Academic promotion is a form of promotion. Why promote that with which we do not agree?

“More precisely, while criticism has expanded in political and personal directions, can political or personal criteria serve hiring committees, dissertation directors, and other professional judges in their decision making? Few academics would agree to have their works and careers decided by the political or personal preferences of their colleagues. Scholarly ideals and academic freedom demand a more objective review, a judgment based on methodological standards, guidelines of evidence and interpretation, consistency of terms, clarity of thesis—in a word, on epistemological grounds. Only these argumentative criteria can provide a discipline with open and consistent evaluations of students’ and professors’ work, for unlike political and personal standards, evidentiary and inferential norms allow for a diversity of opinions (as long as they are carefully argued). This is not to say that politics and personality can be entirely removed from judgment, but only that there is a rough distinction to be observed and that judges can make valuations without linking them necessarily to particular political or personal interests.” “For better or worse, however, these ideas about the objectivity of judgment count for little in the academy today. Instead, scholars take the pathway of asserting the political/personal character of all decisions. But although epistemological issues occupy few critics these days, that does not mean academics have no answer to the question, What is the purpose of inquiry in the humanities? Encouraged by editors who are sensitive to hot institutional topics and by administrators who are eager to launch interdisciplinary initiatives, academics do not hesitate to opine today about the purpose of the humanities and to offer suggestions about the way the humanities should be funded, taught, and disciplined. No ambitious theoretical, historiographical, or cultural studies statement is complete without an argument for disciplinary redefinition. No savvy job candidate walks into an interview unprepared to declare his or her disciplinary commitments and skepticisms. What departmental decision about admissions, hirings, or curriculum proceeds without a discussion of the institutional and political implications of the choices? The age demands that academics take a position on the profession… … “Anybody who makes the objection that colleagues in a discipline share biases and politics and that their collective judgment merely reinforces rather than neutralizes interest has little acquaintance with research in America today. Every discipline in the academy includes individuals of diverse politics and competing interests. Indeed, some have a consummate interest in discrediting the conclusions of others. And because political and personal still count as accusatory terms, some will always examine a study for intrusions of interest and bias, fabrication of evidence, premises that narrowly predetermine outcomes, exclusion of counterevidence, and excessive personal involvement. Of course, such objectivity standards are stricter in the sciences than in the humanities, but they still prevail whenever scholars compile evidence and draw inferences. They may not apply to speculative and theoretical aspects of criticism, but they do to its empirical and logical aspects, and they should be activated whenever scholarship is evaluated for its truth and method. Bearing on facts and conclusions, not “eternal verities,” “transcendent values,” “uninterpreted texts,” or other metaphysical bogeymen, objectivity standards rest on epistemological criteria shared by members of a discipline (who may share little else). In turn, the criteria distinguish good scholarship from bad scholarship, sound teaching from unsound teaching.”