The Bias of Blind Reviews

Durham, N. C.—In his columns, books and public appearances, Professor Mike Adams has become something of a crusader for the first amendment rights of students but he has experienced his own share of professional censorship.

Recently, the criminologist wrote an article on legislation that he has done some research on. “The Hate Crimes Act is completely unscientific,” Professor Adams said at a conference here. The instances of black-on-white crime outweigh those of white-on-black crime by a factor of seven (8.5 to 1.5), Professor Adams found.

Professor Adams teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He spoke at a conference sponsored by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Five academic journals rejected the piece that Professor Adams wrote. One reviewer wrote that the piece was “not appropriate” for an academic journal but might be more suitable in one of the professor’s columns.

“This was really interesting because it was supposed to be a blind review,” Professor Adams said. In such a review, the critics are usually uncertain of the identity of the author whose work they are reviewing.

As of this writing, Professor Adams’ piece is scheduled to appear in Judiciature. “We need more academic journals like Academic Questions, which is published by the National Association of Scholars,” Professor Adams says.

Indeed, published articles count heavily in hiring and tenure-granting practices of colleges and universities. Hence, without publishing articles in their disciplines, professors find it difficult to get, let alone keep, jobs.

This recent experience is not the first of its kind for Professor Adams. Although he has written a book subtitled Confessions of a Conservative College Professor, he encountered the heavy hand of the academic censor while still relatively liberal.

Professor Adams had journeyed to Ecuador to examine the prison system when participating in a faculty exchange program. His conclusion: “Our [American prison] system is the worst except for all the others.”

“In Ecuador, prisoners routinely had no attorneys, no juries and had to wait two to three years for a trial on a sentence of two to three months,” Professor Adams reported. He wrote an article on his trip for Humanity & Society magazine.

Although initially accepted, the magazine’s editor called Professor Adams to renege on that publication promise. The editor, Michelle Stone of Youngstown State University in Ohio, claimed that Professor Adams made “culturally unacceptable remarks about food.”

What Professor Adams had done was to point out that rotten meat and vegetables were routinely sold to prisons, an exchange he had personally witnessed. His article was published when Stone left her job but how many other articles was she able to suppress for similarly “unacceptable remarks,” along with the careers of their authors?

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.