For those following the debate over the article “The Case for Colonialism,” the following adds little new. It’s mostly a way of summarizing the issue and collecting some useful links in one place.
There’s a lesson for academia in the flare-up over the Third World Quarterly article “The Case for Colonialism” by Bruce Gilley. The article was published after undergoing peer review in which multiple reviewers recommended its rejection. One of these specifically rejected its publication as a “Viewpoints” article, which in the journal’s lexicon designates articles that are more in the vein of an opinion piece than a scholarly research piece.(Reading it online, however, I didn’t see anything indicating that it wasn’t a scholarly research piece. And I saw all the trappings — format, footnotes, etc. — that indicate that it was such a piece.)
There’s no doubt in my mind that the article is shoddy scholarship and deserved to be rejected. The letter, signed by over 10,000 signatories, calling for its retraction made that case. (That Noam Chomsky, among others, declined to call for that is interesting. Chomsky wrote that “what I publish offends many people, including editors and funders of journals in which they appear.” My own sense was that the demand that the editors of TWQ be “replaced” went too far, as that kind of demand only plays into the right-wing political machinations that the article seemed to be geared for.)
More importantly, however, critiques of the article have shown how shoddy it was. If you read only one article on Gilley’s piece, read Nathan Robinson’s demolition of it in Current Affairs. (But there are plenty of others, even on the political right.)
On the other hand, a reader unfamiliar with scholarship on the history of colonialism could easily read it and think: yes, he’s probably right — the field has been tainted by knee-jerk anti-colonialism (of the sort that academia reeks of, or so the story goes) and it’s time to clear that up. Thanks, Bruce, for doing that. (I’m being facetious: that would be an utterly misinformed reaction, but precisely the kind Gilley and his backers might have been hoping for. More on that below.)
The main question is: why did the editor-in-chief, Shahid Qadir, decide to publish it after its seemingly unanimous rejection by peer reviewers?
Qadir’s own account suggests that he did what many a journal editor might have done (I speak from my own experience here): take the reviewers’ comments into account, ask for specific revisions, and then, upon getting the revised article, make a decision based on his or her own reading of how the required revisions were addressed. Qadir claims that one of the peer reviewers recommended “minor revision” as opposed to the other’s rejection recommendation, and that it was therefore up to Qadir to consider the conflicting reviews and make his own decision. That decision was for a “major revision.” If that is true (and some critics are skeptical of that account), the decision looks, in retrospect, as a brutally misguided one.
The other explanation that’s been offered is that both the article and the decision to publish it are part of a broader phenomenon by which scholarly publishing has been commodified — or, in effect, colonized — by neoliberal market standards and practices. Gilley’s piece and its publication could, in this sense, be seen as the perfect case against this kind of neoliberal colonialism.
In their piece “Clickbait and Impact: How Academia Has Been Hacked,” Portia Roelofs and Max Gallien make precisely this case. They acknowledge, on the one hand, that the article
“is a well-planned provocation, an argument that feeds off the criticism it is designed to create, and references it as evidence of the prevailing “orthodoxy”. If this sounds familiar, this is exactly the same strategy with which the alt-right movement has hacked its way into public debates.”
More than that, however, they argue that the article “represents the culmination of broader trends in academia: from marketisation, to impact, to the promotion of artificially adversarial debate.” Their account here is worth quoting in full:
“From the late 1990s, universities have been under pressure to operate more like businesses. Rather than existing in their own comfy bubble, politicians demanded that universities face the bracing winds of the market and earn their keep. Students became consumers, big companies increasingly set the agenda for publicly funded research, and academics were to be subject to the same accountability and incentives as, say, a call-centre worker. Academics have to publish. In order to rank articles against each other, the world of academia had to create a universal way of quantifying how good an article is: hence the citation index. Indexing platforms like Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar record how many other articles or books cite your article. The idea is that if a paper is good, it is worth talking about. The only thing is, citation rankings count positive and negative references equally.”
But this kind of quantification “pales in comparison to what has been done under the ‘impact agenda’,” whereby academia has come to be “evaluated according to essentially the same metrics as Buzzfeed posts and Instagram selfies.” “If your job prospects depend on clicks,” they posit, “you’d be stupid not to write clickbait.”
A related trend is the reduction of academic debate “to an adversarial ‘for and against’.” “When academia is thus framed as a confrontation, it favours confrontational people,” which in turn “has gendered and racialised effects.” “The sort of sensational articles that get hits – like Gilley’s – are those for which white men are lauded, while everyone else is told to get on and do some proper work.”
No one here is arguing that Gilley shouldn’t be allowed to write what he’s written. There are places for that, and that’s a good thing. It’s just that a piece like this shouldn’t have appeared in a journal that is supposed to be publishing research that has been vetted by multiple reviewers for its quality. The mistake was the editor’s, and the journal’s for not subjecting a controversial piece to the gaze of the editorial advisors who add respectability to that journal.
The mass resignation of a large part of the editorial board was, in that sense, a good thing to the extent that it has drawn attention to a problematic manifestation of these trends. How the journal will address that resignation will tell us what kind of journal it aims to be from this point forward.
There is not all that much or cultivated in his want for colonization and there is no level headed discussion to be had. His straight supporters and other provincial theological rationalists in the scholarly community are the main ones who need to see this sort of gibberish. It’s a disgrace that the diary has paid the cost of losing all believability and regard all the while.
Does no one see the irony of the article ending and directly below it the line reads: “Be Sociable, Share!” with links to a bunch of different social media platforms?
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