Blind leading the blind

One place where the “blind leading the blind” system works well is anonymous peer review. Introduced first in 1665 by Hendy Oldenburg, the editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, this remarkably successful invention advanced the quality of scholarship. It is partly responsible for the establishment of the scientific method and the rise of the European civilization. I know the Russian academic scene fairly well; it can boast both talent and ideas, but no true blind peer review process. This little deficiency has very large consequences. The Russian educational discourse is much more arbitrary, much more ego-driven than the English-speaking one. It takes much longer for good ideas to rise to the top; it breads corruption and discourages truthfulness. Both junk and good scholarship can be found both in Russia and in the West, of course, but I can assure you, the proportions are very different. The anonymous peer review provides a significant nudge, over time shaping the academic discourse. It has its drawbacks in the times of paradigm shifts, but no one argues that its overall effects are negative or insignificant.

When I review a paper, don’t know who wrote it, so I am not beholden to assumptions, biases, and expectations. The judgment is between me and the Truth. I never know if it is a he or she, a high school student or a distinguished silverback. When I was younger, peer review-inspired rejections seemed to me arbitrary and unfair (I did not feel that way about reviewers who liked my work). With age, I came to treasure those anonymous interactions, even when they end in rejection. When we do not know each other, the Truth can be indeed invited to the table. I don’t care if the author’s feelings get hurt, and won’t pay a price of souring relationships with him. We always lie and flatter those next to us because we are constantly working on reinforcing good relationships. Those seem more important than the abstract truth. We can only be truly honest with strangers. Honesty and friendship are incompatible, contrary to the naïve belief in the opposite. Relationships get in a way of being truthful – they have to! People with very deep connections (“real friends”) can sometimes afford to tell the truth on important matters, but it is rather an exception than the rule.

I have written about the need for blind peer review in teaching. As many of you know, some of us have been working on Syllabus, the first journal to publish peer-reviewed syllabi (hopefully, the first issue will appear in June). The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Why don’t we blindly review many more things - syllabi, assignments, tests, assessment instruments, rubrics, reports, tenure and promotion materials? We do need honest, unbiased, anonymous feedback from people we can trust.

In teaching, we need to know our students, their stories, their needs and strength to guide them. And yet we also need a moment of truth when someone who we know is competent, but also removed, dispassionate, and nameless, tells us how we both did. Did the student really learned what I hoped to teach her? Or am I projecting my own pride, my insecurities, and my own time investment onto him? I worked so hard, and poor thing, she worked so hard, - it just got to be an A. I would like to pass the ultimate judgment of his competence onto someone else – the next class’ instructor, a future employer, or an independent testing company. Does my involvement make me blind to her weaknesses? Of course, it does. We are biased because we are human. We cannot be trusted with evaluating our own work.

Nor do we compete with each other. For example, when a group of faculty redesigns curriculum, there is never a competing team whose final project may actually be selected, not yours. You are always, automatically producing the best work! You’re on the winning team from the start! is this healthy? Would a little competition make us a more creative, more demanding of each other, and less likely to succumb to groupthink? Private businesses are at least subjected to the discipline of the market – those who care too much about being nice to each other at the expense of truth – those will go belly up, eventually. But we are not in that world. What will compel us to tell the truth rather than always being nice to each other? We do need to think of a way to erect a barrier between our relationships and our professional judgment.