Whoever it was that said academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small got it all wrong: Academic politics are a doll’s tea party compared to the real thing, and they are that way precisely because stakes are so vertiginously high, at least from the perspective of a nontenured academic. I bring this up in connection to an August 24 piece in the New York Times about scholarly experiments in replacing or augmenting peer review with online crowdsourcing.
There’s no question that the existing review process is slow: an article can take years to reach publication. But it’s not clear, at least not to me, that it really disfavors innovation by empowering unaccountable gatekeepers who select against new and threatening ideas.
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Last summer I attended what will likely be the last academic conference of my fizzled career as a historian of American radio broadcasting. The paper preceding mine was dedicated to the proposition that the popular public radio program This American Life, while superficially “gay-friendly,” is actually an artful trap designed to “accommodate and contain gay voices,” thus neutralizing their subversive potential and reinforcing “hetero-normative values.” Looking around the conference table, I wondered how many present were secretly thinking, as I was, “Really? This American Life isn’t gay enough for you?”
After the panel was over, I learned, by cautiously sounding out some other attendees, that I was not in fact alone in finding this to be a perfectly hilarious argument. And yet none of us managed one squeak of demurral in public.
The field of academic book reviewing is likewise a pillow fight. Few reviewers care to freely speak their minds when they know that an uncensored takedown might do real injury to the reviewed author’s prospects for tenure or other advancement—and might piss off the author’s friends and allies in the bargain. (Fun facts: Amid the thousands of academic book reviews accessible through Project Muse, a gargantuan database of 393 peer-reviewed journals, only nine books were deemed “poorly researched” by their reviewers. On the other hand, 374 were found to be “magisterial”—pretty much the warmest plaudit in the humanistic vocabulary.)
Given the essentially medieval nature of academic hierarchy, I wasn’t thrilled to have cultivated such a powerful enemy. Friends and family tried to cheer me up by arguing that it augured well for my book’s reception that it was already creating controversy even though I’d barely begun writing it. (My wife pointed out that Expert Two’s e-mail was actually a glowing blurb in disguise: “The stuff for breaking new paradigms . . . Enormous and extraordinary! . . . One of the breakthroughs of the decade in radio and television history!” To this day, she maintains I never would have finished my manuscript if my conversation with Expert Two hadn’t left me with a clear sense of who my target reader was.)
But by 2002, Bellesiles’s critics—primarily nonacademics, at first—had debunked his documentation to the extent that his Bancroft Prize was rescinded and he was obliged to resign from his tenured position at Emory University.
