New Journal Will Allow Academics to Publish Ideas Under Pseudonyms

New Journal Will Allow Academics to Publish Ideas Under Pseudonyms

We’ve come to the point where academics fear the social justice warrior mob s much that they need to do this. Take a bow, progressives.

Inside Higher Ed reports:

A Very Controversial Idea

Academic freedom is meant to protect scholars with controversial ideas. But a group of philosophers says academic freedom isn’t protection enough in an era of campus speech debates, internet trolls and threats against professors — and that academics now need a place to publish their most sensitive ideas pseudonymously.

That venue, The Journal of Controversial Ideas, will launch next year. Co-founder Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and no stranger to controversial ideas, mentioned the idea for such a journal in a 2017 interview. But plans for it took shape in a BBC Radio 4 documentary on viewpoint diversity, which airs for the first time this week.

Jeff McMahan, White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at University of Oxford, told the BBC that the need for more open discussion is “really very acute.” There’s “greater inhibition on university campuses about taking certain positions for fear of what will happen,” he said, with the political right and left alike stoking that “fear.” Threats to academic freedom and free speech from within the university tend to come the left, he added, while outside threats tend to come from the right.

McMahan told Inside Higher Ed Monday that the journal doesn’t have a confirmed publisher, but that it will be open access, from a “reliable and well-established” source. It will be peer reviewed, with an editorial board that is diverse, ideologically and otherwise. There will be no restrictions on academic disciplines, though organizers expect most submissions will be from researchers in the humanities and social sciences, perhaps tilted toward philosophy. Natural sciences submissions also are welcome, and McMahan said he’s received offers to help review from scientists in those fields. Possible ideas include moral issues in research on weapons technologies and animal experimentation, for example, he said.

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