New Ideas

I’m now a managing editor of a scholarly journal. I send submitted articles to reviewers and make the recommendation to publish or not based on their feedback. It’s a modern languages journal, so almost no articles are in my own field.

We received an article recently that was written by a young, inexperienced scholar with very conservative beliefs. I didn’t need to Google him to know that he’s young and inexperienced because it was clear from the writing. But it’s somebody with an original, unusual point of view. Somebody who is trying to engage with theory and big ideas instead of applying somebody else’s ideas to yet another “diverse” author. If I were the reviewer, I’d guide him to rewrite for clarity and coherence and I’d definitely publish the piece.

The first blind peer reviewer recommended exactly what I would have. He didn’t engage with how “correct” the author’s thoughts are but whether they are clearly expressed and coherently argued. The second reviewer, however, went into a full-on ideological mode. Her main argument was that these questions have all been settled, structural racism is indisputable, fluid identities are great, saying that identity labels can be used to seek victim status in a competitive economy is insulting to a long list of identity holders, and so on.

Of course, I recommended that we go with the first reviewer’s approach. It is not our business to judge which ideas are correct but to facilitate a free exchange of thought. We cannot take an ideological role of promoting “correct” ideas, I said. We’ll see how the two editors-in-chief respond but this is a heartening development. It’s time to see theory that is free from the shackles of the politically correct and the ideologically permissible.