I haven't read the piece, and given my slow pace of reading, I thinnk other things have higher priority for me. But I want to comment briefly on the title, "peer Review as *Censorship." Of course it is, and almost certainly it leads to the suppression of many good things and lets a lot of trash through. And almost certainly in some fields that censorship _is_ political censorship. And of course editors censor all the time. Think of the hundreds of thousands of poems that have never been published because editors of literary journals have rejeceted (censored) them. Think of all the novels that languish in typescrpt because publishers have not accepted them for publication. And almost certainly quite a few of those rejected novels are better than quite a few of the novels that have been published.
Fundamentally, censorship is a very good thing. Unfortunately like so many good things the power of censorship is in the wrong hands. We muddle through. Put another way, all issues are ultimately political issues, questions of power.
Carrol
John Gulick wrote:
>
> Alan:
>
> "...intensified demands on faculty to plow out completely mainstream,
> totally
> pedestrian
> and intellectually uninteresting research in the humanities,
> social sciences..."
>
> Doug:
>
> "Ok, so you're saying: 'stop/reverse the corporatization of the
> university and the privatization
> of the public university'? I'm 100%
> with that. It makes me nervous, though, when I hear populist
> critiques
> of 'research' as pointless and of profs as out-of-touch pointy-heads."
>
> Me:
>
> Along these lines, what do you gents think about this piece? (I think it is a pretty illuminating
> critique overall, although of course to some extent Noble is leveraging it toward his quixotic campaign
> against the AGW consensus of climate scientists.)
>
> "Peer Review as Censorship" http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur02262010.html
>
>
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