The academic world is full of scandals, and among the worst is the proliferation of fraudulent research. In the past, we could mostly count on scholars to weed out most dubious to dishonest work through peer review. Unfortunately, academic integrity has largely been replaced with ideological fidelity. Say the right things and you’ll get published; say the wrong things and you won’t, no matter how compelling your arguments.
In today’s Martin Center article, Rob Jenkins and Michael R. Jenkins look at this problem and offer a solution.
Unfortunately, the accuracy of the system isn’t even the biggest issue. Like many institutions, it has devolved into a highly politicized echo chamber. Rather than a mechanism for determining and disseminating truth through a system of scholarly checks and balances, peer review has become an instrument for promoting and enforcing orthodoxy. No longer a community of scholars rigorously but collegially testing each other’s hypotheses, journal editors and reviewers have appointed themselves gatekeepers. Only those who recite the correct passwords are admitted.
These days, scholars are obliged to pay homage to the leftist gods of diversity even when their work has nothing whatsoever to do with that absurd mania.
Jenkins and Jenkins have an idea for salvaging peer review:
Our idea involves creating official online forums for each discipline, where scholars can post essays about their ideas at any stage, laying out the theoretical background, proposing hypotheses, disclosing research findings (including methodology), and extrapolating to implications or predictions. Other scholars in the community can comment on those essays, offering critiques, providing missing information, and suggesting new directions in which to take the research. They can also try the experiments themselves to see if they get the same or similar results and “report back” to the group. Then the original authors can take that information and apply it to their further exploration of the research topic.
The system has become a hindrance in the pursuit of truth, and this suggestion could help to get the academic world back on track.