Dr. Rebecca Colesworthy, an acquisitions editor (!) at SUNY Press (authors, take note!), thinks a pattern of possible editorial decisions based on an author's controversial viewpoint is not worrisome, but "nonsense"! (She was prompted, it appear, by Alex Bryant's clueless comments on the earlier post [Mr. Bryant, another benighted PhD student, was last seen demanding that Kathleen Stock be excluded from a volume].)
Mr. Bryant's tweet also inspired Professor Benjamin McKean, a political theorist at Ohio State, to offer this profound insight:
Amusingly, however, a few days later Professor McKean was lamenting "corporate interference" (no doubt driven by the marketing folks!) at the Journal of Political Philosophy:
Of course, there is a "principled" difference: "corporate interference" with publishing decisions at OUP in the Byrne case is fine since Byrne has evil thoughts; "corporate interference" with JPP at Wiley is not OK because JPP is good.
For good measure, Professor McKean was also indignant at philosopher David Wallace:
Actually, Alex Byrne is not David Wallace's "pal," it's just that Professor Wallace, unlike Professor McKean, has a principled interest in fair publishing practices. The problem, moreover, is that as things stand, we do not know if Byrne's book was rejected because it was a "bad" piece of work, or because it expressed an "incorrect" point of view. That is why Professor Wallace wanted more information, since it is a matter of importance for the scholarly community if certain serious points of view are being treated as verboten by major academic press.
Unsurprisingly, the irrepressible Chris "I make things up" Bertram was inspired once again to "make things up" because of the Byrne/OUP fiasco:
Actually, no. Stewart Cohen, the former editor of Philosophical Studies, thought the paper violated the journal's rules prohibiting "personal attacks." As I said at the time, "Professor Cohen objected to Dembroff's attack on Byrne's real motives (not Dembroff's 'tone' and not that Dembroff's criticisms were 'harsh'), and it seems perfectly reasonable for an analytic philosophy journal to bar such attacks." It would also be "perfectly reasonable" for a journal to have no rules about this. If OUP has such rules, they appear not to have been mentioned in the correspondence--and, in any case, there have been no allegations that I have seen of attacks by Professor Byrne on the motives of named individuals.
Thank God for Twitter: without it, one would have no idea how clueless and mendacious people with PhDs can be!
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