MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY: UPDATED
This piece makes some good points; an excerpt:
There are many ways of describing this new journal; a sanctum away from the pitchforks of the mob; a place of amnesty where ideas can flourish without fear or self-doubt; a thought experiment. But essentially, it is a safe space, one where authors do not have to deal with feedback or criticism from those at the sharp end of their “controversial” ideas. It is publishing without the responsibility that comes along with that. It is all the things the zeitgeist condemns: thin-skinned, elitist, coddled, unable to engage in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace of ideas. Safe spaces have their virtues, specifically in allowing those who feel marginalised to congregate and share their experiences. But a host of academics with access to platforms who specifically want to publish papers they know will elicit a strong response does not exactly smack of persecution.
(Thanks to Paul Russell for the pointer.)
UPDATE: Philosopher Jeff McMahan (Oxford) asked me to share the letter he and the others editors sent to The Guardian regarding the preceding piece:
We are the editors of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which was criticised by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian on 13 November. We would like to correct her misrepresentations of our project.
At present there is no Journal of Controversial Ideas. There are only our plans and intentions and a group of about 40 academics who have agreed to be on our editorial board. These are the only facts there are about the journal. Malik could have learned about them had she contacted one of us, as every other journalist we know of who has written or is writing about the journal has done. Instead she attributed to us a set of aims of her own invention, principal among which is to create a ‘safe space’ in which, by ‘deliberately branding ideas as controversial’, our authors can ‘provoke, recoil at the response, abhor it as overreaction’. Because our ‘thin-skinned, elitist, coddled’ authors ‘will be anonymous’, they can publish ‘without responsibility’ and with complete ‘freedom from consequence’. Malik even endows us with an unidentified source of funding who will ensure that the journal will be governed by ‘market forces’.
Our aim in establishing the journal is only to enable academics – particularly younger, untenured, or otherwise vulnerable academics – to have the option of publishing under a pseudonym when they might otherwise be deterred from publishing by fear of death threats (which two of us have received in response to our writings.), threats to their families, or threats to their careers. Pseudonymity is optional, not required. Our intention is to publish only articles that give carefully developed reasons, arguments, and evidence in support of conclusions that some may find offensive or pernicious. We will not publish work that is polemical, intentionally inflammatory, or ad hominem. If Malik had looked at any of our own publications, she would have found that these aims and constraints have consistently guided our own writing.
The journal will have credibility only if its articles satisfy the highest standards of academic rigour. The ideas in the articles must therefore pass an unusually meticulous review process. We will invite objections to those ideas but seek to protect their authors. The best way to respond to ideas one opposes is to refute them, not to suppress them through coercion or intimidation.
The journal will have no substantive commitments other than to academic freedom. We have assembled an ideologically diverse board of editors.
We have no funding whatsoever, apart from what comes from our own pockets. The journal will be open access and wholly non-profit.
Jeff McMahan, University of Oxford
Francesca Minerva, University of Ghent
Peter Singer, Princeton University and University of Melbourne
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