No room for ‘alt facts’ in world of academia
If a social debate is based on fuzzy ideas accumulated from something read somewhere, sometime, an academically published view is the antithesis of it, based on rigorous research, citations and knowledge. Before being published, it is peerreviewed, or tested for accuracy and integrity by someone with subject matter expertise.
This process is at the heart of a controversy roiling the academic community after the Third World Quarterly, a reputable British journal on global politics, published a piece this month titled “The case for colonialism” by Bruce Gilley, a Princeton University PhD and Portland State University professor.
(Although “third world” is now considered a derogatory term, the 40-year-old journal’s name is derived from the non-aligned movement of countries who did not want to support either side of the Cold War.)
In his article, Gilley says colonialism has been unjustly vilified, that it was legitimate and its “civilizing mission” was in fact beneficial. He also writes that it is time to recolonize parts of the world and create “new Western colonies from scratch,” because developing countries are failing at self-governance and anti-colonial ideology was harmful to native populations.
The reaction was explosive, targeted at both the article and the journal’s decision to publish it. A petition calling for the article’s retraction gathered more than 10,000 signatures. On Tuesday, roughly half of the journal’s 34 editorial board members resigned in protest.
Two researchers writing for a London School of Economics blog called the piece “a travesty, the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes.”
That it appeared in a respected journal devoted to anti-colonial politics made it “the equivalent of a journal devoted to Holocaust studies publishing that the Holocaust didn’t happen,” according to Ilan Kapoor, a York University professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, who was one of the board members who quit.
The primary problem, though, revolved around whether the piece published under the label “Viewpoint” passed the scholarship test for publication.
“As with all articles in the journal, this Viewpoint did undergo doubleblind peer review and was subsequently published,” said Shahid Qadir, editor-in-chief of the quarterly in a statement.
In a double-blind review, the au- thor’s and reviewer’s identities are withheld from each other.
The editorial board members say they asked for, but didn’t get, copies of the review. They also say the article was not passed, but rejected by three reviewers. (Qadir did not respond to my requests for comment on this.)
“The piece in question was rejected by two peers who were editors of a special issue on ‘Whatever happened to the idea of imperialism?’ and then it was further rejected by another peer,” said Lisa Ann Richey, a scholar from Denmark currently at Duke University in the U.S.
“There was a remedy available last week — to retract the piece and apologize for the gross error — and this remedy was not implemented by the editor. After this disappointing outcome, the only option available for anyone sitting on the board who wanted to stand for academic integrity was to resign.”
Kapoor said, “This discrepancy between what the editor has told us and what we have found is highly problematic.”
Meanwhile, the piece is being torn apart by academics on factual grounds.
“Gilley says he is simply asking for an unbiased assessment of the facts, that he just wants us to take off our ideological blinders and examine colonialism from an empirical perspective,” writes Nathan Robinson in a scathing piece in Current Affairs.
“But this is not what he has done. Instead . . . (he has concealed) evidence of gross crimes against humanity.”
For instance, he omits any mention of the first 300 years of Western colonization because it’s “impossible to spin it” as beneficial to native populations, Robinson says.
Or he quotes a Congolese man saying, “Maybe the Belgians should come back” and entirely bypasses Belgian King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo that scandalized the world.
In the think tank Cato Institute’s blog, Sahar Khan gives five examples of how the piece is “empirically and historically inaccurate.”
For instance, “Gilley attributes the abolition of slave-trading to colonialism, which in addition to being ridiculous, is factually incorrect . . . Systematic decolonization and subsequent wars of independence eventually ended the slave trade.”
The unexplained publication of a piece that does not meet academic standards of quality should sound alarm bells for those of us outside the ivory towers, too.
The desire to appear even-handed under pressure from faux freespeech defenders has created a damaging false equivalency model in mainstream media, where the compulsion to get “the other side” means unfounded ideas are given the same weight as sound reasoning.
Despite the imperfections of academia, academically credited facts established with rigour, empirical evidence and scholarship remain a credible tool to fight climate-change deniers, racism deniers, anti-vaxxers or anyone floating in the universe of “alternative facts.”
Not condemning this attempt to Breitbart-ize academia will effectively wipe out the role of accountability in fact-gathering and remove any barriers to revisiting lasting atrocities of our past.
The primary problem revolved around whether the piece published under the label ‘Viewpoint’ passed the scholarship test for publication