Great installment in a series that just keeps getting better.
I agree that the grant system and peer review provide some boundaries on research/accepted speech. But I also wonder if self governance in general is a kind of pie-in-the-sky approach. As mentioned, when it fails, it can lead to things like McCarthyism or the recent backlash over perceived institutional stances on Israel/Palestine.
Reminds me a bit of the financial-services industry's attempt to self regulate via FINRA: it appears effective in good times, but it is in the in bad times that it seems to amplify harm as well (or at least it amplifies public outrage).
It would be interesting to measure a given university's retractions vs. let's call them "faculty disciplinary events" over time. "Nature" recently approached this from a slightly different angle:
Thanks for your comment. I agree with your point that funding agencies and peer review make plenty of mistakes and "bad science" gets through. Replicability is a critical part as well... we generally don't take research as gospel just because it made it into print. There are active efforts across many disciplines to see whether studies replicate, and many retractions flow from cases where replication uncovered something untoward. I think these are weakest in areas where replication is most difficult, and outright academic dishonesty continues to plague some areas. The question in some sense is not... is the system foolproof? But rather, what system would you prefer?
It's great to hear that those efforts are being undertaken. I remember reading something from LSE a few years ago about how up to 80% of papers in the humanities are never cited, and that acceptance rates from associated journals were similarly high. If that's the case, then perhaps the failure is not that peer review is decentralized, but that it's internal.
That's where I think my FINRA analogy breaks down a bit - what would a decentralized but external governance system for university output look like? Something that DoE administers? I certainly wouldn't want the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction, wherein the President of the United States is also the President of Columbia University.
I don't know the answer myself, but I will look forward to learning how we cure all of society's ills in next week's post :-)
A thoughtful and informative piece! From one non-academic’s perspective, the current firestorm is fueled not by tenure but by some Humanities Departments swinging the pendulum too far to one side. Might this pushback, however clumsy, be an attempt to restore balance?
Thanks for your comment. It does strike me that a lot of the issues that really seem to provoke a great deal of public outrage and make headlines are confined to relatively small corners of large universities. But the response to the outrage is coming for the university as a whole, including tenure protections for all of the faculty. Jay and I dealt firsthand with people who wanted to see faculty brought to heel because their research findings or teaching -- in areas wholly unrelated to the humanities -- upset someone. I would also note that the Trump administration's treatment of Columbia and Penn might have been ignited by culture war issues, but as a practical matter, they went after science funding.
Thanks for clarifying the topic of which I Only understood at the surface.
Great installment in a series that just keeps getting better.
I agree that the grant system and peer review provide some boundaries on research/accepted speech. But I also wonder if self governance in general is a kind of pie-in-the-sky approach. As mentioned, when it fails, it can lead to things like McCarthyism or the recent backlash over perceived institutional stances on Israel/Palestine.
Reminds me a bit of the financial-services industry's attempt to self regulate via FINRA: it appears effective in good times, but it is in the in bad times that it seems to amplify harm as well (or at least it amplifies public outrage).
It would be interesting to measure a given university's retractions vs. let's call them "faculty disciplinary events" over time. "Nature" recently approached this from a slightly different angle:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00455-y
Thanks for your comment. I agree with your point that funding agencies and peer review make plenty of mistakes and "bad science" gets through. Replicability is a critical part as well... we generally don't take research as gospel just because it made it into print. There are active efforts across many disciplines to see whether studies replicate, and many retractions flow from cases where replication uncovered something untoward. I think these are weakest in areas where replication is most difficult, and outright academic dishonesty continues to plague some areas. The question in some sense is not... is the system foolproof? But rather, what system would you prefer?
It's great to hear that those efforts are being undertaken. I remember reading something from LSE a few years ago about how up to 80% of papers in the humanities are never cited, and that acceptance rates from associated journals were similarly high. If that's the case, then perhaps the failure is not that peer review is decentralized, but that it's internal.
That's where I think my FINRA analogy breaks down a bit - what would a decentralized but external governance system for university output look like? Something that DoE administers? I certainly wouldn't want the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction, wherein the President of the United States is also the President of Columbia University.
I don't know the answer myself, but I will look forward to learning how we cure all of society's ills in next week's post :-)
A thoughtful and informative piece! From one non-academic’s perspective, the current firestorm is fueled not by tenure but by some Humanities Departments swinging the pendulum too far to one side. Might this pushback, however clumsy, be an attempt to restore balance?
Thanks for your comment. It does strike me that a lot of the issues that really seem to provoke a great deal of public outrage and make headlines are confined to relatively small corners of large universities. But the response to the outrage is coming for the university as a whole, including tenure protections for all of the faculty. Jay and I dealt firsthand with people who wanted to see faculty brought to heel because their research findings or teaching -- in areas wholly unrelated to the humanities -- upset someone. I would also note that the Trump administration's treatment of Columbia and Penn might have been ignited by culture war issues, but as a practical matter, they went after science funding.