BY AARON BARLOW

This past Monday saw publication of my last issue as Faculty Editor of Academe. After six years, it is time for change and I thoroughly approve of the AAUP’s plans for the magazine going forward. In fact, I suggested many of them.

When I awoke a few hours ago,  I saw that another editor, famous and influential and important in ways far beyond what most of the rest of us can ever imagine, has also left his post–but not for positive reasons. Ian Buruma is out at The New York Review of Books–and his leaving has nothing in it anyone can be proud of. Whether he resigned or was fired, his departure has to do with the rancor arising from the NYRB’s decision to publish an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian media star disgraced through his treatment of women.

I had heard about this essay, of course, and about the subsequent interview with Buruma where he showed a surprising lack of understanding of the reasons why the essay drew responses of outrage. But I had no inkling that the decision to publish might lead to the ouster of the editor.

It shouldn’t have. No editor should constantly look over her (or his) shoulder, wondering what the consequences of their decisions might be in terms of their own job. If there were concerns about Buruma’s value in his job, a slower, more judicious process should have taken place.

In that interview with Buruma, the NYRB editor said:

We had a proper office discussion and everybody expressed their views and not everybody agreed. But all views were aired and in the end, when the decision was made, the office stuck together.

That’s how the editorial process should work.

At Academe, we have also had such discussions, and articles that I had accepted and edited have occasionally been pulled. And I have gotten behind the decisions. That’s the way the editing process works–ultimately, once content decisions have been made, the office sticks together. If there had ever been a case where I could not move forward as part of the group decision, I would have quietly resigned before the issue of the magazine appeared, asking that my name be taken from the masthead. After publication, I would have assumed (quite correctly, in the case of the AAUP) that the “office” would support me and the mutual decisions that had led to the features in the issue.

Buruma, evidently, assumed the same–but was wrong to do so.

He shouldn’t have been.

Personally, I would never have published Ghomeshi’s essay, even if it had been the type of thing that might cross my desk. But that’s not the point. Editing is always a process of risk if the publication is to be any good at all. Because of that, the publication, for its own sake, should provide protection for its editors, taking corporate responsibility (after all, the process is rarely individual) and deflecting personal blame–up to the very top.

By allowing Buruma to leave in the way it has happened, The New York Review of Books has weakened the power of its editors henceforward. Buruma’s successor will be much more reluctant to take a risk and the publication will necessarily be a bit more bland.

*****

None of this is easy. Decisions to allow a platform, especially one as prominent as The New York Review of Books or, come to think of it, The New Yorker, are fraught with danger. Immediately after reading about Buruma, I happened upon an essay by Laurie Penny that concerns, in part, the decision by The New Yorker editor David Remnick to ‘disinvite’ Steve Bannon from the magazine’s annual Festival. She writes:

The problem with taking a stand within and against respectable organizations is that however righteous you may feel, you create a lot of work for people in that organization — especially people lower down the chain of command who don’t get to make the big ethical decisions. And it takes rather a lot of courage to defy the customs of polite society, especially if it means compromising social capital you yourself have worked hard for.

This is another weight on the balance pole an editor has to carry on the tightrope to publication. The buck doesn’t stop at the editor’s desk but is passed back down the chain and then up again and is eventually shared all along the line. When an editor does make a mistake and it is not corrected through further steps in the publication process, that editor has an obligation not to resign but to listen and learn. Responsibility is not his (or hers) alone–or should not be. The courage and convictions of everyone involved in the publication need to be respected.

Remnick, though later than he should have, listened to his staff and others involved with the Festival. Buruma may not have (that, at least, is what I take from what I have read)–but he should not have been fired or put in a position where he felt forced to resign. That weakens the publication and makes the lives of future editors more difficult.