Let’s Build Conservative Scholarly Journals

The report “Peer Review Gone Wild”—co-released by the Martin Center, the Goldwater Institute, and Defending Education—makes for compulsive reading. In it, Goldwater’s Timothy K. Minella details the dumpster fire that is the self-described “Feminist Collective,” an editorial board of activist reviewers at the American Political Science Review, one of the most prestigious political-science journals in the country.

Several years ago, attempting to secure control of that journal, the Feminist Collective declared its intent to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure [political science].” In practice, these intentions meant that the board pledged to create a two-tiered system of peer review whereby they “screen[ed] submissions differently based on the authors’ race and sex” and published “articles focusing on race, gender, and/or social justice” at a rate “40 times greater than the number focused on American constitutions.”

An alternative pathway to tenure, while worthwhile, is incomplete. In response to this and other academic-journal politicization, Minella’s report recommends the creation of an alternative pathway to tenure. Traditionally, publication records are the currency that garners lifelong employment on campus; Minella and the partnering organizations instead recommend that excellence in teaching be introduced as an alternative route. This shift would incentivize quality instruction and open a pathway for professors who care deeply about teaching but not about publishing ideologically suspect rubbish.

The coin of the higher-education realm will remain publications. There’s much to recommend in this proposal. First, there’s arguably far more social utility in a professor’s teaching students about America’s civic order than in his publishing another obscure, esoteric essay that no one reads. Second, such a move would reorient universities toward a more traditional, liberal-arts conception of higher learning, whereby the primary purpose of a university would be education, not research. There’s a strong counter-case to be made for the German research university, but Minella and friends are in the good company of such luminaries as John Henry Newman, who implored universities to remain committed to the teaching of universal human knowledge. Finally, Minella’s proposal is a more elegant approach to incentivizing professorial instruction than are blunt minimum-teaching requirements.

All that said, an alternative pathway to tenure, while worthwhile, is incomplete. The coin of the higher-education realm will remain publications and, relatedly, grants. He who earns the university prestige and money will receive great reward. Those who rely on teaching alone may find themselves relegated to a secondary professoriate, where they will grimace and sigh in the campus’s least-comfortable faculty suites. For those who merely want to teach, let them teach and be merry. But an additional initiative, conservative-coded peer-reviewed journals, would both advance heterodox scholarship on topics such as civic education and provide a means for conservative academics to advance their own careers through traditional tenure pathways.

Consider the position of a newly minted conservative or even center-left assistant professor of American history or political philosophy. What options exist for them to advance their careers? Right now, their only recourse is to distort their scholarship until it fits within the dictates and enlightened preferences of editorial boards such as the Feminist Collective. With the addition of an alternative tenure track, they could teach well and advance to an associate or full professorship, but they would be sacrificing their own scholarship. Alternative publication venues, by contrast, would create a space for them to disseminate quality scholarship that breaks with current, progressive dogma while also advancing their own careers through publication.

Such alternative publication outlets are not without precedent. In the world of K-12 education reform, where I spend most of my time, there are two such heterodox journals. Education Next is a reform-friendly (though by no means explicitly conservative) journal that publishes a mixture of opinion and original research and has long boasted of its place “among the reading materials on hand for visitors to the Office of the U.S. Secretary … since George W. Bush.” Similarly, the Journal of School Choice publishes much of the quantitative research that traditional academic journals have spurned because it doesn’t fit the approved narrative.

These publications have allowed a small guild of intrepid researchers to emerge and break with the standard education blob. Look through the editorial board of either, and you’ll find professors at institutions ranging from the Ivy Leagues to state universities. These researchers have helped to build a body of high-quality scholarship on school choice, charter schooling, and other education-reform efforts that would not have otherwise seen the light of day.

Nearly every modern political movement has had a publication wherein proponents can hash out their differences. Outside of academia, alternative publications have a storied history. Nearly every modern political movement has had a publication wherein proponents can hash out their differences, from the Reaganite Revolution and National Review to the Russian Revolution and Pravda.

Obviously, an academic journal differs from a public-policy magazine or a propaganda machine. But these efforts nevertheless demonstrate that insurgent publications are not exactly a novel or radical endeavor. They’re common—dare I say necessary?

A handful of conservative journals, armed with intellectually serious authors, could have a substantial impact on higher education. Some may balk at the idea of openly partisan publications. Surely, scholarship and research rises above the culture-war fray! [Sips Chardonnay.]

Perhaps, but I’d point to any random peer-reviewed journal—say, the Journal of Research in Rural Education, which recently published an issue on “Queering Rural Education”—and ask if such publications aren’t patently ideological already. In an ideal world, as Education Next or the Journal of School Choice prove, the new magazines needn’t be openly partisan so long as they’re willing to publish conservative scholars or ideas that break with the current, anointed opinion.

Given the civic centers popping up in a number of major universities across the country, the establishment of such journals would be an easier task than it might have been even 10 years ago. Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership publishes four such journals. Were the Hamilton School at the University of Florida to follow suit and found journals in classical education or economic theory, it would bolster its own reputation, becoming a pillar upon which an intellectually diverse professoriate could build itself, and, of course, publish worthwhile scholarship.

A handful of conservative journals would not solve all of American higher education’s woes. There would still be mounting student debt, calcified bureaucracy, ballooning budgets, and an ideologically tilted corps of professors.

But just the two aforementioned education-reform publications have had a significant impact on American schooling and the faculty who study it. A handful more, armed with intellectually serious authors, could have a substantial impact on higher education.

Where rivers meet large bodies of water, a small trickle that opens up a new path can, over time, divert the entire flow of water. Such publications wouldn’t change universities tomorrow, but, as they open up avenues for divergent thinkers to enter academia, they could be the first trickle that opens up a large flow of intellectually diverse thinkers and scholarship, finally counteracting the generations-long leftward drift of universities.

Daniel Buck is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network, and a former teacher and school administrator.