Thursday, 02 September 2010

NEXT POST
This is why I "support" majoritarian rule. As a means of registering my discontent with conservative claims that the fact that 70 percent of Americans abhor the idea of the "Ground Zero Mosque" means it should be abandoned, I hereby present other things that 70 percent of "certain" Americans once hated. For example, consider the responses to this question from a Gallup Poll reported in the Los Angeles Times on 14 July 1963.* I snipped the June numbers because at that point only 62 percent of respondents had decided that the Civil Rights Movement was moving "Too fast." I also have other, less inflammatory, examples. To wit: That would be from the Los Angeles Times four days earlier.** I did say I was only referencing "certain" Americans, however, and because I'm an honest chap, I'll tell you that Gallup calls them "Southern Whites." You heard that correctly: the same conservatives who illegitimately claim the moral high ground Martin Luther King, Jr. struggled to capture have the same high regard for Muslims as Southern segregationists once did for blacks. To put it finely: Those who oppose the building of Park51 are justifying their opposition on the fact that the same percentage of Americans are currently as bigoted as Southern whites demonstrated themselves to be when asked how they would "feel about a law which would give all persons—Negro as well as white—the right to be served in public places such as hotels, restaurants, theaters and similar establishments." All of which is only to say that insisting that this "is" should be enshrined in history as an "ought" makes a person as big of a bastard as a Southern white who couldn't brook the thought of sharing his or her establishments with an African-American. It's a rebellious stance to be sure, but in the end they'll be standing in a field screaming "Wolverines!" while the world passes them by. *Gallup, George. "Views Revised on Rights Push." Los Angeles Times (14 June 1963): M2. **Gallup, George. "Slim Majority Backs Accommodations Bill." Los Angeles Times (10 July 1963): C18.
PREVIOUS POST
The short answer to Yglesias's question is "Yes." But as I'm incapable of short answers, let me provide a slightly longer one. In this post, Yglesias shares his experience of having learned that it’s not merely that taking time to help inform a non-specialist audience about political science findings isn’t specifically rewarded, it’s positively punished. And not simply in the sense that doing less research and more publicizing is punished; I was told that holding research output constant, getting more publicity for your output would be harmful to a junior scholar’s career because it would feed an assumption of non-seriousness. That’s pretty nuts. It is. I won't speak for political science as a discipline, but I can speak to the problem as it exists in mine. The basic logic is that sharing work with the general public is a means of circumventing the "serious" peer review process, and as such is necessarily "unserious." The problem with that explanation is that the peer review process is itself a monument to unseriousness: There are numerous examples one could cite of plagiarism, or poor practice, that seem to slip right through the peer review process. Add to this the fact that many, if not most, journals are famous for vetting processes that are as slow as Cream of Wheat going down the kitchen drain. Graduate assistants and faculty editors who lose track of manuscripts; readers who are given six months to complete the review and have to be pushed to complete it anyway; and the capacious use of "revise and resubmit" rather than bluntly saying the article is poor and needs to be completely rewritten—all of these things and more are acknowledged problems with the academic publishing process that make many people reluctant to send work to journals. The other downside to publishing exclusively in journals that live behind pay-walls is that, while the articles contained therein are totally serious, no one ever reads them. As my advisor once told me, if I want an idea to die, the best thing to do is publish it in a flagship journal. He wasn't being serious, obviously, but neither was he being completely unserious. To paraphrase what I believe this fellow once told me, but which I can't seem to locate, my discipline's flagship journal is treated like issues of The New Yorker: they live next to the toilet or in a pile forever awaiting the day in which we have nothing else to read. It's prestigious to be published in it, but it's a means to be hired or promoted, not start a conversation. It hasn't always been this way—or, at the very least, we once made a concerted effort to appear otherwise—but as it currently stands, the choice is between being a "serious" scholar who engages no one or an "unserious" scholar whose work is read by many but, because of that, counts for nothing. I'm obviously not endorsing this model, nor am I saying it's the same in all disciplines, as I would love to be in a discipline in...

Become a Fan

Recent Comments