In their current state, scholarly journals are beset with mediocre research, shoddy in its execution and biased in its choice of topics. In the infamous case of the “nudge” studies that affected public policy in multiple countries, Duke University Professor Dan Ariely and Harvard University Professor Francesca Gino (at the time one of the five highest paid Harvard employees) spent nearly a decade faking data, duping both the public and dozens of coauthors.2 Such outright fraud is likely rare, but as Harvard Business School professor and former Gino collaborator Max Bazerman argues, sloppiness and questionable practices like p hacking (stopping data collection and analyses the instant desired findings are found) are common.3 Moreover, as Alvaro de Menard reports in “What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It,” scholarly studies are rarely replicated, and when they are, the original findings often turn out to be questionable or outright wrong.4
Even worse, in many fields leftist bias in scholarly publication is practically ubiquitous. For example, Richard Kahlenberg and Lief Lin detail how over a three-year period, the leading American studies scholarly journal, American Quarterly, published 77 essays and articles fundamentally critical of America, 19 neutral pieces, and zero America-positive manuscripts.5
Similarly, in a rare bit of investigative reporting, Goldwater Institute political scientist Timothy Minella finds that the American Political Science Association (APSA) governing council in 2020 selected a group calling itself “the Feminist Collective” to edit the APSA’s flagship journal, American Political Science Review (APSR).6 This group declared its intent to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure [political science].”7 As any editor knows, most manuscripts are “desk rejected” by editors rather than sent out for anonymous peer review by scholars in the field. To fight alleged bias favoring heteronormative white males, the Feminist Collective promised in its application to edit APSR that only submissions by the privileged (i.e., heteronormative white males) would face desk rejections. Articles by others enjoyed automatic peer review, an obvious display of discrimination.
Other critical theorists took over the prestigious Review of Educational Research (RER), a journal sponsored by the 110-year-old American Educational Research Association (AERA). The new editors of this hitherto rigorous quantitative journal, devoted to testing hypotheses and presenting research through systematic meta-analyses, announced in their inaugural essay that they would deign to allow quantitative articles, but only from scholars who “apply critical race theory to quantitative data” or “draw their scholarly genealogy from the conflict theory tradition of sociology that centers class conflict.”8 AERA’s critical theory fetish ignores the concerns of classroom teachers, who surveys show focus on student behavior, mental health, and technology use rather than leftist political activism.9
2.Frederick M. Hess, “What If Social Science Is a Scam?,” Education Next, September 30, 2025, https://www.educationnext.org/what-if-social-science-is-a-scam/.
3 Max H. Bazerman, Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal (MIT Press, 2025).
4.Alvaro de Menard, “What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers,” Fantastic Anachronism, September 11, 2020, https://www.fantasticanachronism.com/p/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it. Perhaps due to its relative ideological diversity, which enables researchers to ask a range of questions, economics does somewhat better than other fields with respect to work quality and bias. Interestingly, colleges and universities led by economists are overrepresented among high performers on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression campus free speech rankings. Robert Maranto and Martha Bradley-Dorsey, “Yelling FIRE on Campus: Higher Education Free Speech Leaders and Laggards,” Academic Questions 36, no. 1 (2023): 23–33, https://academicquestions.org/yelling-fire-on-campus-free-speech-leaders-and-laggards/.
5 Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s, Progressive Policy Institute, January 22, 2026, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies/.
6Timothy K. Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology over Scholarship, Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/peer-review-gone-wild/.
7 Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild.
8 Mildred Boveda et al., “Editorial Vision 2022–2025,” Review of Educational Research 93, no. 5 (2023): 638–40, https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543231170179.
9 David T. Marshall et al., “Teacher and Research Priorities: To What Extent Do They Align?” (working paper, SocArXiv, December 20, 2025), https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/h82rk_v1.
