (https://www.salon.com/2021/04/11/why-the-case-against-abortion-is-weak-ethically-speaking/) which argues, bizarrely, from the cases of organ donation and palliative care of anencephalic neonates that the pro-life position is inconsistent if it permits these things. Go check it out.
Kazcor’s response strikes me as charitable, given how very bad the Salon article is. But the Salon piece is SO bad that you wonder why Kazcor judged it worthy of engagement in the first place.
So now I just think the whole thing is weird … Both the 3 pages of Kaczor’s article devoted to a bad pop-Salon “essay” published 4 years ago, and then the commissioning of a reply from the authors of that piece. And all in a journal that tends to publish things like “St. Alphosus Liguori and His Scholastic Sources on Sensitive—but Controverted—Questions on Marital Chastity”.
I also wonder if I’m wrong to say the reply piece was “commissioned”, so much as that they let authors know when their work is critiqued in the journal as a matter of course, and also let them know that they are open to considering replies.
The editor also offers to facilitate the publication of the exchange elsewhere, which is another major difference between this case and what you might typically see with leftwing ideological capture.
I’m not sure I understand what the problem here is supposed to be. But maybe that’s because the claims of “leftwing ideological capture” sound more like an empty vessel that readers can fill with whatever comes to mind. RFK Jr. recently spoke in this vein with regard to certain medical journals. Given his own longstanding commitments, it’s not difficult to guess at what he’d fill that vessel with. But this is why I don’t think the problem, or whether there even is a problem, can bear examination without fleshing out the specific claims, attitudes, ideas, etc. at issue.
Because those medical journals aren’t wrong to reject the sort of anti-vaccine nonsense that RFK Jr. might consider deserving of publication. RFK Jr. could say that it’s “almost impossible to get articles that challenge [vaccine orthodoxy] published,” that articles presenting an “alternative” view to that tend to be rejected. And he’d be right, in a certain sense. And yet that statement—decontextualised and stripped bare of detail, including information about the specific claims, attitudes, ideas, etc. actually at stake—is not enough, on its own, to tell us whether that’s a good thing or not. Because maybe the “alternative” he is promulgating is rubbish, and journals have decided to not waste time on it.
A claim about left-wing ideological capture in journals seems hard to directly substantiate because there aren’t a sufficient number of accessible, quality data points; however, we do have particular cases of publications followed by social media-fueled retractions, apologies, etc., and it seems reasonable to infer that there have been biased decisions made to avoid such incidents, and that generally, these incidents are less likely to be isolated outliers than a reflection of a general climate. The easier case to make regarding left-wing ideological capture is to start with the use of diversity statements in hiring, for which there are publicly available rubrics and guidelines, and make the inference to climate from there.
None of this can be judged from a decontextualised perspective. I can think of more than a few retractions that occurred following social media discussion that were justified. Would those still count as “data points” for this purpose? Why should they? Isn’t that just academia working as it should?; identifying crucial issues that were not picked up at earlier stages and which, if they were picked up, should have resulted in the paper not proceeding to publication. I don’t think you can point to the generalized phenomenon of retractions following criticism on social media as evidence of “left-wing ideological capture.”
This will depend if you think that retraction, outside the empirical and mathematical sciences, is ever justified other than for plagiarism or other author fraud. If (like me) you don’t, or if (again like me) you think doing so violates the COPE guidelines pretty much every journal is signed up to, then you’re never going to think social-media campaigns for retraction were okay. (And I can think of almost none that were.)
Even if you have a more expansive view of retraction, and / or were considering an empirical science paper, you might be epistemically concerned about social-media pile-ons as a mechanism for retraction, as opposed to use of the journal’s formal retraction / correction process.
It isn’t a mechanism for retraction; that’s an editorial decision for the journal to make. It’s a mechanism for accountability. If a journal publishes work featuring discredited “national IQ” data, as some have done even recently, it is entirely appropriate for academics, even ones using social media, to say that something has gone wrong here and that the paper should not have been published. If, upon considering this, the journal agrees, they are free to approach it as they wish, including removing the paper or issuing a notice about its contents.I don’t see any of this as untoward or inappropriate.
As for formal versus informal processes, I think it worth noting that, if papers are going to be promoted by social media (including by journals themselves), it should be expected that they will be critiqued by social media as well. How the journal decides to respond to that is, of course, up to them. But if the work is already being publicized and promoted via those channels, it doesn’t seem sensible to say that we can’t have analysis or criticism occur via those channels, including, on occasion, criticism that has to do with the journal’s decision-making.
If, upon considering [external criticism of a decision to publish], the journal agrees, they are free to approach it as they wish, including removing the paper or issuing a notice about its contents.I don’t see any of this as untoward or inappropriate.
The journal absolutely is not ‘free to approach it as they wish’ (and I speak as a journal editor). Journals have published retraction policies that they need to adhere to: in pretty much all cases, those will include a statement of conformity to COPE guidelines. In the humanities, the grounds for retraction consistent with those guidelines are extremely narrow (they are somewhat wider in the empirical sciences, where the paper is a report of research conducted and not the research itself, and in formal areas where there is consensus on the use of mathematical tools) and in no case do they allow just ‘on reflection we would have made a different call on accepting this’ as grounds for retraction.
(I’m not sure which specific example you’re referring to. Possibly the Rinderman et al paper in JCI? If so, I actually agree that paper should have been retracted/corrected, since it has methodological and data errors that do fall well within the COPE grounds for retraction. As I said at the time (https://dailynous.com/2025/02/11/competent-referees-for-controversial-ideas/#comment-469445) I think JCI’s editors are overcorrecting and misapplying a humanities norm to an empirical-science paper.)
I wasn’t referring to that specific paper, as I wasn’t aware of it—although I know of the authors. But it’s in Controversial Ideas, so it seems par for the course for that journal anyway.
I’d concede then that, where processes exist and are articulated in policy, they should be followed. Although I maintain the broader point about accountability and criticism. That is, whereas action on the journal’s part may be bound to follow the journal’s own policy stipulations, and therefore require a formal process, broader community criticism can (and should be expected to) occur outside of that, and may even encourage initiation of the formal process, if someone in the community is willing to take it up.
The only further thought I have here is that the formal process (depending on what exactly it is) often takes time. This isn’t anyone’s fault, but the way things move in society at large right now means that a paper that ought to never have been published can have an impact long before the process leading to its retraction (or modification) is finalized. In which case, the critical response can be ahead of the curve on the formal process. Although, of course, it might not be as well. Nevertheless, I take your point.
Always sad to see sensible work no-platformed by censors who worry that its publication might cause some inchoate sort of harm.
‘I understand that on the face of it such a journal may seem to many people at odds with the academic enterprise‘ (emphasis added)
Well, it seems that way because it is that way. Inherently
It is evident that the institution this journal acts as a mouthpiece for does not countenance disagreement, even in the form of anodyne and esoteric technical disputes commonly found in scholarly journals.
The Catholic Church wants to maintain the appearance (the charade, truth be told) that it is engaged in principled, scholarly inquiry in matters of morality. This facade has a purpose- to fabricate the patina of intellectual legitimacy in the world of secular academia. A stalking horse to insinuate what is ultimately an deeply bigoted, anti-scientific, and anti-democratic ideology into institutions whose raison d’etre is to promote pluralism, democracy and science.
None of this is benign.
Pretending this is done in good faith, with integrity serves only to carry water from one of the most destructive, autocratic cabals the world has ever known. Let’s not keep doing that and calling it in the service of ‘the academic enterprise’.
How is it beyond the pale or “at odds with the academic enterprise” for Catholic bioethicists to have a forum to discuss issues with other Catholic bioethicists? It’s not like Catholics have a stronghold on academic publishing.
But we agree, at least, that someone here is a bigot … What an pile of hateful garbage this post is.
Hmm… an organization that has been responsible for the deaths of millions, the torture and enslavement of tens of millions more, ascribes to itself unassailable moral authority to engage in rampant discrimination, and seeks to enshrine its retrograde and authoritarian view of human relations through the force of law, employing special pleading to claim entitlement to political deference it would deny every other group, while to this day attempting to obfuscate the most thoroughly documented record of systematic abuse of children worldwide perpetrated over the course of centuries…
Am I missing something?
Do go on about how we should equate their proselytizing with legitimate scholarly work.
“How is it at odds with the academic enterprise for Catholic bioethicists to have a forum to discuss issues with other Catholic bioethicists?” It’s not, but the proper question, in this context, is: “How is it at odds with the academic enterprise for Catholic bioethicists to have a forum to discuss issues with other Catholic bioethicists, when that forum is a journal that has an explicit policy forbidding the expression of views that are contrary to the established teachings of the Catholic Church?” If you don’t see this policy’s conflict with the academic enterprise, you’re not looking hard enough. You might be tempted to argue that other journals do this, too. If so, that just means those journals are likewise at odds with the academic enterprise. Academic inquiry, by definition, presupposes the freedom to follow arguments and evidence wherever they lead. A journal that imposes doctrinal veto points has stepped outside that enterprise and into the realm of apologetics.
If this were the only forum in existence, I would agree with you. But it’s not.
No rational inquiry is presuppositionless. To say “here is a place where we are taking x, y, and z as baseline” can be very fruitful.
Any conversation at all requires a (typically implicit, but sometimes explicit) set of assumptions and norms. They are explicit about the parameters at NCBQ. To say “everything must be subject to critical discussion” is fine, a bit 18th c, but I can get on board with that. But that doesn’t mean “in any context” or “in every single discussion” … This is a minority viewpoint in academia with a journal dedicated to internal discussions.
This is all so basic–I take it no thoughtful person would disagree with what i just said— so I’m wondering if the outrage here is due to the fact that people just don’t like/don’t agree with this particular (Catholic) set of assumptions.
You seem to be mistaking me for someone who made a host of claims I never made. I lack both the time and the appetite to catalogue them. I’ll just say that there’s a world of difference between (a) criticizing NCBQ and its policy forbidding any expression, even implicit, of opposition to Catholic doctrine, and (b) asserting that such a policy is incompatible with the academic enterprise. I did the latter, not the former. And I’m certainly not part of any outrage brigade. My view is content neutral. I would say the same of, for example, an astrology journal that prohibited any deviation from the core doctrines of astrology.
It’s also a misunderstanding to call this “apologetics” or someone else said “proselytizing”. Those things are by definition outwardly directed. NCBQ is having a curated, internal discussion. Yes, it’s public and so anyone can read it if they so choose, but it’s pretty clearly directed at the development of a tradition, not at the conversion of others (via argument) to that tradition.
I think if we envision a world in which such fora for internal discussions don’t exist, that’s a world in which Catholics (and others with minority viewpoints) have to engage almost constantly in apologetics, defending and examining only their most basic beliefs, rather than developing a tradition. If we don’t allow minority views places where those views can be treated without hostility, but taken for granted such that we can then say “let’s see where this goes” … THAT’S what’s at odds with the academic enterprise. That just enforces the dominance and intransigence of the majority viewpoint.
I’m an atheist, and generally fairly skeptical of religion on the whole, but I tend to agree with this—simply because, even if I wouldn’t engage with such journals, I appreciate what they are doing with regard to the tradition they are for. As others have said, the only caveat would be a clear editorial policy and description of the journal’s purpose and scope, so that readers and potential contributors don’t get the wrong idea. But, as a general concept, I don’t see why one would be opposed. It seems to follow from a very basic notion of academic freedom that there will be journals dedicated to advancing scholarship in specific traditions, including religious traditions (or traditions that are at least thematically aligned to a religious tradition), and that the extent to which wider scholarship engages with those journals will depend on the specific topics under consideration.
Somewhat relatedly, I recall listening to a recorded talk by John Heil many years ago (the details of which I only vaguely remember) that was about Descartes’ work attempting to resolve some perceived inconsistencies in the understanding of the Eucharist. I’m not a Catholic (anymore), and I have no idea about Heil’s beliefs (whether he is an atheist, a theist, etc.), but I nevertheless found it interesting (and useful) to think about what motivated some of the “great minds” and how their philosophical work often engaged with ideas in religion, the sciences, and so on.
Now, you could say that that’s just history of philosophy, and lots of that happens in secular journals. And you’re right. But I think we’d be missing something if all journals were strictly non-religious and no academic work considered these matters from the perspective of a given religious tradition. And, ultimately, if these traditions aren’t going to disappear entirely (i.e., the hopes of New Atheism aren’t realized), then I would rather that people who actually care about the tradition and share in its commitments be doing the work in grappling with what it all means.
This of course doesn’t mean others will be in agreement with those commitments. But then again even within journals dedicated to advancing scholarship relating to it you are likely to find perspectives that diverge or clash. Let them have at it, I say. Maybe you’ll learn something from it too.
Ian, we Catholics as a group have done tons of terrible things throughout history, yes. And in this particular case, I would prefer that the journal simply publish work that disagrees with the Church: the journal can do this without endorsing the work, and if the editors want, they can even add a note saying that they disagree with the work. Truth comes out best not through suppression, but through things coming into the light of day and being honestly discussed and debated. I think that, at a deeper level, this is the true position of the Church, even if, at a more superficial level, particular Church members sometimes express views to the contrary. You view the Church as a backward, authoritarian institution that crushes all forms of dissent. And, while that might fit well with some people’s experiences of Catholicism, it does not fit well at all with my experience of Catholicism. And I also don’t think it represents the true nature of Catholicism. We are an enormous Church, with so many people from so many countries, and there is a ton of internal disagreement about what we believe. Yes, we believe that God exists, that the Trinity and Incarnation are true, that humans are made in the image of God, with intellect and will, that humans should love God and neighbor, that Jesus set a model for how to live, and so on. But there are tons of internal disagreements of interpretation on these points, and there are tons of internal disagreements on various other issues, including plenty of moral, social, and political issues. And even when the Church has a clear position laid out officially (say, in the Catechism), it is not as though the Church crushes dissent. We are taught as kids who grow up Catholic to follow our informed conscience even in cases where we disagree with the Church. In these cases, the Church will say: “Well, you’re objectively mistaken in your view, but still, you have to follow your informed conscience.” So, if a Catholic thinks (for example) that women should be allowed to be priests or that inclinations to have gay sex are not inherently disordered, then the Church will say: “you’re objectively mistaken in your views, but still, you have to follow your informed conscience.”
I guess I am trying to convey to you that your hatred of the Church might be based, at least to some extent, on a misconception of true nature of Catholicism. Also, if you were seriously personally mistreated (or had a friend or family member who was seriously personally mistreated) by a priest or nun, then I am very, very sorry this happened — and I can understand why this has led to your hating Catholicism. The religious trauma literature comes to mind here.
I’m fine with there being some ideological journals (e.g. Catholic, feminist, etc.), so long as their policies are explicit. I’m not sure what the policies of such journals ought to be, but they need to avoid doing what the NCBQ did here. I think the NCBQ’s main mistake was, roughly, how they gave Nobis a reply-opportunity paired with a rule which was then interpreted (by the NCBQ’s editor Furton) in a manner that seems to render said rule incompatible with the reply-opportunity.
The NCBQ offered Nobis a chance to write a response article, and purported to set out guidelines for how to do it–disallowing a positive defense of abortion, but allowing a critique of Kaczor’s arguments. This implies they have a coherent and realistically-achievable standard for how someone *can* in principle critique Kaczor’s argument *without* providing a positive defense of abortion. And presumably this is not just *theoretically* possible, but is something that a human can realistically *do*. Otherwise it would be an absurd standard.
But then Furton’s replies (which appear to accept the fallacy fallacy, or similar) render it baffling how Furton envisions such a task can be achieved. In Furton’s view, what could it even mean for Nobis to (permissibly) critique Kaczor’s arguments without (impermissibly) defending abortion?
Skimming over the comments so far, I haven’t seen anyone ask about this: Has the NCBQ done this before, or was this a one-off? What’s the NCBQ’s history, regarding the solicitation of replies from people who disagree with Catholic teachings? Has NCBQ previously offered reply-opportunities to people who argue for views that disagree with the Catholic magisterium, which were handled better than this one? Or were they trying something new by offering a reply-opportunity to Nobis? Or what?
The NCBQ has existed since 2001. It seems a bit strange for them to *not* have already encountered a similar issue sometime before now.