BY JOHN K. WILSON
On Wednesday, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Review posted dueling essays by Northwestern law professor Andrew Koppelman and me (reposted from this blog) about the controversy over the Emory Law Journal. Prof. Koppleman and I decided to continue the discussion, and below is our back-and-forth exchange.
John K. Wilson:
You wrote to me, “My principal disagreement with what you wrote is that the editors demanded the deletion of the entire third section. They could and should have asked for better documentation of his claims, but they made clear that they didn’t want him to make those claims at all because they were hurtful.”
I don’t think that’s accurate. First, let’s analyze the hurtful issue. The editor never said the entire article was hurtful. Instead, the email objected only to something in “your conversation on systemic racism, finding your words hurtful and unnecessarily divisive.” I believe they were referring to where Alexander compared the belief in systemic racism to Nazi Germany, which is indeed to many a hurtful and divisive statement. It’s common for scholarly journals to edit such writing for tone. For example, could a law review decide to edit a paper that called Alexander “racist” and “idiotic” or compared his views to Nazism? I think it’s entirely reasonable that they would, and might politely call such unscholarly language “divisive.” Do you think it’s fundamentally wrong for scholarly journals to edit out Nazi comparisons?
Second, you write that the claim of the editors that Section III was “not strongly connected” to Perry’s work was “obviously false.” I read the whole piece, and it’s obviously true. In fact, I prove it by showing how most of Section III was copied from Alexander’s blog and hadn’t been written to honor Prof. Perry at all. Were you aware that Alexander had done this, and does it change your view of his essay? But most importantly, the editors ask Alexander to cut this section for irrelevance and expand the other sections that were actually about Perry by “building” them. If they really objected to Alexander’s “hurtful” words, why would they continue to be willing to publish the paper and ask him to add to the other sections?
Third, you claim that the editors “could and should have asked for better documentation of his claims.” In fact, the editors did ask Alexander for better documentation, and he refused to make any changes in his paper. Do you think editors are obligated to publish a paper when the author refuses to allow any editing or requests for documentation?
Andrew Koppelman responds:
I claimed, and you dispute, that they demanded the deletion because they did not want to publish “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive” claims even if they were true and even if they were integral to Alexander’s response to Perry. Their earlier memo to him said “as a prudential matter, the refutation of the presence of systemic racism might be a highly controversial viewpoint.” The implication is that it is imprudent to publish highly controversial viewpoints. (You write, “There is no political litmus test that the Emory Law Journal has ever stated or hinted at.” This is an overstatement.)
You claim that the editors were right to demand the deletion, because Part III was unrelated to the critique of Perry. Alexander’s article focuses on a group of articles that Perry wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He explains that he does so “not to find a bone to pick somewhere in Michael’s impressive body of work, but because his error in that early work has an analogue in today’s political discourse, which makes that error of many years past of contemporary importance.” At the end of the article, he says: “What he wrote then resonates with demands one hears today for racially proportionate policy outcomes. Although Michael’s arguments were much more measured and limited than those today to which I am referring, if his arguments should be rejected, then today’s more extreme demands surely must be.” He goes on to argue that Perry’s account of disproportionate racial impact anticipates “the claim that unless blacks are proportionately represented in all sectors of American life, we can presume racism is the cause,” and contemporary demands for reparations. If Part III is deleted, then it is not clear why Alexander is focusing on these decades-old articles. The deletion would mutilate the entire structure of Alexander’s essay.
Some of your claims in your piece in the Chronicle are not accurate. It isn’t true that “the editors asked him to edit it and provide citations for some of his dumbest arguments.” Nor were they “merely asking for citations for such claims to be sourced.” The editors made clear that changes to specific words, or better documentation, would not satisfy them. Rather, the entirety of Part III (which included the claims you mention) had to be deleted. You are defending something that the editors did not do.
As for the fact that Alexander was recycling a blog post, I don’t think it matters. Writers often repeat points made earlier. I’ve written books that were built up from prior articles, and articles that were built up from op-eds. If you have something important to say, you had best say it more than once. Andre Gide was right: “Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” Had the editors known about the blog post – there’s no evidence that they did – they could reasonably have asked that the prior appearance of some of the arguments be acknowledged.
None of this is to defend Alexander’s substantive claims. For instance, I agree with you that it’s preposterous for him to argue, as you put it, “that we must oppose reparations for slavery because without slavery we would all be different people with different parents.” Personal identity is a consequence, not simply of having been born, but of the entire cumulation of one’s life experiences. Attacking reparations on this basis proves too much. The same argument is available in any ordinary tort suit: “It’s true that my drunken driving put you in a wheelchair. But at today’s trial, three years after the accident, your experience has changed you: you are a different person than the one I hurt. That person no longer exists. Motion to dismiss.”
But this is the best documented claim in his article. He provides a long footnote citing a large literature on the so-called nonidentity problem. I think that this is the kind of thing that gives philosophy a bad name, but that’s a complaint against this entire body of scholarship, not just Alexander.
John K. Wilson replies:
The fact that a line editor informs a writer that their arguments are highly controversial has no connection to the separate decision of the editorial board to ask for editing of irrelevant material.
Section III is primarily about reparations, a subject Prof. Perry never wrote about. Alexander tries to justify this by writing, “if his arguments should be rejected, then today’s more extreme demands surely must be.” But then Alexander goes on and on refuting reparations with the whole (well-documented) egg and sperm theory and other dubious ideas, which doesn’t refute Perry and has nothing to do with his theories. You can believe that racism exists and still oppose reparations, so arguments against reparations are irrelevant to Perry. That’s all the editors were saying when they asked him to cut Section III and expand the parts about Perry.
The text alone shows the reparations section had nothing to do with Perry, but the fact that Alexander was reprinting a blog post indicates that he didn’t write any of this with Perry in mind. Yes, writers can recycle their words, but they should be directly related to the topic, they ought to inform readers, and they must inform editors. You seem strangely indifferent to the idea that Alexander was planning to publish in a scholarly journal without telling anyone he’d already published some of the material, which is an unethical thing to do.
The editors asked Alexander to do three reasonable things: edit some language choices, add documentation, and cut the irrelevant parts of Section III. Alexander refused all of them. Editing is a negotiation between writers and editors. But Alexander never entered into that. He wanted his piece published unedited, and refused to engage into any dialogue about editing it. When you demand that the editors publish Alexander’s piece, are you asking them to do what Alexander demanded and publish it unedited?
Andrew Koppelman responds:
The question of how Alexander would have responded to more reasonable editing is not knowable.
John K. Wilson was a 2019-20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies.
