Very interesting, Alex! As always! You might think that, if it’s peer review that’s responsible, we’d expect to see a switch to writing much less bland stuff after tenure in big US institutions. But I haven’t really seen that? I feel like most people tend to keep publishing as they did pre tenure or they shift a bit but the quality goes down. Of course, you might think peer review confers prestige and people want that prestige before and after tenure, but I feel like monographs really confer prestige for post-tenure people, and they’re much more amenable to doing interesting things. Yet people don’t, on the whole. I suppose another explanation is that we’re selecting out the more interesting people by demanding success at peer review in order to get a job. But again I haven’t really seen that in my interactions with grad communities. Of course many wonderful people don’t get permanent jobs, but I don’t think the job market is biased against innovation? Perhaps the selection is happening earlier than that—hard to tell. My own view is that there’s obviously terrible bland stuff in the journals, but there’s also terrific stuff there, and it doesn’t look very stylistically exciting, but the ideas are just as exciting as anything I’ve seen in attempts to de-blandify analytic philosophy. My own view is that some of the big questions we try to answer require lots and lots of detailed work to build the big picture. And that detailed work doesn’t look very exciting in its individual parts. But it is building towards a large scale view on an important question.
Thanks! And you’re right. I didn’t mean to ascribe sole responsibility to peer review (nor does Heatherwick exclusively blame the “crit” for what happened to architecture). As I suggested in my reply to one of the other comments here, I now see that the way peer review works in philosophy might be a mere symptom of some deeper cultural issue.
I’m not sure if you meant to suggest that, by publishing monographs, tenured academics are avoiding peer review. In my experience of academic presses, that’s not the case. First you need reviewers to sign off on your book proposal in order to get a contract, then you have reviewers looking at the draft manuscript and requiring changes. You face the same pressures as with journal articles and likewise end up with something that reads like a legal contract. Trade presses are a very different story. I can’t express how much I’ve loved having an editor, and how much the editorial process seems to push in exactly the opposite direction to academic peer review: towards bolder, more engaging, less defensive, more personal, more beautiful writing.
I am, however, going to try hard to see the apparent blandness of journal articles in a different light, following your suggestion. So far, however, I struggle to see how a lot of unexciting works could be adding up to an exciting picture. I think this comes down to meta-philosophy. Your vision makes sense in the sciences: a lot of boring little results in chemistry might together constitute an exciting paradigm shift. But I regard philosophy as a branch of literature, as I explained in my earlier post. I can’t imagine a lot of boring poems adding up to an interesting metapoem. But maybe the obstacle is my failure of imagination.
Yes, I suspect the meta-philosophy point is the crux of this. And I think it's also quite possible that the correct meta-philosophy is different for different areas. After all, philosophy doesn't seem a very unified enterprise to me, and I suspect we go wrong if we try to think about all parts of it similarly--people often point out that the modern university has created barriers between disciplines where there should be no barriers, but it's less often noted that it's given the misleading impression of unity in disciplines where there is little. So perhaps the areas that interest you more are more like literature and the areas that interest me more are more like the sciences.
I also wonder whether enthusiasm for paradigm-shifts divides us as well. For lots of the questions that I'm interested in, there isn't much evidence at the moment that any sort of paradigm-shift is necessary. So I wouldn't really want all the papers in a journal to add up to one. I just want them to add up to a true picture of the target of study.
On the monographs vs articles point: I just meant that it's a lot easier to get stuff past book referees than journal referees. And even academic press books really do seem to permit a lot of leeway that journals don't. But even if we wouldn't see the better stuff in books, we'd likely see it in blogs or other sorts of unreviewed writings, or perhaps in trade books. Perhaps in edited collections, where the editorial standards are much laxer. And I haven't really seen that. I've seen very good stuff in all these, of course, just not better than in journals (possibly easier and more pleasing to read, I'll grant you, but I haven't seen better or bigger ideas--but again, this might be a function of the areas that interest us; I can only speak to a smallish part of philosophy).
Thank you for engaging on this. Conversations like this are exactly what I hoped for when I started this substack!
I suspect you’re right about our differences. I do perceive bigger and more exciting ideas in blogs and books than in journals, but that’s in my areas of interest. I’m reading Brook Ziporyn’s new book at the moment, which goes so much deeper than most of the philosophy I read. I can’t imagine it getting through what William Petty called the “gauntloop of all petulant wits” and into the journals. Of course, published with an academic press, it had to get through some. Elsewhere I’ve mentioned Ellen Marie Chen’s extraordinary self-published book, In Praise of Nothing, which is so good it would never have got past even the review process of an academic book. And then there is some wonderful stuff here on substack.
I don’t have a great love of paradigm shifts, I should say. I was just trying to think of how, in the sciences, a lot of boring small things could add up to a big exciting thing. Maybe my example of a big exciting thing should have been a major discovery arrived at by incremental steps. As far as paradigm shifts go, I’d prefer it in philosophy if there were no paradigm in need of shifting in the first place.
Fundamentally, I think we differ on this: I agree that we should work towards a true picture of the target of study in philosophy, but I think there is no end of true pictures to be taken, and if we get stuck on one we are neglecting infinite others. I just think it’s in the fundamental nature of reality, at its deepest level, that we can frame things in endless ways and capture them from endless perspectives, but none is ever exhaustive or decisive. To me the magic lies in finding new framings. Otherwise not only do things get boring, we create the hubristic illusion that we’ve found the ultimate truth, and then nemesis follows.
Oh, I'm glad the engagement is OK! What you say at the end here really helps. I'll have to think more about that. And I'll have a look at those books as well. I do like the idea of multiple perspectives on the truth! That sounds like the sort of thing that fits with my general philosophical views as well -- and who doesn't love a meta philosophy that matches their first-order philosophy?!
Interesting piece. I think the institution of peer review has interacted with the pressure to publish to create a culture of safe and boring scholastic disputation. The incentives in philosophy turn writing into an endless game of pleasing journal editors. There is very little connection to anything outside of that — no engagement with anything but words. I think this kind of a system predictably becomes insular, inbred, detached from consequences, and, yes, deeply boring.
A first-time reader, here. You are a wonderful writer. As someone who complains (but, for I am a good and patriotic citizen, that is all I do: complain) about contemporary architecture all the time, and who loathes the rigidity and cookie-cutter articles of much of contemporary philosophical articles, I found myself agreeing with you for most of this. I have been a research assistant in philosophy, a president of my college's philosophy club, and write my blog here and do my own research. I say this to say, I have come across immense barrages of dogshit philosophy articles--which, by the way, is a phenomenon that begins to take on the facade of an antinomy, given how hard it is to get published: that difficult to cut through the process, but that is the result?
I will say, the analogy section of the post to philosophy is intuitive and agreeable, but not quite persuasive in itself, as you do not give many examples. Neither do you mention that there are philosophical equivalents to The Marine Building in article-form: philosophy that somehow rises above to a beautiful and elegant form, without sacrificing any argumentative rigor. I think about articles like Thomas Nagel's "What It's Like to Be a Bat," or I would also suggest anything by Janet McCracken, "Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly," for example, or her recent article on the aesthetics of gadgets and phones, or honestly a lot of stuff in the field of everyday aesthetics. I'm just skimming off of the top of my mind here for the examples, so it's not exhaustive or representative, but there are philosophers who fight back successfully. But, why I remain in agreement with you is that it is a "fighting back," that the norm and usual-case is ugly. And I've read essays that come out in places as esteemed as The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, where I'm like...Huh? How?
You’re right that I didn’t give examples of boring articles—I didn’t have any specifically in mind. Browsing through a recent issue of a Leiter-ranked journal just feels to me how looking at Vancouver harbour must feel to Heatherwick.
You’re also right that I could have mentioned exceptions. Do you think I Nagel’s article was peer reviewed? I don’t know if Phil Review was doing proper peer review in 1974.
I’m intrigued to check out Janet McCracken’s writing.
you don't mind me asking, what has your experience with academic peer-review been like? I for the most part agree with the points you raise in this post (both architecture and philosophy _do_ need a more varied landscape than the trends, bandwagons and bureaucratic hellholes of the contemporary offer), but I would be hesitant to place the blame on peer-review processes (especially when in my experience they have actively operated in favour of diverging from already existing thought) when far more likely and egregious culprits exist in, say, the copy-paste syllabi of philosophy and philosophy adjacent courses. There's nothing wrong with rereading, of course, (nor is it a crime for two different departments to employ the same theoretical traditions and authors) but it comes at the cost of being exposed to alternative theories and models of thinking. The canonisation of and repeated exposure to specific scholars seems to me more responsible for the blandemic.
Then again, for transparency's sake, I am not a philosopher by training; I study Cultural Analysis in the Dutch tradition, which is a considerably younger field and which may not yet have fallen as deeply into the particular traps you have detailed here. Anyways, short rant of insights over, I enjoyed the article and am curious to hear what you have to say!
Thank you—this is a very useful comment! I’ve been arguing that peer review in philosophy functions to enforce conformity and entrench bias. But your comment makes me see that I might have confused cause and effect. You’re right that peer review can function to diversify thinking, by forcing authors to engage a wider range of ideas and see things from more perspectives. In philosophy (in my experience as an author, reviewer, and editor), peer review seems to work in the opposite way. It narrows thinking, because it gets interpreted as a sort of industry certificate. For the average reviewer, accepting an article is saying: this qualifies as the sort of thing that gets published in the Big Journals. But I’m now starting to think that this isn’t because of peer review itself; rather, it’s a deeper cultural norm within philosophy that makes peer review work in that way.
And as for canonisation, I couldn't agree more. We teach a required module at St Andrews called "Reading Philosophy", in which advanced undergraduates have to read set series of articles--all Western, almost all from the analytic tradition. It's totally Confucian and might as well be called "official exemplars".
Thanks for clarifying! I think there is certainly something to be critiqued about the entanglements present between philosophical (and more broadly intellectual/academic) research and the bureaucratic/profit-oriented institutions that prop up Big Journals and allow them to operate, and the ways these inherently ideological entanglements encourage demand for (here I am loosely gesturing towards because I haven't yet thought of a name for these categories, if they exist as I imagine them) theory-as-archetype ("this is a critique of postmodernism!") and theory-as-identitarian ("I hope they can tell I'm not a classist pig!"), rather than theory-as-insight. 100% with you that the attention and status which the "industry certificate" affords is a threat to the potentials (and real-world applications) of research.
This is a nice post Alex, the book sounds interesting. Another thing I notice with peer review in philosophy, which you may have already thought about, is a sort of weird pretence about making very small differences appear like huge consequential differences. It seems like a counter reaction of the conformity. I find this a lot in papers in moral philosophy and meta-ethics. I sometimes feel the same happening with architecture, when an architect friend of mine might ask what I think of a new building, and I find it hard to see what makes it different from all the other angular glass covered buildings.
Thanks Saranga! That’s a really good point. Two stories on this.
1. The journalist Will Storr was walking with Heatherwick somewhere in London. Heatherwick pointed at a building—a glass and concrete rectangle surrounded by other glass and concrete rectangles—and said: “That building won a very prestigious award”. Storr, baffled, asked why. “Look closely at the windows”, Heatherwick replied. “They’re tinted slightly white”.
2. This one is from Heatherwick’s book. He was at a launch for a design of a new hospital. The architect said he’d designed it to resemble a “Tuscan hill town”. When he revealed the design, all Heatherwick could see was a ten storey concrete box, with a few smaller boxes around it. Yet the expert audience was charmed by the “Tuscan hill town”.
Storr told his story to make precisely your point: a culture of conformity exaggerates tiny differences to hide its own conformism. And yes, I see this in philosophy journals too.
Perhaps it's just a different manifestation of a similar impulse but in academic literary studies journals we find no repression of the linguistic ornate or grotesque but suffer the same central issue, which is a tendency toward sameness and a lack of originality. The words are there (sometimes way too many) but the ideas aren't.
Like you, I do think peer review and its cognate in graduate school "training" are a part of this but I'd lay the problem at the feet of disciplinarity as such. The very idea of "the discipline" is undergirded by gatekeeping and policing. Scientism can't be the main cause of the blanding across humanistic disciplines as e.g. peer review in literary studies does exist but is far indeed from scientific. Rather it is those who embrace humanistic work as discipline model the most feverently who believe and practice the idea that there is a wrong way and right way to do such work, and the wrong way must be repressed in favor of the right way. Of course the right way is never to struggle with big questions, or to call the very idea of the right way to account.
I don't know if it's necessarily that maintaining scholarly standards will always lead to the Harrison Bergeron effect, although I wouldn't be surprised if so. I do think that the more invested powerful people are in the "the discipline" model of scholarly work, the less interesting it gets.
Very interesting, Alex! As always! You might think that, if it’s peer review that’s responsible, we’d expect to see a switch to writing much less bland stuff after tenure in big US institutions. But I haven’t really seen that? I feel like most people tend to keep publishing as they did pre tenure or they shift a bit but the quality goes down. Of course, you might think peer review confers prestige and people want that prestige before and after tenure, but I feel like monographs really confer prestige for post-tenure people, and they’re much more amenable to doing interesting things. Yet people don’t, on the whole. I suppose another explanation is that we’re selecting out the more interesting people by demanding success at peer review in order to get a job. But again I haven’t really seen that in my interactions with grad communities. Of course many wonderful people don’t get permanent jobs, but I don’t think the job market is biased against innovation? Perhaps the selection is happening earlier than that—hard to tell. My own view is that there’s obviously terrible bland stuff in the journals, but there’s also terrific stuff there, and it doesn’t look very stylistically exciting, but the ideas are just as exciting as anything I’ve seen in attempts to de-blandify analytic philosophy. My own view is that some of the big questions we try to answer require lots and lots of detailed work to build the big picture. And that detailed work doesn’t look very exciting in its individual parts. But it is building towards a large scale view on an important question.
Thanks! And you’re right. I didn’t mean to ascribe sole responsibility to peer review (nor does Heatherwick exclusively blame the “crit” for what happened to architecture). As I suggested in my reply to one of the other comments here, I now see that the way peer review works in philosophy might be a mere symptom of some deeper cultural issue.
I’m not sure if you meant to suggest that, by publishing monographs, tenured academics are avoiding peer review. In my experience of academic presses, that’s not the case. First you need reviewers to sign off on your book proposal in order to get a contract, then you have reviewers looking at the draft manuscript and requiring changes. You face the same pressures as with journal articles and likewise end up with something that reads like a legal contract. Trade presses are a very different story. I can’t express how much I’ve loved having an editor, and how much the editorial process seems to push in exactly the opposite direction to academic peer review: towards bolder, more engaging, less defensive, more personal, more beautiful writing.
I am, however, going to try hard to see the apparent blandness of journal articles in a different light, following your suggestion. So far, however, I struggle to see how a lot of unexciting works could be adding up to an exciting picture. I think this comes down to meta-philosophy. Your vision makes sense in the sciences: a lot of boring little results in chemistry might together constitute an exciting paradigm shift. But I regard philosophy as a branch of literature, as I explained in my earlier post. I can’t imagine a lot of boring poems adding up to an interesting metapoem. But maybe the obstacle is my failure of imagination.
Yes, I suspect the meta-philosophy point is the crux of this. And I think it's also quite possible that the correct meta-philosophy is different for different areas. After all, philosophy doesn't seem a very unified enterprise to me, and I suspect we go wrong if we try to think about all parts of it similarly--people often point out that the modern university has created barriers between disciplines where there should be no barriers, but it's less often noted that it's given the misleading impression of unity in disciplines where there is little. So perhaps the areas that interest you more are more like literature and the areas that interest me more are more like the sciences.
I also wonder whether enthusiasm for paradigm-shifts divides us as well. For lots of the questions that I'm interested in, there isn't much evidence at the moment that any sort of paradigm-shift is necessary. So I wouldn't really want all the papers in a journal to add up to one. I just want them to add up to a true picture of the target of study.
On the monographs vs articles point: I just meant that it's a lot easier to get stuff past book referees than journal referees. And even academic press books really do seem to permit a lot of leeway that journals don't. But even if we wouldn't see the better stuff in books, we'd likely see it in blogs or other sorts of unreviewed writings, or perhaps in trade books. Perhaps in edited collections, where the editorial standards are much laxer. And I haven't really seen that. I've seen very good stuff in all these, of course, just not better than in journals (possibly easier and more pleasing to read, I'll grant you, but I haven't seen better or bigger ideas--but again, this might be a function of the areas that interest us; I can only speak to a smallish part of philosophy).
Thank you for engaging on this. Conversations like this are exactly what I hoped for when I started this substack!
I suspect you’re right about our differences. I do perceive bigger and more exciting ideas in blogs and books than in journals, but that’s in my areas of interest. I’m reading Brook Ziporyn’s new book at the moment, which goes so much deeper than most of the philosophy I read. I can’t imagine it getting through what William Petty called the “gauntloop of all petulant wits” and into the journals. Of course, published with an academic press, it had to get through some. Elsewhere I’ve mentioned Ellen Marie Chen’s extraordinary self-published book, In Praise of Nothing, which is so good it would never have got past even the review process of an academic book. And then there is some wonderful stuff here on substack.
I don’t have a great love of paradigm shifts, I should say. I was just trying to think of how, in the sciences, a lot of boring small things could add up to a big exciting thing. Maybe my example of a big exciting thing should have been a major discovery arrived at by incremental steps. As far as paradigm shifts go, I’d prefer it in philosophy if there were no paradigm in need of shifting in the first place.
Fundamentally, I think we differ on this: I agree that we should work towards a true picture of the target of study in philosophy, but I think there is no end of true pictures to be taken, and if we get stuck on one we are neglecting infinite others. I just think it’s in the fundamental nature of reality, at its deepest level, that we can frame things in endless ways and capture them from endless perspectives, but none is ever exhaustive or decisive. To me the magic lies in finding new framings. Otherwise not only do things get boring, we create the hubristic illusion that we’ve found the ultimate truth, and then nemesis follows.
Oh, I'm glad the engagement is OK! What you say at the end here really helps. I'll have to think more about that. And I'll have a look at those books as well. I do like the idea of multiple perspectives on the truth! That sounds like the sort of thing that fits with my general philosophical views as well -- and who doesn't love a meta philosophy that matches their first-order philosophy?!
Interesting piece. I think the institution of peer review has interacted with the pressure to publish to create a culture of safe and boring scholastic disputation. The incentives in philosophy turn writing into an endless game of pleasing journal editors. There is very little connection to anything outside of that — no engagement with anything but words. I think this kind of a system predictably becomes insular, inbred, detached from consequences, and, yes, deeply boring.
A first-time reader, here. You are a wonderful writer. As someone who complains (but, for I am a good and patriotic citizen, that is all I do: complain) about contemporary architecture all the time, and who loathes the rigidity and cookie-cutter articles of much of contemporary philosophical articles, I found myself agreeing with you for most of this. I have been a research assistant in philosophy, a president of my college's philosophy club, and write my blog here and do my own research. I say this to say, I have come across immense barrages of dogshit philosophy articles--which, by the way, is a phenomenon that begins to take on the facade of an antinomy, given how hard it is to get published: that difficult to cut through the process, but that is the result?
I will say, the analogy section of the post to philosophy is intuitive and agreeable, but not quite persuasive in itself, as you do not give many examples. Neither do you mention that there are philosophical equivalents to The Marine Building in article-form: philosophy that somehow rises above to a beautiful and elegant form, without sacrificing any argumentative rigor. I think about articles like Thomas Nagel's "What It's Like to Be a Bat," or I would also suggest anything by Janet McCracken, "Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly," for example, or her recent article on the aesthetics of gadgets and phones, or honestly a lot of stuff in the field of everyday aesthetics. I'm just skimming off of the top of my mind here for the examples, so it's not exhaustive or representative, but there are philosophers who fight back successfully. But, why I remain in agreement with you is that it is a "fighting back," that the norm and usual-case is ugly. And I've read essays that come out in places as esteemed as The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, where I'm like...Huh? How?
Cheers, and thanks for the post.
--Nicholas
Thanks!
You’re right that I didn’t give examples of boring articles—I didn’t have any specifically in mind. Browsing through a recent issue of a Leiter-ranked journal just feels to me how looking at Vancouver harbour must feel to Heatherwick.
You’re also right that I could have mentioned exceptions. Do you think I Nagel’s article was peer reviewed? I don’t know if Phil Review was doing proper peer review in 1974.
I’m intrigued to check out Janet McCracken’s writing.
bravo
you don't mind me asking, what has your experience with academic peer-review been like? I for the most part agree with the points you raise in this post (both architecture and philosophy _do_ need a more varied landscape than the trends, bandwagons and bureaucratic hellholes of the contemporary offer), but I would be hesitant to place the blame on peer-review processes (especially when in my experience they have actively operated in favour of diverging from already existing thought) when far more likely and egregious culprits exist in, say, the copy-paste syllabi of philosophy and philosophy adjacent courses. There's nothing wrong with rereading, of course, (nor is it a crime for two different departments to employ the same theoretical traditions and authors) but it comes at the cost of being exposed to alternative theories and models of thinking. The canonisation of and repeated exposure to specific scholars seems to me more responsible for the blandemic.
Then again, for transparency's sake, I am not a philosopher by training; I study Cultural Analysis in the Dutch tradition, which is a considerably younger field and which may not yet have fallen as deeply into the particular traps you have detailed here. Anyways, short rant of insights over, I enjoyed the article and am curious to hear what you have to say!
Thank you—this is a very useful comment! I’ve been arguing that peer review in philosophy functions to enforce conformity and entrench bias. But your comment makes me see that I might have confused cause and effect. You’re right that peer review can function to diversify thinking, by forcing authors to engage a wider range of ideas and see things from more perspectives. In philosophy (in my experience as an author, reviewer, and editor), peer review seems to work in the opposite way. It narrows thinking, because it gets interpreted as a sort of industry certificate. For the average reviewer, accepting an article is saying: this qualifies as the sort of thing that gets published in the Big Journals. But I’m now starting to think that this isn’t because of peer review itself; rather, it’s a deeper cultural norm within philosophy that makes peer review work in that way.
I’ll have to ponder this more…
And as for canonisation, I couldn't agree more. We teach a required module at St Andrews called "Reading Philosophy", in which advanced undergraduates have to read set series of articles--all Western, almost all from the analytic tradition. It's totally Confucian and might as well be called "official exemplars".
Thanks for clarifying! I think there is certainly something to be critiqued about the entanglements present between philosophical (and more broadly intellectual/academic) research and the bureaucratic/profit-oriented institutions that prop up Big Journals and allow them to operate, and the ways these inherently ideological entanglements encourage demand for (here I am loosely gesturing towards because I haven't yet thought of a name for these categories, if they exist as I imagine them) theory-as-archetype ("this is a critique of postmodernism!") and theory-as-identitarian ("I hope they can tell I'm not a classist pig!"), rather than theory-as-insight. 100% with you that the attention and status which the "industry certificate" affords is a threat to the potentials (and real-world applications) of research.
I forgot a very important "If" at the beginning of my first sentence, my apologies!
This is a nice post Alex, the book sounds interesting. Another thing I notice with peer review in philosophy, which you may have already thought about, is a sort of weird pretence about making very small differences appear like huge consequential differences. It seems like a counter reaction of the conformity. I find this a lot in papers in moral philosophy and meta-ethics. I sometimes feel the same happening with architecture, when an architect friend of mine might ask what I think of a new building, and I find it hard to see what makes it different from all the other angular glass covered buildings.
Thanks Saranga! That’s a really good point. Two stories on this.
1. The journalist Will Storr was walking with Heatherwick somewhere in London. Heatherwick pointed at a building—a glass and concrete rectangle surrounded by other glass and concrete rectangles—and said: “That building won a very prestigious award”. Storr, baffled, asked why. “Look closely at the windows”, Heatherwick replied. “They’re tinted slightly white”.
2. This one is from Heatherwick’s book. He was at a launch for a design of a new hospital. The architect said he’d designed it to resemble a “Tuscan hill town”. When he revealed the design, all Heatherwick could see was a ten storey concrete box, with a few smaller boxes around it. Yet the expert audience was charmed by the “Tuscan hill town”.
Storr told his story to make precisely your point: a culture of conformity exaggerates tiny differences to hide its own conformism. And yes, I see this in philosophy journals too.
Perhaps it's just a different manifestation of a similar impulse but in academic literary studies journals we find no repression of the linguistic ornate or grotesque but suffer the same central issue, which is a tendency toward sameness and a lack of originality. The words are there (sometimes way too many) but the ideas aren't.
Like you, I do think peer review and its cognate in graduate school "training" are a part of this but I'd lay the problem at the feet of disciplinarity as such. The very idea of "the discipline" is undergirded by gatekeeping and policing. Scientism can't be the main cause of the blanding across humanistic disciplines as e.g. peer review in literary studies does exist but is far indeed from scientific. Rather it is those who embrace humanistic work as discipline model the most feverently who believe and practice the idea that there is a wrong way and right way to do such work, and the wrong way must be repressed in favor of the right way. Of course the right way is never to struggle with big questions, or to call the very idea of the right way to account.
I don't know if it's necessarily that maintaining scholarly standards will always lead to the Harrison Bergeron effect, although I wouldn't be surprised if so. I do think that the more invested powerful people are in the "the discipline" model of scholarly work, the less interesting it gets.