Philosopher Richard Moran (Harvard) comments on a less-noted aspect of the defamation of Rebecca Tuvel by the (now former) Associate Editors of Hypatia:
It became clear that, among the signers of the original statement denouncing Rebecca Tuvel’s article were various philosophers and others who were furious that their own work on transgenderism and related issues was not given respectful attention in Tuvel’s article. This created an unholy mixture of academic status consciousness and political self-righteousness, as well as the unedifying spectacle of tenured professors protecting their turf against a younger colleague. Among the later defenders of the original statement denouncing Tuvel’s article the tone often moved back and forth between criticizing Tuvel for violating a professional scholarly responsibility to respond to the existing literature on a subject, and an insistence on a kind of political representation in scholarly work. The invocation of the supposed scholarly responsibility of ‘coverage’ acted as a cover for the insistence on political representation, which in turn, for some of the original signers, served as a cover for a demand that their own work be given a kind of attention that Tuvel may not have thought it merited.I suspect that we are going to see a lot more of this, and that there is probably much more of it going on behind the scenes in the reviewing process in journals than most of us are aware of. It’s a good moment, then, to point out how bogus and counter-productive the demand for ‘coverage’ in the reviewing process has become and how it lends itself to just these sorts of abuses. The area of Tuvel’s work is at the intersection of many different styles of philosophy and other kinds of commentary and much of it is just plain awful. In this it is no different from most if not all other areas of philosophy. It’s the nature of creative work, especially when institutionalized and produced at great volume. Tuvel had every right to ignore work, even whole areas of work, that did not seem to her to be worth discussing or seemed outside the concerns of her article.
The sheer quantity of scholarly work is an unmanageable burden for everyone in the academy today. The ideology of ‘coverage’ as a scholarly responsibility takes this growing volume and inscribes it in the production of new work added to the pile. This is especially destructive for new scholars trying to break in to publication in journals. The laziest and most automatic response for any overburdened journal reviewer to give to a submission is to say something of the form ‘Well, what about Professor X, or journal article Y and Z? What do you say to that?’