Sociology has been, in my experience, a petri dish for rabid socialists. In fact, I’ve seen studies that have looked at the political leanings of different departments and sociology (and anthropology) tend to be the ones who lean toward big government the most.

As far as APSR is concerned I’ve seen some really stupid articles in there. One Ivy League professor wrote theorizing that we could save American democracy by restricting the Senate to the rich, the House to the poor, and randomly selecting a tribunate from the citizens who get one vote in a year to veto a law passed by Congress.

I mean, she can say something like, “The peer review at Education Next doesn’t make it a scholarly journal because they only pick their peer reviewers from like-minded people who share their worldview and will thus usually return the verdicts that Education Next wants.”

And if she said something like that, she’d be right. But the same goes on at every other peer-reviewed journal. That’s how peer review works.

(It’s true that there are a handful of really big discipline-wide journals, like APSR, that just from their sheer size can’t help but include a variety of worldviews among their peer reviewers. But the selection of worldviews that’s available is still hand-picked by the journals’ editors. The fundamental problem remains the same.)

The point is not that peer review is bad, just that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Although I disagree with her (transparently silly) assessment that Education Next isn’t scholarly, I agree with her (implicit) stance that having been peer reviewed doesn’t make a study or article scholarly. I just wish she applied that position consistently.

As compared to AERJ? Hmmm.

Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller?