This issue contains a number of surprises that may challenge and even shock our readers, but we hope will also arouse and invigorate.
One thing that is no surprise is the recent swell of concern about the ungodly quantity and poor quality of much scholarly publishing, but Lawrence M. Mead deepens the discussion considerably with “The Other Danger… Scholasticism in Academic Research.” The corruption of scholarship through politicization and political correctness rightly deserves attention, but the “other danger” is the narrowing of research to the point where it loses all claim on the interest of society at large. Mead uses his own field of political science to exemplify in specific detail the more general problems in social science research: greater and greater specialization, more focus on methodology instead of substantive content, quantitative analyses of relatively small data bases, and a
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