Retraction, Free Speech, and Editorial Ethics: A Defense of the Retraction of Lawrence M. Mead’s “Poverty and Culture”

Abstract

The article is a defense of the retraction of Lawrence M. Mead’s “Poverty and Culture” from the journal Society in 2020. Four reasons for retraction are adduced: the unreliable content; the faulty review process; the redundancy of the article in relation to previous articles by Mead; and the defamation of racial and national groups. The article discusses the ethics of retraction in general, arguing that retraction is an indispensable procedure for correcting errors and maintaining high academic standards. The article also seeks to allay the apprehension that retraction is contrary to the spirit of free speech. Since a statement of retraction is a form of discourse and an exercise of academic judgment by the editors, retraction is an instance, not a violation, of free speech.

Background on the Mead Retraction

On July 21, 2020, Society published “Poverty and Culture” by Lawrence M. Mead, a professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. The Abstract included these lines:

Attempts to attribute long-term poverty to social barriers, such as racial discrimination or lack of jobs, have failed . . . More plausible is cultural difference. The United States has an individualist culture, derived from Europe, where most people seek to achieve personal goals. Racial minorities, however, all come from non-Western cultures where most people seek to adjust to outside conditions rather than seeking change.¹

Mead’s article will be discussed in greater depth, but the passage above gives an idea of his binary thinking: Europe is equated with initiative, while non-Western cultures are associated with conformity.

Another feature of Mead’s thought, evident above, is an unqualified style of generalization. Saying that “all” minorities come from non-Western cultures strains credulity. What about immigrants from India who were educated in British-style schools? What about the many North Africans who are bilingual in Arabic and French? What about people of mixed racial backgrounds? And the massive category of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in the USA—are they “all” non-Western? Mead identifies Mexican Americans and other “Hispanics” (his preferred term) as non-Western, but he does not explain why.

What exactly does “Western” mean in Mead’s lexicon? Is “Western” a geographic concept? If so, then Mead is abusing the term because Mexico is in the Western hemisphere. It is also Western ethnically, and linguistically by virtue of Spanish ancestry and colonization. Or is “Western” supposed to be a cultural category indicating that one has imbibed the ethos of “individualism,” regardless of one’s geographic origin? If so, calling “Western” people individualistic is merely a tautology. Even before the article begins, we are confronted with incongruous assertions.

On July 30, 2020, Springer issued a notice saying that the then editor in chief, Jonathan Imber, “took full responsibility” and was going to request a retraction from the author. It added, “We are reviewing the publishing process which was followed in this case and will make any necessary changes to prevent a situation like this happening again.”² On July 31, Springer³ retracted the article.

Owing to a lack of editorial oversight, on both content and process grounds, this article should not have been published. Following an expedited investigation, the article has now been retracted and removed from the journal’s website with the full support of the Editor-in-Chief . . . We are doing everything we can to make sure this does not happen again.⁴

Mead did not agree to the retraction. He republished it in Academic Questions,⁵ a journal of the National Association of Scholars. The retraction, then, was implemented by the editor in chief and the publisher, not by the author: an editorial rather than authorial retraction. It could also be called a “forced” retraction.

Forced retraction is a vexing issue. Yet, it is eminently justified, I suggest, when multiple reasons for retraction converge. “Poverty and Culture” (1) does not meet professional standards in its academic content; (2) was not peer reviewed; (3) was redundant in relationship to previous publications by Mead; and (4) defames national and racial groups.

Finally, the retraction of Mead’s article was a communicative act expressing the capacity of Society to recognize a mistake, to examine and modify its review procedures, and to reaffirm its mission: notably, its commitment to publishing articles that convey diverse viewpoints, including diverse political orientations, if the articles are academically sound. Retraction is a form of meta-speech, a commentary on the kinds of discourse that do and do not align with the journal’s standards. As a speech-act unto itself, retraction is an exercise in free speech and not a violation of it.

The Need for a Symposium on Retraction

This article is one of four papers in a symposium devoted to the subject of retraction. Andreas Hess and I became coeditors in chief of Society in January 2021. We were not involved in the decision to retract Mead’s article. We decided, however, that a symposium could generate a deeper understanding not only of the retraction of “Poverty and Culture” but also of the academic and ethical issues associated with the practice of retraction in general.

The retraction of “Poverty and Culture” has its share of supporters.⁶ It has also fueled critics who suggest that retraction has become a political tool for repressing conservative ideas.⁷ My purpose in this article is to demonstrate that the retraction of Mead’s article was justified on purely academic grounds. When a publisher retracts an article, it does not usually go into a full analysis of the demerits of the retracted piece. The rationale for retracting Mead’s article which I delineate here is obviously post hoc and more fully reasoned than the short statement of retraction provided by the publisher of Society, Springer, in July 2020. But my discussion simply amplifies terms found in the 2020 retraction notice and in Springer’s retraction policies.

Despite the firmness of my support for the retraction of Mead’s article, I recognize that editorial decision-making belongs to the sphere of ethics, not science. A decision was made to retract; there were compelling reasons for it. It was, however, a choice—a professional judgment—and not an inevitable procedure like the arrest of someone caught flagrantly violating a criminal law. Retraction is contentious, as this symposium shows. There is no law of retraction, no constitutional or civil jurisprudence bearing on it. There are not even any relevant rulings from the American Association of University Professors.⁸ The silence of the AAUP is particularly telling, for the AAUP is the closest thing we have in the USA to an arbiter of the standards of academic freedom and professionalism. Founded in 1915, the organization has taken the lead in defining concepts such as tenure of employment, freedom to choose one’s path of research, freedom of teaching, and freedom of extracurricular expression.⁹ Yet, the AAUP has not produced any position papers on retraction. This omission suggests one of two things. Either retraction, like the grading of exams, is so obviously an exercise of academic freedom that it needs no defense, or the AAUP regards the editing of journals as outside its jurisdiction—that is, not controlled by the principles of academic freedom that apply within universities (which is the AAUP’s chief concern). In either case, nothing in the AAUP’s discourse on academic freedom speaks against retraction.

Another professional organization, less well known among academics at large but important for editors of academic journals, does address the topic of retraction. The Committee on Publication Ethics, founded in 1997, is an association of editors which compiles best practices, including procedures for the handling of misconduct, in the field of academic publishing. COPE’s guidelines on retraction¹⁰ are advisory, not binding, but the guidelines have influenced the policies of many publishers, including Springer.¹¹ COPE’s guidelines are the product of collective deliberation by professional editors. In contrast, any programmatic opposition to retraction based on free speech or other abstract principles lacks a legal and professional structure to back it up.

The papers in this symposium by John K. Wilson and Patrick Garry offer viewpoints contrary to mine. Wilson and Garry express doubts about retraction. Wilson’s paper is systematic in its critique of the retraction of academic articles for any reason other than intentional fraud, and he judges the retraction of Mead’s article to be wrong. Garry focuses on other retractions such as the retraction of Bruce Gilley’s “The Case for Colonialism.”¹² Garry is not so concerned as Wilson is to indict retraction in general. He seeks rather to highlight instances in which retraction has become a politically free-floating concept, a tool used to stifle those with whom one disagrees.

Despite differences between them, Wilson and Garry uphold a more libertarian vision. They focus on the rights of authors, while I focus on the rights and obligations of editors. The fourth contribution, by Kai Preuss, offers a valuable historical look at retraction by way of Augustine of Hippo.

Academic Content

As noted above, “Poverty and Culture” is deficient for four reasons: the article’s unreliable findings; the compromised process of review before publication; the fact that Mead had already published the same ideas multiple times before; and the unethical defamation of racial and ethnic groups. These four rubrics fall within COPE’s retraction guidelines.¹³ Here, I focus on academic content.

Mead provides no information to support his argument that Americans of the “non-Western” genre lack a culture of “individualism.” The article provides no data from value surveys to prove that Black, Latino, and other “non-Western” Americans have less initiative than Euro-Americans. And Mead offers nothing to prove that “all” non-Western immigrant groups are poorer than Americans of European descent. It is patently clear that some, notably Asians, are wealthier and more highly educated,¹⁴ but Mead makes no mention of Asian success. In another article, Mead dismissed Asian achievement. “While some Asians do well in school, few assert themselves in the creative, innovative ways necessary to excel after school in an individualist culture. On average, the ‘model minority’ falls well short of the assertiveness needed to stand out in America.”¹⁵ This astonishingly glib and unconvincing remark is still more than Mead offers concerning Asian achievement in “Poverty and Culture.”

Mead’s article is replete with bald statements such as:

[T]he West has evolved a more ambitious lifestyle than the non-West.

In the West, most people are individualists.

[T]he West tends to be moralistic about ethics, while the non-West is more conformist.

People [from the non-West] mostly understand right and wrong in terms of what the people around them expect of them. So there is less sense of absolute standards and less sense of personal responsibility.

[T]he West has simply chosen a more ambitious way of life than the non-West, where minorities originate.

Today, the seriously poor are mostly blacks and Hispanics and the main reason is cultural difference. The great fact is that these groups did not come from Europe . . . Their native stance toward life is much more passive than the American norm. (Italics in original.)

Cultural difference helps to explain the two most puzzling things about the long-term poor: their tepid response to opportunity and the frequent disorder in their personal lives.¹⁶

None of the above assertions is backed up with any statistical data.

Admittedly, there are other ways to make a provocative argument plausible, notably by referencing the work of other scholars. But in “Poverty and Culture,” Mead adduces only three previous works of scholarship to support his mantra that people who are “non-Western” lack individualism and are thus destined for economic failure. Referenced in footnote 5 of the article, the sources do not actually align with his position. To make this clear, I will focus on one of the books referenced by Mead: Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why.

Nisbett does more to undermine Mead’s claims than to support them. First, the scope of The Geography of Hope is too specialized to support Mead’s hyper-generalizations. Nisbett’s non-Western sample includes only Asians, not “all” non-Western cultures. More importantly, when Nisbett speaks of “Asians,” he means only those living in Asia, especially China. The book is not about Asian Americans and other immigrants to the USA of non-European origin. Since Nisbett’s text is not about immigration, it provides no support to Mead’s contention that non-Westerners who come to the USA fail to bring with them, or to absorb, individualistic values.

It is true that Nisbett’s writing has a binary quality when he contrasts Chinese and American values. This may well be why Mead cites it. But Nisbett’s binaries do not line up with Mead’s. Nisbett avoids suggesting that Western attitudes are economically or morally superior. He does not claim that Asians are less enterprising, less conscientious, or less ambitious than Westerners. The following passages give an idea of the even-handed flavor of Nisbett’s style of cultural comparison.

• Chinese social harmony should not be confused with conformity. On the contrary, Confucius praised the desire of the gentleman to harmonize and distinguished it from the petty person’s need for conformity. The Zozhuan, a classic Confucian text, makes the distinction in a metaphor about cooking. A good cook blends the flavors and creates something harmonious and delicious. No flavor is completely submerged, and the savory taste is due to the blended but distinctive contributions of each flavor.¹⁷

• Confucianism stresses economic well-being and education. The individual works not for self-benefits but for the entire family.¹⁸

• Success [for Asians] is often sought as a group goal rather than as a personal badge of merit.¹⁹

• Thus, to the Asian, the world is a complex place, composed of continuous substances, understandable in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts . . . To the Westerner, the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue [sic] attention to context.²⁰

• [Asians] have a greater preference for compromise solutions and for holistic solutions and they are more willing to endorse both of two apparently contradictory arguments. When asked to justify their choices, they seem to move to a compromise, Middle Way stance instead of referring to a dominating principle.²¹

Nisbett contrasts cultures without putting them in a hierarchy. He also recognizes the limits of his own generalizations. Conceding some merit to Francis Fukayama’s “end of history” argument²² that nations and value systems are converging around the globe, Nisbett points out certain patterns of Easternization in the USA. “Westerners are rapidly fusing their cuisines with Eastern ones . . . the countless resorts in the Catskill Mountains formerly catering to a middle-class Jewish clientele are rapidly transforming themselves into centers for the study of Buddhism--which is gaining US adherents at a much more rapid rate than mainline Protestantism.”²³ Nisbett even cites a study—one that he co-organized—revealing how Beijing University students hold certain “Western” values such as imaginativeness and independence more than University of Michigan students. The latter reported valuing respect for tradition and honoring parents more than the Beijing students did.²⁴

By moderating his main thesis concerning the fundamental differences between Asians and Westerners, Nisbett exhibits one of the cognitive traits that he identifies as typically Western: the tradition of positioning one’s interpretation in the context of a debate and thus including “possible counterarguments.”²⁵By Nisbett’s cultural standards, Mead is not a Western thinker. For Mead acknowledges no alternative ways of classifying cultures beyond the Western/non-Western binary; he acknowledges no patterns of hybridity, and no instances contradicting his main arguments. He refers to none of the classic works on immigration in the USA such as Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design (2008); Reed Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America (1994); or Stephen Thernstrom et al. (eds.), The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980). Mead frames none of his arguments about immigration in the context of the discipline. He preaches in a disciplinary vacuum.

Mead characterizes cultural groups as having immutable characteristics. What he calls “culture” is racialized in the sense that he attributes immobile features to races and nationalities. Culture appears to mimic—to be posterior to—a predetermined racial classification. Mead underestimates the significance of blending and integration. He is essentially saying that minorities in the USA have a stunted background and, even after coming to the USA, continue to be more influenced by their origin in other countries—from which they have been divorced, in some cases, for over150 years—than by their American surroundings.

He sidesteps the fact that many “non-Western” immigrants arrive with high ambitions and a solid work ethic, and that American culture also exercises a powerful influence on immigrants. Within one generation, people often lose their native tongues and pursue the dream of attaining status as conceived in American society. At times, individualism, initiative, and entrepreneurialism take on aberrant forms. Philippe Bourgois’s book, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, portrays the aspirations of young Latinos who are knocking themselves out in the drug trade as only true individualists and entrepreneurs might.²⁶ For an American society that is so complex, Mead offers too few concepts.

The Review Process

In its notice of retraction from July 31, 2020, Springer stated that there had been “a lack of editorial oversight, on both content and process grounds.”²⁷ I now consider the process. The key fact is that “Poverty and Culture” was not peer reviewed. It was accepted by the editor in chief alone. It seems obvious that an article of this kind, which makes stark social-scientific claims about the roots of poverty and the mentality of racial and ethnic groups, should be assessed by social scientists and/or social theorists other than the editor.

Yet, this is not a simple issue because the lack of review for Mead’s article was not an anomaly; it was how Society normally functioned under its then editor in chief. Peer review was implemented only after Jonathan Imber resigned and an interim editor in chief, Dante Scala, oversaw the production of the last two issues of 2020.²⁸ When Andreas Hess and I became co–editors in chief in 2021, we consolidated peer review. Articles purporting to be based on extensive research are reviewed by the two editors as well as two other readers (unless the two editors deem a submission to be too specialized or otherwise plainly inappropriate for the journal, in which case it is rejected by the two editors without further review). Stand-alone commentaries and opinion pieces are reviewed by the two editors and one external reader. The most flexibility is shown for commentaries or opinion pieces that are also part of a forum or symposium containing contrary viewpoints. The two editors reserve the right to authorize publication of such papers without review, but we often send them to one external reviewer (as was the case with the present article).

There is no denying that the solo model for editing an academic journal has benefits. Society functioned well for decades under this regime. The journal was founded in 1962 by Irving Louis Horowitz. I do not know if Horowitz dispensed with peer review, but it is unlikely that Imber, who took over in 2003, would have functioned as he did if Horowitz had not already set a top-down pattern. The journal flourished. A list of authors who published in Society reads like a “Who’s Who” of twentieth-century social science and theory. Authors include Abraham Maslow, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Shils, Robert K. Merton, James Q. Wilson, Seymour Martin Lipset, David Riesman, Harold Laski, Richard Hoggart, Daniel Bell, Margaret Mead, Orlando Patterson, Katherine S. Newman, Deborah Lipstadt, Robert Bellah, William Julius Wilson, and Orlando Patterson. A newsletter of the Library of Social Science reported in 2016 that Society had “an enviable reputation as the social science counterpart to Scientific American.”²⁹

Society has not been the only well-regarded academic journal to function in a top-down manner. A notable example is Mind, one of the leading journals in philosophy. The Oxford philosopher, Simon Blackburn, who ran the journal from 1985 to 1990, described his editorial style as “a sort of tyranny.”³⁰ With help from another Oxford philosopher, John Kenyon, Blackburn refereed nearly all submissions. Blackburn explained that there is a problem with peer review.

We decided what went into the journal. We very seldom employed referees because . . . if you get a referee’s report on a paper you’ve got two things you have to decide about. You’ve got the paper and the referee’s report. There’s no guarantee the second is better than the first, and so you’re doubling your workload, and it’s better I think to do it yourself. Nowadays of course you have to have six referees and a human resource program behind you to make sure you’re not biased. I didn’t care about bias as long as I was biased in what I regarded as the right direction. And that was it.³¹

Blackburn concedes that the workload “ground me down.”³² He served as editor for just 6 years, while Imber served for seventeen, and the scope of Society is wider than that of Mind. The latter is devoted to just one discipline. At the end of his editorial term, Blackburn reported that most of the submissions were in a few subfields in philosophy,³³ areas in which Blackburn is a top expert. Society is a multidisciplinary journal. The journal’s homepage during Imber’s editorship included this statement: “Articles in Society span the social sciences, including sociology, political science, economics, psychology, and anthropology.”³⁴ These disciplines are more empirical than philosophy.

That only one author, Mead, was mishandled during Imber’s editorship is impressive but does not cancel out the fact that publishing Mead without any peer review was a mistake. Even Blackburn and Kenyon (already a pair) sometimes resorted to peer review. To “very seldom” employ referees means they sometimes did. Nothing precludes a top-down editor from sometimes consulting others. Imber admitted that he did not consult anyone.³⁵ Given Mead’s far-fetched claims, and that they cast a shadow over the respectability of racial and ethnic groups, a stricter scrutiny of this particular article was plainly called for.

One other matter related to process requires consideration. Imber stated that he intended to publish Mead’s article simultaneously with articles criticizing it.³⁶ This raises the question as to why the critical responses did not appear. It may well have to do with the nature of online publishing. Articles are published online in the order of completion. But the publication of Mead’s article was not accompanied with any hint that criticism was to follow, and it could have been arranged to hold off the publication of Mead’s article till it could be published simultaneously with the criticisms. Had the criticisms appeared concurrently with the article, retraction might not have been necessary (much depends on the nature of the responses). More importantly, to be worthy of critical responses in an academic journal, an article must be meritorious in some regards and not just broadcast sensational claims. As I explain more fully in the last section of this article, academic journals are not “public forums” for the expression of all ideas.

Redundancy

Of the many comments on the Mead retraction, only one, to the best of my knowledge, noted the issue of recidivism³⁷: Mead’s prior publication of ideas interchangeable with those in “Poverty and Culture.” The discovery that Mead had not only published redundantly but had done so in Society raised a question for Andreas Hess and myself when we became editors: should we retract additional articles? This became a matter of extensive inquiry. We consulted several academics with expertise in the fields of immigration, economic inequality, and academic freedom. The consensus that emerged was that retroactive retraction was problematic. First, it had no clear precedent. Secondly, it ran the risk of appearing to be an excessive persecution of one person.

Thirdly, it ran the risk of making it look like the new editors were engaging in a witch hunt. No one we consulted defended Mead’s articles on an academic level. What elicited caution was the question of appearances. Andreas and I wrote a report to Springer, which had queried us on whether further retractions were in order; in fairness to Springer, its executives exerted no pressure on us to make further retractions. We stated that no further retractions would occur; we also decided at that time to sponsor a symposium on the subject of retraction.

What follows is only a partial account of the redundancy of “Poverty and Culture.” In 2016, Mead’s “Immigration: The Cultural Dimension” appeared in Society. The abstract sounds much like the article published in 2020.

The United States has become a multicultural society, which is good, but rapid immigration threatens to turn it into a mainly Latin American and Asian country. That would undermine the individualist culture, derived from Europe, that is essential to American world leadership.³⁸

To support his claim that “current migrants undermine the individualist culture that has made the West affluent, well-governed, and powerful,”³⁹ Mead cited Nisbett’s book comparing Asians and Americans. As discussed above, Nisbett does not discuss immigration and does not use the concept of individualism in the same way as Mead.

In “The Moral Community and Immigration,” published in Society in 2009, Mead asserted, “America has retained its moralistic culture despite immigration to date mainly because its European population has remained dominant.”⁴⁰ In “The Primacy Contest: Why Culture Matters,” published in Society in 2012, Mead contrasted “the individualism” of Western cultures with “the more collective worldviews of the non-West” and asserted that the latter are economically counter-productive. In “American Power: The Challenge Within,” which appeared in Society in 2017, Mead argued that we need to reduce immigration to protect “individualism.” The terms of the argument are not distinguishable from “Poverty and Culture.”

Today’s long-term poor, however, originate in mostly non-Western countries, according to research on world cultures, attitudes are more cautious and collective. Most people seek to adjust to their environment rather than change it. The aim is more to survive day by day than to get ahead. In the West, also, social order is based mainly on people internalizing principles of right conduct early in life, minimizing the need for external enforcement later. In the non-West, however, order depends more on external authority, including tradition.⁴¹

Mead provides no more basis for these dualities than he did in “Poverty and Culture” (he again cites Nisbett). In “Cultural Difference,” published in Society in 2018, Mead wrote:

The basic difference is that America is the world’s most individualist society, while minorities, most immigrants, and poor countries overseas all [my emphasis] represent a much more cautious and collective mentality. Individualists see life as a project, where one orients mainly to inner goals and values and seeks to realize them out in the world. The more collective-minded, however, see life as survival. One seeks less to realize inner goals than to adapt to one’s environment. Individualists take initiatives to change the outside world, while the non-individualist mostly defer to it. The first is the typical temperament of the Western world, the second of the non-West—and of groups in America who originated outside Europe.⁴²

The same vapid generalizations, framed in starkly binary terms, and unsubstantiated by research, occur over and over. Even if Mead’s arguments were well grounded, the redundancy of his discourse should have precluded publication of “Poverty and Culture.” Mead seems to have benefited from editorial carte blanche. I have not observed any other cases in which Society permitted such recidivism. There have been authors such as William Cain, John Rodden, and Amitai Etzioni who have written frequently for the journal, but always on different topics, and always with more scholarship and nuance than Mead. Retracting “Poverty and Culture” was a good way to announce, “Enough is enough. Henceforth, no one gets a free pass.”

Racism and Strict Editorial Scrutiny

It cannot be denied that one of the factors under consideration when Imber and Springer retracted Mead’s article was that some readers perceived it as racist. A report in Inside Higher Education entitled “Journal Editor Regrets Publishing Racist Article” quoted Imber, “I deeply regret the pain that this has caused.”⁴³ Springer’s statement of July 30, 2020, included the following: “We are deeply sorry for the distress and upset that our publication of this paper has caused. We are committed to standing against racism and discrimination, and to supporting the academic community and wider society in this.”⁴⁴

One should not rush to the conclusion that “Poverty and Culture” was retracted merely because leftist readers were “offended” by Mead’s emphasis on minority cultures, rather than racism, as a source of economic disparities. The “distress” to which Springer referred can be construed as a legitimate academic anxiety. “Poverty and Culture” is racially provocative; the article over-generalizes about racial differences and blames minorities for their poverty.

Mead’s article was properly retracted not because of its topic but because of the cavalier manner in which he treated it, and because the article was not adequately reviewed before publication. His flamboyant generalizations should have triggered a closer-than-normal review process, or what I shall call “strict editorial scrutiny.” The term “strict scrutiny” comes from American constitutional law. Strict scrutiny is a more rigorous standard of judicial review than its alternative, the “rational basis” standard. Under the rational basis standard, which governs most judicial inquiries into the constitutionality of a given statute, courts will not overturn a law if it is supported by any credible legislative findings. Credible does not mean uncontroverted or definitive. It is sufficient if the law is not justified in a capricious manner.The judges need not agree with the factual premises on which the law is based, or with its moral or political goals. What is required is simply a plausible, not a compelling, rationale for the law.⁴⁵

Under the strict scrutiny standard, however, a law must have more than plausible grounds for its existence; it must have a compelling rationale, and it must seek to achieve its goal in the narrowest possible manner (known as being “narrowly tailored”). The classic scenario triggering the strict scrutiny standard is a law based on racial, ethnic, or national classification. President Donald Trump’s 2017 “Muslim Ban” (Executive Order 13769) was met with stiff resistance from multiple courts for this reason. While the ban’s goal, to prevent terrorism, meets the compelling-interest standard, the ban was not narrowly tailored. It excluded vast numbers of people based on nationality regardless of whether they were a security threat. The ban was in fact replaced by a more narrowly tailored one which the Supreme Court upheld (see Trump v. Hawaii, 2018 concerning Executive Order 13780).

Today, no one maintains that all laws should be judicially scrutinized according to a single standard. Courts will examine different types of laws with different degrees of skepticism depending on whether the law appears to impinge on the egalitarian principles essential to a democracy: notably, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. If a judge has an obligation to apply different standards of judicial review to different laws based on their relationship to democratic principles, should not editors also apply stricter review to articles which run the risk of propagating inegalitarian falsehoods? In our constitutional system, if a court applies the wrong standard of judicial review when assessing a law, an appellate court will overrule its decision. The prior decision is “vacated,” which means retracted.

What does strict editorial scrutiny mean in practice? It does not mean that articles with provocative theses bearing on race should be automatically rejected. Strict editorial scrutiny is just an enhanced precaution. If articles in a certain journal are usually vetted by one person, then strict editorial scrutiny would mean two or more. If the usual process involves two readers, then it would be three or more.

One can object that all articles should run through the same procedure, regardless of the topic; otherwise, “politics” is impinging on “academics.” But the “politics” in this context pertains to basic democratic values. It would be morally obtuse to ignore the fact that in a democratic society with a long history of racism, including pseudo-scientific racism in university life, the discussion of racial disparities inherently runs the risk of raising the specter of oppression. One must scrutinize such academic work more closely than other types of articles. Imagine an article claiming that different races innately have different levels of creativity. It should be reviewed with greater care than, say, an article claiming that students who take notes by hand in a college course learn more than students who take notes on a computer.

While avoiding giving offense is not what editors should be concerned with in general, there is a certain kind of offensiveness, incited by insensitive abstraction and particularistic language, that editors should not neglect. Positing fundamental racial, national, or gender-based differences and linking them to success in society is not only stigmatizing; it also has implications as to whether members of the allegedly self-hindered groups have a right to participate in debate about the merits of the theory in question. Mead portrays “non-Western” people as less objective, less able to internalize abstract norms. This implies that they are generally less qualified to make independent and reasoned decisions, which in turn suggests that any objections they might have to his work can be written off as expressions of their “non-Western” culture.

In his groundbreaking essay, “The Normative Structure of Science” (1942), Robert K. Merton identified the dimensions that constitute the “ethos” of science: skepticism, publicity (he calls it “communism”), disinterestedness, and universalism. The last term signals that truth claims in science, need to be free of “pre-established personal and social attributes” such as race, nationality and class (today we might also want to include sex and/or gender).⁴⁶

The acceptance or rejection of claims entering the lists of science is not to depend on the personal or social attributes of their protagonist; his race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities are as such irrelevant. Objectivity precludes particularism. The circumstance that scientifically verified formulations refer in that specific sense to objective sequences and correlations militates against all efforts to impose particularistic criteria of validity.⁴⁷

Merton does not mean that all claims about differences necessarily contravene the academic ethos. But when assertions about fundamental differences are not well articulated at the conceptual level, are not accompanied with compelling evidence, and have not been reviewed closely by experts, then readers have a right to view such work as an expression of “particularism,” that is, as part of an effort to disempower them through pseudo-scientific authority. The scientific ethos requires the retraction of such work.

On Free Speech and Retraction

In “The First Amendment’s Firstness,” Akhil Amar describes how free speech is the most iconic idea in the US Constitution.⁴⁸ The popularity and apparent simplicity of the term “free speech” have led to misunderstandings of what it means, especially in the context of academic life. Stanley Fish has been the leading critic of the tendency to appeal to the right of free speech in academic contexts where norms such as scholarly rigor are more important.⁴⁹

Fish is correct that the purpose of academic life is to promote disciplined speech, not free speech. Free-speech law in the USA aims primarily to protect individuals against governmental censorship. The First Amendment was not framed to apply to educational institutions. It says, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” In the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court began to rule that state and local governments are also bound by the First Amendment. But freedom of speech generally does not apply within non-governmental organizations, which is why the owners of social media sites are free to censor if they wish. Organizations of all kinds need to set limits on the speech of employees in order to function; this is true even of state institutions.⁵⁰ A lawyer does not have a free-speech right to share all of a firm’s legal memos and strategies with opposing law firms, even if the firm is a government agency.⁵¹ A doctor can be fired for tweeting that she intends to give “wrong meds” to Jews.⁵² Professors, too, can be disciplined if they engage in harassment in the classroom or recurrently wander off-topic when teaching.⁵³ Likewise, no one has a right to publish their speech in an academic journal.

The decisions made by editors are based on professional values and are not controlled by the free-speech rights of authors. Moreover, certain editorial functions are themselves forms of expression and thus protected by free speech. To the extent that one insists on imposing a free-speech template on academic publishing, the advantage passes to the editors and publishers.

In American law, freedom entails the right to distance oneself from the utterances of others. I have already mentioned social media as places where exclusion can occur. In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982), the Supreme Court held that politically motivated boycott movements are protected by the First Amendment. Other Supreme Court cases have interpreted freedom of speech to mean that public-school students can exempt themselves from civic ceremonies such as the flag salute⁵⁴; that a newspaper cannot be required to print editorials which counterbalance its preferred point of view⁵⁵; and that the organizers of a parade cannot be required to include persons whose opinions they, the organizers, oppose.⁵⁶ As Frederick Schauer has said, it is not a prerequisite of free speech that one accord reciprocal speech rights to others in an institutional setting.⁵⁷ When editors reject or retract articles, they are exercising the right to uphold their own academic principles; their commitment to reasoned discourse is protected by the First Amendment.

The only places where free speech is the primary and constitutive norm are so-called public forums. These are streets and parks designated for protest, assembly, and the unlimited expression of ideas. The university is not a public forum, though it can designate certain open spaces on campus as such. A landmark public forum case is National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977), upholding the right of Nazis to assemble and bear placards in a predominantly Jewish town. The activity took place in a public forum (a park district). It would obviously be impermissible for Nazis to march into a hospital’s operating room, a university classroom, or a board meeting of an academic journal.

Free speech, then, is not the constitutive value of most spaces in society. Even the “press,” understood as the aggregate of venues for printing and broadcasting news and expressing political opinions, is not a public forum. Although free speech means that individuals can create their own news outlets and publish their opinions in it, no specific news outlet is a public forum unto itself: the editors are under no obligation to publish ideas they disagree with.

An academic journal is not a free-speech zone in which low-grade talk has the same status as highly disciplined argumentation. In his Letters on England, Voltaire marveled at the verbal spontaneity which was permitted in Quaker meetings.

All were seated, and the silence was universal. I passed through them, but did not perceive so much as one lift up his eyes to look at me. This silence lasted a quarter of an hour, when at last one of them rose up, took off his hat, and, after making a variety of wry faces and groaning in a most lamentable manner, he, partly from his nose and partly from his mouth, threw out a strange, confused jumble of words (borrowed, as he imagined, from the Gospel) which neither himself nor any of his hearers understood.⁵⁸

Voltaire’s Quaker guide explained the reasons for the sect’s permissiveness. “‘We are obliged,’ says he, ‘to suffer it, because no one knows when a man rises up to hold forth whether he will be moved by the Spirit or by folly.’”⁵⁹ It was Voltaire’s genius to overlay mordant criticism with admiring wonder. Here, he cultivates his usual aversion to organized religion by describing Quaker discourse as incomprehensible. At the same, he expresses marvel for the spirit of toleration to be found in England. The Quaker’s explanation suggests that the repression of bad speech runs the risk of simultaneously shutting out glimmers of truth.

I agree with that libertarian philosophy of speech, in the sense that apparently ridiculous ideas should not be stifled everywhere. One should be free to experiment verbally in one’s home, in public forums, and in groups devoted to spontaneous expression. But Society is not a public forum; it is not a Quaker meeting either. The gospel of Mead as expressed in “Poverty and Culture” was properly retracted from this journal.