WHY "PEER REVIEWED" ISN'T THE QUALITY ASSURANCE YOU THINK IT IS.

Higher Education Quarterly just confessed to being pranked.  "The retraction is agreed because data in the article has been identified as fabricated and the authors have not disclosed their true identities."  The authors gave their names as "Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III." Doesn't anybody think of an acronym here, or was the title, "Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy," just too appealing to The Narrative to call for more careful review?

The paper, titled Donor Money and the Academy: Perceptions of Undue Donor Pressure in Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy, includes the Olin Foundation and the “Randy Eller Foundation” among the “right-wing donor sources” subject to research. However, the Olin Foundation disbanded in 2005, and the “Randy Eller Foundation” does not appear to exist, a detail noted by Steven Hayward at Powerline.

The paper also lists the Federalist Society among donors to four-year universities and colleges. However, a Federalist Society spokesperson told National Review in an email that the organization “does not donate to undergraduate programs.”

National Review has reached out to Higher Education Quarterly and its editors for comment. The nature of the review process for the article was not immediately clear.

It's malpractice for an editor to send a manuscript on the behavior of eleemosynary institutions to reviewers who are so unfamiliar with the foundations (particularly, if there are economists helping review the paper) as to let that "Randy Eller" (it's easy enough to check the sponsored projects office at a university for that one) slide or to be unaware that Olin have not been calling for proposals for over fifteen years.  The Narrative, notes Pierre Lemieux, was Just.  Too.  Convenient.  "The specter of Koch money appears often in the article along with code words such as 'neoliberalization of higher education' or 'market fundamentalism.' That might have been sufficient to have the article accepted, despite fabricated data and obvious errors."

Academia delenda est.