On the Fool's Gold of Peer Reviews

How the "gold standard" of scholarly production is really just gold spray paint

At a recent faculty meeting at Loyola Maryland, my history department chair opened up a discussion about some minor revisions to the standards it uses to determine promotions for non-tenured teaching faculty and for junior-level, tenure-stream faculty. Although a couple of my colleagues made a few points about the value of publications like big think pieces with newspapers and magazines, as well as comprehensive “state of the field” book reviews, the consensus for the group of 12 became clear. That as far as my department was concerned, peer-reviewed scholarly publications in journals would remain “the gold standard” for scholarly research production and for promotion. 

My department chair said these words with such overinflated hubris that I bursted out in laughter while rolling my eyes. I laughed for a good half-minute, but still had enough awareness to turn off my screen after the first ten seconds. I had already muted my microphone on the Zoom call.

Over the decades in and out of academia, I have learned one thing to be true. That nearly everything those in authority say about their rules for hiring and promotion is a lie, or at least, more lie than truth. The same is true about peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, certainly in the history profession, although less true in education schools, my other academician hat. If they are “the gold standard,” they are only so because no one in the system is willing to challenge the white mediocrity that allows this myth to persist.

My experiences with the peer-review scholarly journal process as both an author and a reviewer taught me how flawed and highly subjective this allegedly objective process for publishing scholarly articles has always been. To me, it isn’t much different than the Himalayan-mountain-sized bullshit that overwhelms the legal term “a jury of your peers.” A nation with a history of all-white juries convicting innocent Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks while letting off murderous white men who might as well have shown up to court covered with blood has taught me there is no justice to be had in the US. If justice is blind, she is blind because she is up to her eyeballs in an ocean of violence and blood.

While peer review in academia and in my fields of history and education is generally less lethal, it is certainly blind to its own Andes Mountains-worth of ossified shit. It is a less violent form of gate-keeping hiding under the guise of objectivity and allegedly name-blind reviews. In the two decades of sending scholarly article drafts to the Journal of American History, History of Education Quarterly, Teachers College Record, Journal of Negro Education, Harvard Educational Review, and American Studies, I have either known for sure or guessed at the so-called peers who had reviewed my work. Or, in most cases, I knew well or I knew of the editors who reviewed my drafts before either rejecting them outright or forwarding my work to alleged peers who rejected my writing and ideas.

I got a good lesson in how subjective and in-plain-sight academic peer-review publishing has always been in 1998. That was when I met with the History of Education Quarterly editors, including its chief at the time, my former one-time professor Richard Altenbaugh. I’d done small article-length entries for his Historical Dictionary of American Education, which hit in 1999. Over the course of a two-hour lunch, Altenbaugh and his assistant grilled me about the contents of my article, my writing in general, and about the publishing business. For Altenbaugh and the other editor, I at 28 was simply too young to write an essay that reviewed previous scholarly work. “Even a senior scholar with fifteen years in the field would have trouble pulling this off,” Altenbaugh said. My writing wasn’t dense and scholarly enough, and my subject matter — multiculturalism and multicultural education — too new and controversial for my peers to understand and take seriously. Oh yeah, they also recommended that I get approval for my essay draft from two white historians before resubmitting to the journal. One of them was Philip Foner, who had died in 1994. The other was August Meier, who at 75 was in poor health (he died in 2003).

I felt like I had walked through a gauntlet of white male mediocrity, ageism, and racism, with spit, piss, and venom hocked and hurled in my direction, too. My ambition outweighed my disgust at their white-men-must-approve-of-my-work-racism, though. So off and on over the next decade, I worked on various writing projects meant to blur the lines between the scholarly and the everyday. It got me a publication in the peer-reviewed Radical Society in 2003, after some approval by the late Derrick Bell of my use of his “Rules of Racial Standing” in the piece. I published a few reviews and an article in Teachers College Record between 2006 and 2013, and an article in The Journal of Hispanic Higher Education as part of a special edition in 2009. 

But while I didn’t bow down and offer homage to dead and nearly-dead white men to get published, I also knew just about every person involved in editing and reviewing my articles in those years. None of them had any expertise in multiculturalism, multicultural education, Critical Race Theory, K-16 education reform and college access from a nonprofit or foundation perspective, or anything else I wrote about back then. These juries of my peers who called my work “anachronistic” or rejected my writing as “journalistic” were no less biased than a jury of 12 white guys hot-blooded for Black men to suffer and bleed.

If peer-reviewed scholarly articles are the “gold-standard” of publishing in academia, then that standard consists of gold spray paint over a petrified cow turd. Anyone who has read sentences that begin like “The epistemological underpinnings of the subfield of migration studies must be revisited…,” “Indeed, Lynd posited in his seminal work on the differences between Marxist and Post-Structuralists…,” and “The raison d’etre of social history is to explore the universe of the ordinary…” knows scholarly writing is as dense as a neutron star. Mediocre only gets at the surface of the quality of language, so white and bereft of food for thought that even Wonder Bread seems healthier. 

So many historians and education scholars study the extremely narrow, esoteric, and vapid — they think it’s great when they know their article has been cited 100 times. (By comparison, I thought it was pretty cool when a Washington Post piece I wrote on teaching Black history in white spaces in 2018 ended up in nearly every major newspaper in the US — and overseas as well — through syndication). And they do it all to be part of the club, to gain tenure, to be among the guys at conferences and in faculty clubs. There’s an army of white men in positions of authority in academic scholarship, history and education, included. They only promote the mediocre as gold, because nothing shines brighter when it's judged by peers of the like-minded.