Mass resignations at the journal Intelligence

Numerous members of the editorial board resign after publisher installs new editors-in-chief.

Written by Noah Carl.

Intelligence is one of the few scientific journals where it is possible to publish work on controversial topics such as national IQ. Or at least, it was until now. At the end of November, members of the editorial board were notified that current editor-in-chief Richard Haier would be stepping down and would be replaced by two new editors-in-chief. While editorships changing hands is perfectly normal in academia, two elements made this handover rather unusual.¹

The first is that the current editors were excluded from the decision of whom to select as new editor-in-chief, which was instead made by the journal’s publisher, Elsevier. The second is that the two individuals who were selected do not appear to be well-suited for the role. I will not name them here, but I can say the following.

Neither is currently a member of the journal’s editorial board, and neither lists “intelligence” among their main research interests on their faculty page. Remarkably, one of them has only published a single paper in the journal. (Some members of the editorial board have published more than a dozen.) This is particularly noteworthy given that the original job posting states, “It is critical that the Editor in Chief has a history of publishing in Intelligence”. There is also reason to believe that at least one appointee may not share the journal’s stated commitment to academic freedom as regards controversial topics.²

Since learning about the new editors-in-chief and the process by which they were appointed, most members of the editorial board have resigned in protest. Some are now making plans to start a new journal. There is a general feeling that Elsevier has acted improperly.

So why did Elsevier fail to consult the current editors and then select two individuals who seem poorly suited for the role? At this point, I can only speculate.

In recent years, the journal has come under increasing attack for publishing research that some people consider racist. Back in June, an article appeared in Stat News calling for Elsevier and other publishers to retract all of Richard Lynn’s articles dealing with national IQ on the supposed grounds that they are flawed. Fast forward to a few days ago, and we learn from the Guardian that Elsevier has “ordered a review of Lynn’s research published in its journals, including in Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences”. Were the new editors-in-chief brought in to ensure this “review” went ahead? It’s certainly possible.

Douglas Detterman founded Intelligence in 1977 and served as editor-in-chief all the way until 2016. In his final editorial, he wrote, “One thing I hope the journal never loses is its willingness to publish good, currently unpopular research”. Unfortunately, it looks like Intelligence may have lost that thing.

Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia.

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1. My source wishes to remain anonymous.

2. The founding editor, Douglas Detterman, has written of the journal:

It provided a place where someone interested in intelligence could get a review of their work free of the prejudices that were often apparent at so many other journals. (Some of those prejudices still exist but they are substantially reduced.) To some extent, this freed researchers from the fear that they would do good work on intelligence and not have a place to publish it. Intelligence has published many papers that probably could not have been published easily in any other journal. These papers were in areas like genetics, education, ethnic differences, and national IQ to name a few.