Academic presses can kill controversial manuscripts when invited peer reviewers accept and then decline after seeing the content, leaving editors to cite lack of reviews or 'controversy' to terminate contracts. This procedural non‑engagement functions as de facto censorship without a public ban or rebuttal.
— It exposes a subtle gatekeeping mechanism in scholarly publishing that shapes which ideas reach the public and the historical record.
BeauHD
2025.12.01
68% relevant
Both cases show institutional actors using procedural levers to suppress unwelcome voices without an open public rebuttal: the abbey’s conditional offer (quit Instagram, cease press contact, forgo legal counsel, bar helpers) functions like the peer‑review refusal that quietly prevents contested ideas from reaching audiences—a de facto censorship through process rather than formal adjudication.
Aporia
2025.12.01
75% relevant
Noah Carl documents 81 petitions that use collective academic signatures to delegitimize colleagues and press for sanctions (disinvitations, retractions). That mechanism is the same structural phenomenon described in the 'Refusal‑to‑Review' idea: procedural or coordination tactics among academics functioning as de‑facto gatekeeping and censorship.
Jesse Singal
2025.11.30
72% relevant
Singal describes a cultural mechanism—dismissal by non‑engagement—that parallels the academic phenomenon where reviewers or editors decline to engage with controversial work and thereby functionally censor it; both are procedural, non‑evidentiary ways of narrowing which ideas reach publics.
Susan Pickard
2025.10.01
100% relevant
The press sent the Beauvoir manuscript to 26 reviewers; most backed out after seeing it, only one review arrived, and the 2025 contract was cancelled as 'too controversial.'