There is no escape from Reviewer 2

Inducing shame and humiliation is not a blood sport. It is the very life blood of the academic profession, says Michael Marinetto

March 15, 2022
Max Weber montage illustrating  opinion about shame and humiliation in academia
Source: Getty

“Since 1977, we’ve been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening.”

So said the labour economist Paula Stephan, talking to an audience of young American scholars in 2015. She was speaking in demographic terms: there are ever more new PhD graduates than there are academic jobs to go around. And while not every doctoral candidate is set on an academic career, one survey suggests that more than three-quarters are. The shame of working so hard for so long, only to fail to land the longed-for job, is everywhere.

But shame is also abundant among those who somehow beat the odds and stay in academia.

There is a wealth of guidance available on how to navigate an academic career. Most of the counsel aimed at early career academics majors on what Megan MacKenzie, professor in international law at Simon Fraser University, calls the “holy trifecta” of publications in top journals, money (in the form of research grants) and professional networks. But MacKenzie concludes that such “toxic” advice is “staggering, unrealistic and overwhelming”.


THE Campus views: Researchers are too critical – we need to give ourselves (and others) a break


So should early career academics dismiss the career advice of mature colleagues? Not so fast – it all depends on who is giving the advice.

From my own experience, the best and most trustworthy career insights come from those academics who are willing to critically detach themselves from their own profession. One such person was the great German social historian Max Weber.

Weber may long pre-date the modern era of promiscuous academic reproduction, but it is interesting that even in his day, academia had a distinctly Sturm und Drang feel to it. In a 1917 guest lecture at the university of Munich, titled “Science as a Vocation”, he described academic life as “a mad hazard”. To endure it, his advice was both simple and striking: prepare yourself for regular bouts of professional shame and humiliation.

Personal experience has demonstrated that Weber’s advice is still relevant. Of course, every profession has a shame quotient. But early career academics need to realise, if they haven’t already, that inducing shame in academia is not just a blood sport – it is the very life blood of the profession.

This is for two compelling reasons. First is the rigid hierarchy that long pre-dates even Weber but that universities retain. This military-style echelon system lends weight to the carrot-flavoured sticks used to manage human resources and guard against excessive boat-rocking.

Promotion is a means not just to better pay but also to improved status; the motivational pulling power of a new title on the door of a larger office should not be underestimated. By contrast, failure to progress can be a source of shame and even contempt, especially when others overtake us. We hate it when our friends become successful, sang Morrissey; he should have added that if they’re colleagues, it’s even worse.

Second, to understand the routine humiliation that comes with being an academic, look no further than the senior academics who are the custodians of “professional capital”. According to Patrick Dunleavy, emeritus professor of political science at the London School of Economics, senior figures in academia have often acquired “mildly neurotic traits along with their eminence”. Usually, these personality quirks do not matter much – your august scholars will moderate how far they expose such hang-ups. But Dunleavy argues that there are crucial moments in academic life – such as job appointments and promotion decisions – when these quirks can be the source of real shame for those at the receiving end.

Take, for example, peer refereeing. The anonymity of the review process creates what psychologists call deindividuation. Or, to put it another way, the veil of anonymity can transform reviewers into heartless bastards.

This is the notorious “Reviewer 2” phenomenon. David Peterson, Lucken professor of political science at Iowa State University, analysed this in his 2020 Social Science Quarterly article, appropriately titled “Dear Reviewer 2: Go f’ yourself”. Peterson describes Reviewer 2 as “dismissive of other people’s work, lazy, belligerent, and smug”.

Although I am old enough to have circled the block a few times, I am still amazed by the endless creativity of those seeking new ways to put others to shame in academia. Early career academics who think they have the resilience to cope with such treatment should double-check that they have really thought that through.

“I have found that only a few…could endure this situation without coming to grief,” Weber told his audience in 1917. He died two years later of the Spanish flu, aged 56. But had he lived another 100 years, it is hard to believe that his observations would be greatly different. Indeed, it is hard to believe that the shame should not have driven even him out of the profession decades ago.

Michael Marinetto is a senior lecturer in management at Cardiff Business School.

POSTSCRIPT:

Print headline: Reviewer 2’s malice is an inescapable fact of academe

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Reader's comments (5)

Although I agree with quite a bit of this article (particularly seeing others progress more quickly), I have a few comments. It is true that a new title could be nice but if promoted the change in pay would not be that great and I would retain the same office that I have had since I was a lecturer. Given that I am near the end of my career, there is thus no disincentive to prevent me from engaging in the role of the academic to be a disruptor. In fact, unless one is particularly bad, I have seen no evidence that behaving as a good citizen makes much difference. It all comes down to grant income and those with large amounts of this get on rather than those with better h-indices. The real issue is that pay has not kept up and promotion is necessary for early-career academics to maintain a reasonable standard of living. I am not surprised that so few home students are interested in research degrees or the academic profession in my own area (Engineering) despite relatively generous bursaries being on offer.
Research grant monies and publications dwarf teaching effectiveness for career advancement. Despite tuition and classroom enrollment paying the university's bills.
I am not sure what this is about, but if anything it is an example of bad practice, rather than the norm, and as such should be sanctioned by those in a position to do so. I was an editor on a top journal for a decade, and have reviewed many journal submissions. It is up to the editor to sanction bad behaviour, and not invite reviewers who indulge in such behaviour. I have also reviewed many research grants. In that case there is no "editor" function, but it is up to knowledgeable committee members to winnow out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to reviewer comments. On top of that, and against conventional wisdom, I am also a fan of metrics, particularly when dealing with multiple evaluations, and particularly when the items being evaluated - promotion, research grant - are substantial, not as the only determining factor, but as a key factor along with everything else. Thus, h-index (subject to usual qualifiers), citation scores (subject to usual qualifiers) have a certain objectivity, and overcome the essentially impossible task of going through all the key publications in detail, many of which will be outside one's area of expertise. I have to say that as both a recipient and an "inflicter" I have found that the system of science and scholarship works - with good faith and management.
Max Weber was one of the founding intellectuals of the then nascent discipline of sociology. He was extremely successful until his untimely death and had an excellent grasp of many themes in historical and systematic sociology, economics and political science. The article and the curious picture seem to insinuate that he was victim or survivor of humiliations that are deemed as "the very life blood of the academic profession". Nothing could be further from the truth. The article had benefited by a targeted read of Joachim Radkau's biography. Moreover, Weber's analysis of the situation of young academics cannot be cited as support for the misguided pop-psychological interpretation of the author. Weber referred to the specific conditions of German academic institutions.The path to a professorship went through a second thesis after the doctorate ("Habilitation") to obtain the title "Privatdozent" (without salary of course), i.e. a lengthy period of precariousness which was the source of the stress Weber analyzed in "Science as a Vocation". As the author of this article only uses one paragraph of this writing he completely distorts its meaning in order to justify his misanthropic view of Academia as based on humiliation.
Thank you for your ChatGPT inspired reply. Please read the said Weber lecture and the offending sentence is very clear and definitely not take out of context.

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