Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Yitzhak:

Though I am not part of academia now (I have dyslexia, can you believe
that?), my father and grandfather were both professors, so I have
observed some of the dirty underside of academia that they don't want
the hoi polloi to know about. I have seen data falsification, even in
the hard sciences, in order to get past the gauntlet of a powerful
professor to get the sheep's skin. I have seen professors denied
tenure for no reason other than that they espoused an unpopular theory
even though otherwise their work was top notch. I have seen shoddy
work praised simply because it was politically correct among other
professors. I have seen students given lower grades, or even denied
their degrees, because they did not agree with their professors on
tangental beliefs. I have been outside of academia for decades, but
your comment below reminded me of those days.

On 11/22/06, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
> You missed a sentence, "You are expected to know the value of
> offering your book to criticism from your peers in the linguistics
> department."  That says it all.
>
>
> Yitzhak Sapir

That says nothing. All too often that peer review system is now used
for censorship of ideas outside of the mainstream, a fact that some
reviewers openly admit. Work that has solid methodology, peerless
analysis, yet will be rejected for publication because of politics.
Now I don't know all of Prof. Fried's theory, so I can't really
comment on that, but I would not be surprised that in discussing his
theory with his colleagues, they may have rejected it for what ever
reasons that they have.

In short, the peer review system is way overhyped, and broken.

Karl W. Randolph.