tempest

For those who did not see it, this is the coverage of the ASR
controversy by the
Chronicle of Higher Education.  It appeared only on line (during the
annual
hiatus for the paper edition).
Best

Michael




This story appeared in  The Chronicle of Higher Education Monday August
16


  Sociologists Ask Their Leaders to Rethink Decision on
  Journal's Editorship

  By D.W. MILLER


  Members of the American Sociological Association called on
  their governing board to reconsider its rejection of a
  prominent scholar who had been nominated to edit the
  association's flagship journal. The vote by the membership,
  which came here Monday at the group's annual meeting, followed
  months of simmering debate over the publication, the American
  Sociological Review.

  The association's Council was asked to reappoint the journal's
  outgoing editor for one year and to rethink its decision not
  to appoint Walter Allen, of the University of California at
  Los Angeles. Members overwhelmingly approved the non-binding
  resolution. The Council will take up the matter at its
  meetings this week.

  Mr. Allen was one of six people to apply in January for a
  three-year term at the helm of the journal. Mr. Allen had
  proposed to open the journal to research from a broader array
  of methodologies and subfields, and had recruited a
  prospective slate of assistant editors from a variety of
  racial and ethnic backgrounds and intellectual interests. His
  editorial proposal won the favor of the association's elected
  Publications Committee, which is charged with recommending
  candidates to the Council.

  But in February the Council, which has the final say on the
  selection of editors for association journals, rejected Mr.
  Allen by one vote and passed over the Publications Committee's
  No. 2 choice, Jerry A. Jacobs of the University of
  Pennsylvania. Instead, the board chose Charles Camic and
  Franklin D. Wilson, a team of editors from the University of
  Wisconsin at Madison that the committee had earlier rejected.

  Critics faulted the decision on both procedure and substance.
  Although the Council acted within its constitutional powers,
  say critics, the rejection of Mr. Allen and Mr. Jacobs usurped
  a tradition of deference to the committee's recommendations.
  More fundamentally, some critics interpreted the decision as a
  reflection of the Council's resistance to opening up the
  journal to newer varieties of research.

  According to members of the Council and the Publications
  Committee, the association has been grappling for many years
  with criticism that the Review has become too narrowly focused
  on highly technical, quantitative survey research, to the
  exclusion of policy research and papers with qualitative or
  ethnographic methods. As a result, they said, the journal is
  thought to be unrepresentative of the full breadth of
  scholarship and tends to overlook newer fields, including
  studies of race, gender, and sexuality that often employ those
  methods.

  Although sociology has many specialized journals, said Michael
  Schwartz, a sociologist at the State University of New York at
  Stony Brook and the chairman of the Publications Committee,
  diversity in the flagship journal is important because
  "ambitious grad students use the top journals to decide what
  areas to pursue." It also encourages "the cross-fertilization
  of one sub-discipline to another sub-discipline," a crucial
  task in a field with "strong area boundaries," he said.

  Citing a need for confidentiality, most of the Council members
  have declined to explain their decision or describe the
  discussion of Mr. Allen's candidacy. In fact, his identity was
  not publicly acknowledged until today's meeting. But word got
  out about the Council's action in June when Michael Burawoy, a
  member of the Publications Committee and a scholar at the
  University of California at Berkeley, quit the panel and
  disseminated his letter of resignation on academic listservs.
  The decision, he wrote, rendered "our work null and void."

  The letter prompted much uninformed speculation among
  sociologists about whether the majority of Council members
  found Mr. Allen's qualifications too weak or his editorial
  proposal too unconventional. Douglas A. Massey, a professor at
  the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Council,
  confirmed that both issues came up in the discussion.

  Mr. Allen, a scholar of race and education, has several dozen
  journal articles to his credit. According to Paul Burfield, a
  sociologist at the University of Washington and a member of
  the Council, however, some on the Council believe that Mr.
  Allen's failure to have published anything in the Review
  itself should count against him.

  At the debate Monday, angry scholars accused the Council of
  "blackballing" and "star chamber" tactics, and suggested that
  the panel was insensitive to the need to be more inclusive of
  research by minority scholars. (Before this year, the Review
  had never had a black editor; Mr. Allen, like Mr. Wilson, is
  black.)

  Eventually, Margaret Anderson, of the University of Delaware,
  moved that the publication of the journal be suspended
  entirely until the editorship could be reconsidered. To judge
  by the applause and cheers drawn by various speakers in favor
  of the motion, it seemed to have the overwhelming support of
  those in attendance.

  As a vote neared, however, Ms. Anderson consented to a
  substitute proposal offered by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, of
  Colby College. The new motion, which passed with few
  dissenters, proposed that Mr. Camic and Mr. Wilson be asked to
  step aside for Glen Firebaugh of Pennsylvania State
  University, who recently finished his tenure as editor of the
  Review.

  It was not known Monday night whether Mr. Firebaugh would even
  be willing to resume the editorship. Although he did not speak
  at the debate, Mr. Allen said in an interview that he did not
  mind revealing his identity to his colleagues. "As we approach
  the new millennium," he said, "we need to have strategies of
  outreach to constituencies that had been turned off:
  qualitative research, critical race theory, the sociology of
  health -- those that aren't necessarily mainstream."


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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education