The New England Journal Failed in Editorial Oversight of a Recent Voices Column on Jason Arday

Jeffrey S Flier MD is the former Dean of the Harvard School of Medicine.

In its recently launched Voices section, an expert clinician blog featuring short personal essays, the venerable New England Journal of Medicine published an article by Dr. Kemi Doll, one of its six inaugural contributors. Entitled “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia”, the article expressed the strong personal reflections of an accomplished Black physician-scientist to the tragic Arday affair. Though the Journal makes clear these pieces are not peer reviewed and don’t represent the views of the Journal, this article raises serious questions about the goals of the Voices section and the editorial process responsible for publishing them. If not further explained and defended by the editors, this contribution may undermine the reputation of the journal as a reliable source of evidence-based medical information, and those concerned about this outcome have a responsibility to present their reasoning.

The focus of the article is the tragic story of Jason Arday, a young Black professor of educational sociology at Cambridge University whose academic accomplishments and many aspects of his life story were recently revealed to be fraudulent. This produced voluminous press coverage, an investigation by his employer Cambridge University, his resignation and soon thereafter his death, likely by suicide. This is both a personal and institutional tragedy with many intersecting dimensions that will continue to stimulate diverse reflections on its causes and implications.

Let me start by identifying several things that are not the basis for my critique of the Journal piece. First, the Journal has the editorial freedom to publish opinion pieces, including those such as Voices that lack peer review. Second, both racism and academic careers are appropriate topics for the Journal, as they represent important issues for the medical profession and medical science. Third, the author, a highly successful Black physician scientist, is free to publicly express her personal reflections on Arday’s death and its meaning to her and, as she believes, other Black academics.

Given the above points, what is my critique of this specific piece being published in the Journal? My concern begins with a high-level view of the role of the New England Journal as a distinguished repository for evidence-based, peer-reviewed research, educational material and, increasingly, opinion. The Journal’s reputation was built by doing this well, though as in all endeavors, mistakes have been made from time to time. In launching the Voices section, the Journal chose a group of experts from different medical fields to contribute regular opinion pieces without peer review. But even without peer review, most would assume some level of editorial oversight of submitted pieces. Even if well-chosen Voices contributors require minimal editorial oversight, it’s hard to imagine editors refraining from reading, reviewing, and if necessary, modifying pieces with obvious errors or logical flaws - which brings us to the current paper.

Dr. Doll’s Voices columns have a focus on careers, mentorship and related matters, and my reading of her prior columns reveals that to be the case. In the Arday piece she used his tragic death to make several strongly worded points. While these reflect the author’s reactions and conclusions, and may have been valuable to her readers, they should have evoked an editorial response, as, among other flaws, the piece was unclear, made several unfounded assertions, and was highly emotional. The editors responsible should have noted these attributes and sought appropriate changes to the text, while maintaining consistency with the goals of the Voices section.

Start with the opening sentence, “They are trying to kill us”. The “us” refers, or so it appears, to all Blacks in academia. This is obviously hyperbolic, though the author denies this possibility without providing any evidence. She also fails to define the “they” who seek to do the killing, apart from referencing the “ever-present winds of white-supremacy and anti-Blackness”. A responsible editor should have questioned this opening.

Though many facts about Arday’s life and career are less than entirely clear, there is plentiful evidence to support widely circulated conclusions about his serious personal and academic flaws. Yet, the author states, “I don’t care whether any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true”, a statement that should have invoked editorial intervention, and has drawn repeated commentary on social media as a flagrant weakness of her argument. Why? Her sentiment that the truth of the matter is unimportant conflicts with values fundamental to scholarship, science and medicine, values the Journal must endorse. She didn’t need to dismiss the importance of the truth of the allegations to convey her personal distress caused by Arday’s career-ending exposure, or her career concerns as a Black academic.

Given her role as a Voice columnist whose assigned mission is facilitating careers of physicians, including Black physicians, hyperbolic claims whose effects on Black physicians are more likely to impair than encourage their success should be questioned. And casually consigning unidentified white colleagues to the category of white supremacists, or people trying to kill their Black colleagues is surely not a path to creating a more diverse and inclusive community- it’s an approach that will drive us apart.

Of course, Dr. Doll is free to publish this article, as others are to support or criticize it. And as stated earlier, the Journal is free to use its platform for the article, as it did in this case. But members of the biomedical community who read, support and in many ways depend upon the Journal should feel free to question the process leading to its publication, the judgment of the responsible editors, and the effects of the article’s publication on the Journal’s reputation and the well-being of the community it serves. As a publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society, the society’s members should be willing to engage in spirited discussion of these issues.

Stepping back from this specific article, this case also raises broader questions about the role of opinion pieces on controversial topics in medical/scientific journals like the New England Journal and others. Editorials are a longstanding and valued feature of medical publications, as are invited perspectives; their quality largely reflects the reputation of the journals and the effectiveness of their editorial boards in confronting important issues. One criticism of prevailing practice has been that, on some controversial topics, editors have done a poor job of ensuring that a range of alternative positions appear in their pages. This is true for submissions subject to review and editorial decision-making, and is even more likely in a series such as Voices, which lacks peer review, and has an obscure editorial process.

I have been a strong advocate of open inquiry and constructive dialogue in medicine and higher education more broadly. My advocacy reflects the belief that the search for truth requires that, on controversial topics, serious alternative views should be respectfully engaged, rather than ignored or silenced. Despite my objections to key elements of her column, I obtained some insights from the piece by Dr. Doll, and vigorous engagement with her views will enhance the possibility of productive dialogue. My objection is not to the piece having been published, or to the need to engage with its perspective, but to its publication in the New England Journal of Medicine with inadequate editorial review for a journal of its stature.

I look forward to further discussion of the Arday affair, its implications for the wellbeing of faculty and higher education, and the future approach to publishing pieces in the Voices section of this venerable and important publication.