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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Equity-cum-demographic diversity is not a value in scholarship, redux

A young scholar recently shared with me a referee report he received that was, in many ways, complimentary, although it ultimately recommended rejection.  But here was the very first comment:

1.      One of the first things I noticed is that not a single female author is being referenced or cited in this piece. Given that this is generally seen as problematic, I urge the author to make an effort to engage with some women scholars, such as [female professor X], who I believe wrote on [the topic of the essay] fairly recently.

Female professor X was not a philosopher, and her work was not actually relevant to the topic of the essay.  Indeed, since I know something about this topic, I can't think of any female authors who have done relevant work.  (I can think of one Black author who has done quite relevant work, but that wasn't the issue here.)  If I were an editor of the journal for which a referee started his comments with something this irrelevant, I would never use that referee again.  As I wrote recently:

[R]acial or demographic equity in citations is not a value in scholarship; truth and knowledge are the only values. If past racism has resulted in neglect of scholars who can contribute to truth and knowledge in a particular domain, then the demand should be to name those scholars so that they can be studied. But equity-qua–demographic-diversity per se is not a scholarly value. It has a stronger claim to be a value in pedagogy….

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