How to wreck political science scholarship

www.americanthinker.com

After being appointed to head the flagship journal of political science in 2019, the 12 members of the American Political Science Review’s new all-woman editing team took to the Washington Post to celebrate the “bold move.” They had a great opportunity, they wrote, not only to “improve what is already an excellent journal,” but also to make it “more representative of the breadth of political science research.”

What followed shattered the American Political Science Review’s (APSR) reputation for neutrality and professionalism. The group of radical editors soon began calling itself “the Feminist Collective,” consolidated power, and aggressively rewrote the journal’s standards. Rather than prioritizing methodological rigor and scholarly relevance, the new regime elevated activist research and promised to enforce racially discriminatory review practices justified in the name of “equity” and “inclusion.”

These are some of the shocking findings of my new report for the Goldwater Institute on the APSR, which documents how ideological capture transformed a once-prestigious academic journal into a mechanism for left-wing advocacy. The APSR’s decline shows that public universities need structural reforms to restore excellence and accountability.

The APSR is one of the leading journals in political science, an academic discipline that is supposed to teach students about the principles of government and the ideals and institutions of our constitutional republic. As an elite journal, publication decisions can determine tenure, grants, and long-term professional status, giving editors enormous influence over academic careers. That’s exactly what the Feminist Collective aimed to control.

In 2020, the editors pledged allegiance to the woke crusade against the alleged systemic oppression related to every aspect of human life, including their own academic profession. “If the discipline [of political science] is to better reflect the diversity of society,” the editors pronounced, “then we need to actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure it.”

To further its ideological agenda, the Feminist Collective proposed outright discrimination on the basis of race and sex, a shocking betrayal of higher education’s supposed commitment to merit and the pursuit of truth. They promised to implement a two-tiered system of manuscript review. “Work by women and scholars of colour” would virtually automatically advance in the review process, while work by scholars not in the favored identity group faced an initial round of scrutiny.

The Feminist Collective also deliberately promoted “scholarship” that reinforced leftist narratives. Nearly one quarter of the papers published in the APSR over the past five years addressed issues such as race, gender, decolonization, or equity -- 40 times greater than the number focused on the constitutions of the United States and the 50 states.

The ideological capture of the APSR affects more than just the political scientists who submit their work to a journal only political scientists read. It shapes the professorate as a whole, including who will be teaching our kids in classrooms and making hiring decisions at universities, because public universities rely on journals like the APSR to judge the quality of their faculty. Professors with publications in elite academic journals are more likely to receive tenure and promotion.

When ideological agendas replace truth-seeking at publications once revered for academic ethics, universities must adopt alternative ways of evaluating research, teaching, and advancement. A proposed state law called the American Higher Education Restoration Act would reward teaching excellence and civic instruction rather than ideological publishing incentives. Developed by the Goldwater Institute, Defending Education, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, the proposal begins from a simple premise: taxpayers should not subsidize activist faculty who use classrooms and “research” as political platforms rather than teaching or advancing knowledge.

The American Higher Education Restoration Act reestablishes a teaching-first norm and ensures that non-STEM faculty who seek to be exempted from normal instructional loads to pursue additional taxpayer funded “research” are conducting at least minimally serious academic scholarship. No more automatic course reductions, no more guaranteed public subsidies for niche ideological projects.

Perhaps more importantly, the act also creates a new pathway for faculty in American civics and western civilization to bypass the entire research-obsessed model of higher education and instead focus on giving students rigorous instruction in American founding principles.

If American taxpayers are going to continue pumping billions of dollars into public universities, they need to know that those schools are focused first on teaching and providing students with top-notch educations, not on producing the kind of activist claptrap the Feminist Collective prioritized at the APSR.

The severe ideological imbalance of higher education distorts academic research and promotes a one-sided, leftist view of American society. It is high time that we take the necessary steps toward ensuring scholarly legitimacy, civic seriousness, and high-quality teaching in public universities.

Timothy K. Minella is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.

Image: American Political Science Review