In the spirit of Humanities Australia, the Academy’s journal, Emerita Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki FAHA writes about the challenges faced by the humanities in the age of fake news, pressure on academics to publish at all costs and rising international tensions.
Imagine the following scenario. A senior academic, whose field of research is biology but not immunology, has highly controversial views about the effectiveness of certain vaccines. He writes several articles on this topic and sends them to scientific journals outside the field of immunology, where they are peer-reviewed by scholars who are not immunologists. The reviewers recommend publication of the articles, and these duly appear in print. This causes uproar amongst expert immunologists, who write to the journals and to the academic’s university, pointing out that the articles are full of misinformation, flawed data, incorrect statements of fact, misleading citations, material taken from unverifiable sources etc. They also point to the risk of social harm.
We don’t tolerate junk science in the life sciences – nor should we. But humanities is treated differently. Conspiracy theories, unsupported nutty assertions and offensive claims are tolerated under the guise of academic freedom. Internationally, governments (especially rightwing ones) have legislated to preserve such freedoms. It is hard not to think of the likes of David Irvine and wonder if that’s the kind of freedom we want to preserve. This pierce reflects on those issues for humanities.
But in the humanities, matters are very different. International networks like the World Conferences on Research Integrity and the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities have developed guidelines for the protection of research integrity, and these stress the importance of addressing the falsification or fabrication of research findings across all disciplines, including the humanities. But, academic institutions rarely have clear protocols for dealing with humanities research misconduct, except when this involves plagiarism. Articles in humanities journals, too, are hardly ever retracted for manipulation or falsification of facts or sources.
