A new Goldwater report reveals discrimination and ideological bias at the American Political Science Review.
By the Goldwater Institute
A leading political science journal abandoned merit-based scholarship in favor of race- and sex-based discrimination, according to a new Goldwater Institute analysis of the American Political Science Review(APSR). Under the control of the self-described “Feminist Collective,” the journal’s editors instituted their divisive ideology to promote agenda-driven research, leading to devastating consequences for merit-based scholarship nationwide.
In its report, Peer Review Gone Wild, the Goldwater Institute examined every article published in the journal over a five-year period and found the profound outcome of the Feminist Collective’s leadership. The editors actively favored submissions steeped in an ideologically charged policy agenda and promised a two-tiered system of standards that would provide an easier path to the peer-review process for women and “scholars of colour.”
“Under the leadership of the Feminist Collective, the American Political Science Review was turned into a tool for promoting a woke activist agenda rather than advancing human knowledge,” said Timothy Minella, Senior Constitutionalism Fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy and author of the report. “Scholars who submit research to journals like the APSR should expect to their work to be judged on its merits, not on a political ideology or on the race or sex of the researchers.”
Among Goldwater’s findings:
- The Feminist Collective deliberately promoted “scholarship” that reinforced leftist narratives of systemic oppression.
- Nearly one quarter of the papers published in the APSR over the five-year period addressed issues such as race, gender, decolonization, and equity—more than 40 times greater than the number focused on the constitutions of the United States and the 50 states.
- ASPR published many articles promulgating, at taxpayer expense, obvious claims, such as a finding that depressed people are less motivated to participate in politics.
In 2020, the APSR’s publisher, the American Political Science Association, granted editorial control to the Feminist Collective, a group of political scientists who pledged allegiance to the woke crusade against the alleged systemic oppression that structured every aspect of human life, including their own academic field. “If the discipline [political science] is to better reflect the diversity of society,” the editors pronounced, “then we need to actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure it.”
To accomplish its goals, the Feminist Collective proposed outright discrimination on the basis of race and sex, a shocking betrayal of higher education’s supposed commitment to merit and the pursuit of truth.
This leftist “scholarship” they published included articles such as “Wages for Earthwork,” in which the author advocates for “reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work”and for “decolonizing climate justice … and [the] wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.” Another author argues for “the socialization of housework.” In the article “Race, Gender, and the Politics of Superheroes,” the author examines the Marvel character Punisher as an emblem of “white male grievance.”
The ideological capture of the APSR affects more than just the political scientists who submit their work to the journal. Professors with publications in elite academic journals are more likely to receive tenure and promotion. Public universities thus rely on journals like the APSR to judge the quality of their faculty. But because ideological agendas have replaced the pursuit of truth at these publications, public universities must adopt alternate metrics for faculty advancement.
That is why the Goldwater Institute, Defending Education, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal are partnering to propose a powerful reform of public universities, the American Higher Education Restoration Act. This policy would bring accountability to faculty by ensuring that their taxpayer-funded research actually advances human knowledge rather than ideological agendas.
The severe ideological imbalance of higher education threatens the academic research enterprise and promotes a one-sided, leftist view of American society. But the American Higher Education Restoration Act takes a giant leap towards restoring scholarly legitimacy and quality teaching to public universities.
Read the full report here.
