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Alex Byrne’s rejection email from Oxford University Press

Brian Leiter

Given the unpleasant speculation circulating on social media, philosopher Alex Byrne kindly agreed to share the rejection email he got from Oxford University Press after submitting the manuscript that was based on the proposal that OUP had put under contract.  Professor Byrne stated, in his original essay, that OUP rejected the book for the sole reason that the book "does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.”  Subsequent public information suggested that the manuscript was rejected based on the reports of the four referees (see the descriptions of the reports here,), which led the skeptics to declare that this was all just sour grapes by Professor Byrne, not a case of publishing decisions being determined by political considerations.

In fact, the email rejecting Professor Byrne's manuscript makes clear that it was rejected not based on the referee reports (which are mentioned as an afterthought that might be helpful to Byrne) but based on consultation with OUP "colleagues" and "advisers" who–the email strongly implies–were not the "academic readers."  Here is the rejection email (with email addresses removed):

From: Peter Momtchiloff
Date: Thursday, June 23, 2022 at 12:43 PM
To: Alex Byrne
Subject: Trouble With Gender

Dear Alex

Thank you for sending me the manuscript for Trouble with Gender.  I have now read it, and consulted with advisers and colleagues.  I regret to say that OUP will not be able to publish your book.  I am sorry to have to give you a negative response.  I’m afraid our judgement is that the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.  The same kinds of problems that I found with the introduction we now find continue throughout the book.

I am forwarding a copy of the manuscript which I have annotated.  I hope that these comments might be helpful to you.

I shall also forward comments from four academic readers.   Whatever you decide about the book, I hope that these will be useful to you.  It may be that another publisher would not agree with OUP in finding this treatment of the subject inappropriate, and would be happy to be able to publish the book.  Perhaps the comments I send may then prove to be useful to that end.

I am sorry to have to write to you with this decision, since you are a valued OUP author. 

With best wishes

Peter

I asked Professor Byrne about the reference to the "same kinds of problems" in the draft introductory chapter.  Here is what he said:

“The same kinds of problems that I found with the introduction” refers to Peter’s problems with “tone” in one of my initial drafts of the introduction and first chapter. I allude to this in the Quillette article: “’Happy to revisit anything,’ I wrote in an email, referring to adjustments I had made (mostly small choices of wording) in response to earlier comments from OUP.” As anyone who has worked with Peter will expect, his comments were constructive and helpful. 

Here are four representative examples of such adjustments:

“An open letter calling for the retraction of the paper swiftly garnered more than 800 signatories. Some were from the Perpetually Outraged on the internet, but many of the signatories were distinguished academics.” -> “An open letter calling for the retraction of the paper swiftly garnered more than 800 signatories.”

“Please note: this is the American Medical Association, not a group of mendacious activists.” -> “Please note: this is the American Medical Association, whose mission is to ‘promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health’.”

“some fancy-sounding academese -> “unmistakable imprint of gender studies”

“the Dean of the School of Public Health had thrown Littman under the bus” -> “the Dean of the School of Public Health had written a letter to staff and students”.

Comments are open, and will be moderated for relevance.   Comments must include your full (actual!) name, and a valid email address (the latter will not appear).

ADDENDUM:  Philosopher Neil Levy on Twitter makes the fair point that Peter M. typically refers to referees as "advisers," although the way this is written, it still leaves it unclear what role, if any, the referee reports played in the decision, and what overlap there was between "advisers" and actual referees of the manuscript.  (And, to repeat what has been said before, the referee reports were divided between positive and negative, and when a book is under contract, as this was, it is quite irregular to deny the author an opportunity to respond to any negative reports.  This, of course, is why most observers think the subject-matter and point of view of the author played a very large role, and in a way that seems inappropriate for an academic press.)

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38 responses to “Alex Byrne’s rejection email from Oxford University Press”

  1. Jason Brennan

    I, for one, am thoroughly convinced that even though we all know there is tremendous social pressure not to publish books like Byrne's, nevertheless, this book was rejected for the regular old scholarly reasons and not for political reasons. Of course that's true and I believe it.

    Reply
  2. David Zimmerman

    And what do you base your belief upon, Sir?

    Reply
  3. Jason Brennan

    I was doing a sarcasm there.

    Reply
  4. Michel Xhignesse

    I recently read Simon Conway Morris’s “The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals” (CUP 1998), a popular science treatment of the Burgess fauna. I’d been told it was highly critical of the perspective offered by Stephen Jay Gould in “Wonderful Life”, so I was looking forward to a knock-down drag-out fight (like the one between Gould and Dennett).

    I hated this book. Just loathed it. There are many reasons for that, including the fact that it’s just very, very bad (qua science as well as qua popular science). But a big part of my instant dislike for the book had to do with its tone. Gould was always “Steve Gould”, never “Gould” or even “Stephen”; and despite complaining in the opening pages that people these days just throw "isms" at each other instead of having substantive debates on the merits of positions, Conway Morris accuses Gould of being a godless Marxist and post-structuralist, among other things. These unexplained accusations persist throughout, and ultimately just go towards building strange straw men which Conway Morris doesn’t even bother to tilt at. It’s weird and thoroughly off-putting, and, frankly, the result is a book that does not redound to Cambridge’s credit.

    My point in recounting this anecdote is that tone is not as trivial a matter as we sometimes assume. Conway Morris’s book has a lot of problems, and, honestly, its tone is among the least of them. But it’s also what was responsible for my hating it so much. No doubt he thought he was being wry but I found it insufferable, and it really served to make it seem as though he had a personal grudge against Gould, rather than a scientific disagreement. And that’s just not good material for a work of popular science.

    Based on the few examples Byrne has given above, it sounds to me like he was striking entirely the wrong tone. A tone which, far from wry humour, communicated a deep disdain for his dialectical opponents. And while surely there’s room in the world for that sort of thing, I don’t think a popular-facing volume is good fit for it. After all, who’s the volume’s audience? Is it just other “gender critical” feminists? I would think that, ideally, it would also be the trans-allied side, whom he’s presumably trying to convince, or at least engage in dialogue. But if his disdain for and hostility towards them is so palpable, they’re not likely to pay his book much heed. This issue seems especially compounded by the ongoing anti-trans moral panic which has swept up a goodly chunk of political discourse in the US, and which is resulting in some pretty horrifying legislative measures against trans people (to say nothing of the physical violence visited upon them).

    As an instructor, this kind of dismissive tone is something I’d flag in a student paper. That’s not to say that it’s hard to change individual instances so that their tone is more respectful. But the more such instances there are, the more work is involved; and if it’s an issue that was flagged at the proposal stage, then it’s bound to be pretty annoying for the editor to find the work of identifying such instances entirely offloaded onto his plate. Indeed, as an editor, I’d be worried that the author seems not to have been able to rein himself in/identify these instances for himself in editing. It would undermine my confidence in the rest of the manuscript. Unless the target audience was just other “gender critical” feminists, then that would be a problem. But if that’s the target audience, then I don’t think OUP is a good venue for the book.

    Reply
  5. Brian Leiter

    Note, however, that after the issue of tone was flagged early on, Byrne revised the tone in the offending passages.

    Reply
  6. Gabriel Gottlieb

    One reasonable reading of the letter is that in consultation with advisers and colleagues, where in that consultation the reports from academic readers were considered, Peter Momtchiloff decided to reject the manuscript. On this reading, the reader reports and additional advice from non-readers provided Momtchiloff sufficient reasons to reject it.

    Reply
  7. Brian Leiter

    Bear in mind that the reports from readers were divided (one written report very negative, another written report very positive). Normal procedure in cases like that, with a proposal under contract with an established author, is to invite the author to respond and/or to require revisions. Rejection is, to put the matter gently, highly unusual in this kind of situation–except that the subject matter is radioactive, and the opponents of views like Byrne's are fairly relentless and quite open about their belief that views like his should be suppressed.

    Reply
  8. Asia Ferrin

    Professor Leiter, what do you make of Peter Momtchiloff’s claim that: “The same kinds of problems that I found with the introduction we now find continue throughout the book”?

    Reply
  9. Brian Leiter

    I put that question to Byrne (see my original post), and his answer was that it referred to the tone issue that he had fixed in the introduction, but apparently not sufficiently elsewhere in the text. Since the examples Professor Byrne gave of tone problems were easily fixed, the puzzle is why he was not allowed to fix them in other parts of the text.

    Reply
  10. Alex Byrne

    Re Professor Ferrin's question, the introduction and first chapter were the main places where my polemical inclinations may have led me to overdo it. The rest of the book is different. And anyway, I had shown myself more than willing to alter the text, although I did resist Peter's suggestions occasionally. He gave me excellent advice about not over-editorializing.

    Reply
  11. Timothy Sommers

    Someone I know once wrote a book about the so-called indigenous people of Madeupland. They argued that, rightly understood, it was improper for Madeuplanders to describe themselves as either indigenous or as a group needing any "special" legal consideration. In the introduction, the author explicitly made fun of the preposterous claim for a right of self-identification by Madeuplanders and implied that no serious person would side with them. The editors rejected the work citing this tone. When the author suggested they could work their way back through the manuscript hiding, or minimizing, this distain whenever it became too explicit, for some inexplicable reason, the editor said no. This is, no doubt, another example of how political pressure from indigenous Madeuplanders distorts the discourse of philosophy.

    BL COMMENT: Did the author already have a contract for the book? Had the author previously published with the press? Had the author already indicated willingness to revise for tone, and already done so on earlier material? Unless the answer is "yes" to all three questions, this little story seems to me irrelevant.

    Reply
  12. David Zimmerman

    You should work on your sarcasm tone. It is not quite right yet.

    Reply
  13. Moti Gorin

    Poor Professor Byrne. His email box must be getting flooded with apologies from those on other blogs (and no doubt Twitter) who had been accusing him of misrepresenting these matters.

    Reply
  14. Spencer Case

    Even if it's the case that the editors thought that Byrne's book suffered from "tone" problems throughout, and this was the sole reason for its rejection, it doesn't follow that it wasn't rejected for political reasons. Allen Wood's Kantian Ethics is full of gratuitous jabs at Republicans. Kate Manne's books aren't exactly respectful of her political opponents, either. The bar for what sort of tone is considered respectful and scholarly is dramatically different depending on whose views are under discussion. If you're on the left criticizing the right, you can spit fire and not only get away with it but be praised for your pointed writing style. If you're criticizing the good views, though, you'd better be extremely diplomatic, or else you'll be accused of being unscholarly. And if you criticize transgender activism, absolutely no tone will be neutral enough. In the eyes of your critics, every line will be dripping with hateful invective no matter how you phrase your objections.

    Reply
  15. Alex Byrne

    On Spencer Case's point, remember Every Thing Must Go (OUP, 2007)?

    "This is a polemical book. One of its main contentions is that contemporary analytic metaphysics, a professional activity engaged in by some extremely intelligent and morally serious people, fails to qualify as part of the enlightened pursuit of objective truth, and should be discontinued. We think it is impossible to argue for a point like this without provoking some anger. Suggesting that a group of highly trained professionals have been wasting their talents—and, worse, sowing systematic confusion about the nature of the world, and how to find out about it—isn't something one can do in an entirely generous way."

    Reply
  16. Moti Gorin

    One more thing: I’m curious whether the referee reports were sent only after the rejection. The email seems to suggest this but it’s possible they had already been sent to Byrne.

    Reply
  17. David Wallace

    Just as some further context, here is a link to OUP’s official policy on the review process: https://academic.oup.com/pages/authoring/books/review-and-approval-process . It extensively discusses the principles used to select referees, how they consider fairness and anonymity, what feedback is provided and how an author will be given an opportunity to respond, etc. It is a very extensive and careful document.

    And it is entirely concerned with the review of book proposals prior to a contract being issued. So far as I can see – corrections welcome – any approval process for a completed manuscript is literally not mentioned in OUP’s guidelines. (The nearest I can find is a one-sentence note that an editor will check that “[t]he content of the manuscript submitted is in line with the agreed proposal”.)

    I think this is worth bearing in mind in assessing just how unusual and weird all this is.

    Reply
  18. Alex Byrne

    On Moti Gorin's question, Peter's rejection email arrived first, and the reports (in separate emails) shortly after that. True story, I swear: I had a blizzard of emails that day, and overlooked Peter's first email. I quickly skimmed the reports and dashed off a reply (pointing out, e.g., that one referee had accused me of mistakenly attributing a certain view to a scientist, which I manifestly had not), and saying, "Certainly people get very touchy when their discipline is criticized." I ended my email with: "Do you want me to plunge ahead as usual, making changes and replying to the refs?" Shortly after that, I noticed Peter's first email, to which I replied: "Oh, I just saw this. That is unfortunate. Clearly I’m not doing very well with OUP at the moment."

    Reply
  19. Alex Byrne

    Re David Wallace's comment. If we say the tone of Every Thing Must Go is 10, and the tone of Ted Sider's Logic for Philosophy is 0, then I would put the enthusiastically accepted proposal for Trouble with Gender at 7. The submitted draft was perhaps 5 or 6, around the level of Tyler Burge's Perception: First Form of Mind. Less than the tone of the proposal, for sure.

    Reply
  20. Eric Bennett Rasmusen

    Tone is a completely inappropriate ground for a university press to reject a book if the scholarly reviewers do not even mention it as a problem. What does some B.A. editor know about what is appropriate tone?
    The kind of attitude displayed by Oxford University Press is what makes most academic writing so boring. Midwits think that lively writing can't be intelligent, and intelligent writing has to use big words, the passive tense, lots of qualifiers, and make the scholar sound like a robot.

    Reply
  21. Dean C. Rowan

    Ordinary reader here of a mix of academic and belletristic work. Taking the example edits in turn:

    “An open letter calling for the retraction of the paper swiftly garnered more than 800 signatories. Some were from the Perpetually Outraged on the internet, but many of the signatories were distinguished academics.”
    I don't see how the tone here is dismissive of anybody who matters. It slurs nobody in particular, and everybody is aware of some population of "the Perpetually Outraged" in our online public sphere. The revision reduces the review process to a contest.

    “Please note: this is the American Medical Association, not a group of mendacious activists.”
    A fair criticism about tone here, because it risks identifying activism tout court with mendacity. The revision is excellent.

    “some fancy-sounding academese"
    Really? The tone goes too far? Who needs to be protected against stereotypes about ivory tower discourse? The revision is worse! As if readers instantly know the smell of gender studies discourse! See, e.g., opinions of what CRT is, was, and does.

    “the Dean of the School of Public Health had thrown Littman under the bus”
    But isn't this pretty much what this fancy-sounding academese (hard to distinguish from bureacratese) precisely (but figuratively) accomplishes? https://www.brown.edu/news/2019-03-19/gender
    The mere reporting of facts–"a letter to staff and students"–utterly avoids revealing the bullshit purveyed by the Dean.

    To my mind, the publisher mistakenly criticized three of four of the examples. I have the sense that OUP rests on its laurels, and not on strict editorial instructions, when it comes to "tone."

    Reply
  22. Curtis Franks

    Anecdotally, my father-in-law is a retired English and Linguistics professor who specialized in natural history of European languages, stylistics, and regional American vernacular. He and some friends coauthored a piece once about the effectiveness of Stephen J. Gould's writing style, contrasting its directness, clarity, and verve with typical science writing from the same journals, and when it was rejected the stated reason was that it did not conform to the journal's standards of academic writing style.

    Reply
  23. Russell Blackford

    If the folks at OUP think the tone of the (rather anodyne) cited passages is too disrespectful of opponents for publication – at least by them – wait until they get around to reading Voltaire and Nietzsche.

    Reply
  24. Leslie Glazer

    it seems there are three levels of where the relation between a publisher and an author can be severed:

    a). a matter of tone. this seems a simple editorial matter and ought to be corrected by having a good editor who would go through the manuscript putting it into better or more acceptable shape given the targeted audience
    b). a matter of argument and research. this is the academic matter, where expert reviewers would comment on the originality, quality of argument and research in the work as such. this matters mostly for academic audiences where someone would be making a claim to advance a field of study, but could also apply more journalistically regarding sources for claims. But, generally, if one can lay out the academic debates involved and is sensitive to ones limitations an author can include comments and suggestions in developing and improving on their work even if all the critics aren't fully in agreement with the final product
    c). this is the more slippery consideration. where even if the tone is alright and the argument and research are sound, the claims or position is seen as unacceptable ideologically or morally. the view here is that the reasoning and evidence must be shoddy otherwise one couldn't arrive at such an abhorrent conclusion.

    Reply
  25. Timothy Sommers

    Yes, to all three.

    Reply
  26. Timothy Sommers

    It's not sarcastic to ask if changing the group changes people's intuitions. If a book denied the existence of any ethic group and mocked them however mildly in what was meant to be a public-facing work would toning it down be sufficient? Even if you answer yes to the three questions Brian asked, personally I would be uncomfortable about moving forward. I am not experienced enough with academic publishing to say much of value, but I wasn't being sarcastic.

    Reply
  27. Timothy Sommers

    No, wait, I guess the last two lines were sarcastic.Drop the last line and "inexplicable".

    Reply
  28. David Cockayne

    It's always such a pity when one actually has to say so, but there it is. As the renowned philosopher GW Bush once said, "Nuance simply is not done."

    I rather like you interlocutor's use of the slightly menacing use of 'Sir', though.

    Reply
  29. Patrick Müller

    As a grad student, I do not know much about these processes, standards, etc. However, I thought it might be worth pointing out the following:

    Perhaps the "tone" of Byrne's book was more on the offensive side (I don't know, but let's just assume this for the sake of the argument) relative to usual philosophical works. Assuming this, I think it must be pointed out that the "tone" in this literature is *generally* heavily on the offensive side, relative to usual philosophical works. Anyone who spends more than a day researching about it knows (see also e.g. Dembroff's reply to Byrne, mentioned in the Quillette article). This is *especially* true with essays against opponents of the field's mainstream views. And note that this literature gets published this way — it's not like they have to revise their "tone". And so even if the tone of Byrne's book was not exactly on the caregiver's side, it would be extremely weird to only criticise (or even censor) the tone if it's a minority view in the field. Especially without giving the chance to revise it, which would have been the milder way of treating Professor Byrne unequally.

    Maybe I've missed sth here…but the many comments attempting to justify OUP's decision more and more sound like rhetoric diversions to me, or religious apologetic-ish. (I hope I hit the "tone")

    Reply
  30. Richard Marshall

    From an earlier moment:

    “The German Censors —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— Idiots —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
    —— —— —— —— ——”
    ― Heinrich Heine, Ideen

    Reply
  31. Brian Leiter

    Thanks for the clarification. As the examples, above, make clear, Professor Byrne's book did not show "disdain" for transgender people (although it showed some disdain for critics of Gender Critical feminism).

    Reply
  32. Milan M. Ćirković

    In addition to your impressions about Conway Morris vs. Gould, there's just this one trifling trifle you forgot to mention: that Conway Morris was right about the topic (Burgess taxonomy) and Gould was wrong.

    I'd prefer true and irritating over false and soothing any day of the week.

    Reply
  33. Mike Veber

    Enforcement of civility norms disproportionately targets and suppresses minority and contrary opinions. So I say: Defund the Tone Police. One of the authors of a famous essay defending women’s suffrage (but whatever did he mean by ‘woman’?) complained about the double-standard 150 yrs ago:

    "With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation."

    Reply
  34. Timothy Sommers

    Fair enough.

    Reply
  35. Eric Bennett Rasmusen

    Has anybody ever heard of a university press rejecting a book because of reviewer comments after they have already signed a contract with the author?

    I'm an economist who does a lot of law publishing, and I've never heard of it.

    BL COMMENT: It does happen, not a lot, but when it happens it's because the contract (based on a proposal and some sample chapters, plus the author's reputation/past work) contains an escape clause. But presses only rarely exercise it, and in every case I know of, only after giving the author an opportunity to rectify the concerns.

    Reply
  36. Eric Bennett Rasmusen

    On confidentiality of reviewer reports: in economics I don't think anybody would think that anonymous referee reports for journals or books would be confidential if the author of the book or article was willing to release them. I think there's even an entire book of referee reports, mostly negative, of famous articles. I have posted a sampling of mine on the Web for the benefit of PhD students, hto I can't find them now. In particular, I like to show a negative one for my best-known paper ("Naked Exclusoin") which probbaly helpled get it accepted, since the referee obviously hated the policy implications of the paper but couldn't find anything specific to object to in it.

    Reply
  37. Jonathan Kramnick

    In response to Rasmusen, from the perspective of English, not Philosophy, I've seen it happen more frequently than Brian has, and I have a fundamentally different understanding of what an advance contract is and how much it binds the press. At least in English, and I'd be surprised if things were wholly different in other disciplines, advance contracts are commitments to put an entire manuscript through peer review based, usually, on an initial review of a proposal and sample chapters. If that review of the entire manuscript doesn't go properly, if all or enough of the reviewers don't recommend publishing, then the press will not publish the book. To be sure, manuscripts with advance contracts most often get published, but by no means all the time. I know of several cases in which they haven't. Sometimes the readers of the final, entire manuscript will be different in part from the people who read the proposal and samples. Sometimes the initial readers will discover parts of the final manuscript that they don't like as much as the sample or feel that their recommendations weren't taken seriously, etc. It's a difficult business. That's also why every department I've been a member of has, for the purposes of promotion and tenure, considered advance contracts to be indications of interest on the part of a press, important and meaningful, but by no means promises to publish.

    Reply
  38. Eric Bennett Rasmusen

    Thank you, Professor Kramnick. It may be, too, that disciplines differ. In economics, it's easier to publish a book with a good publisher than an article with a good journal. The referees are not nearly as tough, and a book doesn't count for as much come tenure time as a "top 5" journal publication. (In my own first try at UCLA, my Blackwell game theory book was spun as teaching, since they wanted to reject me as bad at research, tho in my next job, at Indiana, it was spun as research, since the committee wanted to reject me for being bad at teaching. http://www.rasmusen.org/GI/index.html).

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