Dear Areo readers.
As many of you will now know, Areo was one of several outlets to have recently published pieces by a person calling himself “John Glynn.” It seems that Mr Glynn had claimed to have a PhD and a professorship in psychology to other outlets, and that these qualifications when followed up on, were found not to exist. To us, Mr Glynn just said he was a psychologist without further elaboration when asked for a biography. On learning that even this might not be true, we altered Mr Glynn’s biography to include a disclosure that his former claim to be a psychologist seemed to be false.
At that point, we seriously discussed the option of removing John Glynn’s work from our magazine but decided against it. Although we cannot condone the dishonesty of misrepresenting his qualifications for reasons (presumably) of personal gain, none of Mr Glynn’s essays, which were social commentary, relied upon his being a psychologist. At Areo, we believe very strongly that our job is to publish good arguments, which do not rely on personal or professional identity. If the submission contains factual claims that fall outside our expertise, we send them to expert reviewers and do so whether the writer is a professor of her subject or a high-schooler. Our editorial stance is to check the facts of a submission and the strength of an argument, not the identity, moral character, or pre-existing work of any of our writers before deciding whether to publish. Each argument must stand or fall on its own merits.
Had Mr Glynn still been writing for us, we would have asked him to stop sending submissions because of the breach of trust. However, we had asked him to stop and blocked his emails and social media accounts in April because his behaviour had become erratic and insistent. Consequently our tweets acknowledging his fraudulent claims about his identity aimed to combine transparency with compassion.
Today, it was brought to our attention that a comment on one of Glynn’s pieces from several months ago pointed out that he had so closely paraphrased Michael Gurian that Gurian’s words should really have been indented as a quote rather than a simple “As Michael Gurian points out….” If we had seen this comment at the time, we would have made that change to it, thanked the commenter, and impressed the importance of this on Mr Glynn. However, due to his fraudulent behaviour and being unable to be sure that none of his pieces contain genuine plagiarism, we have now decided to remove all of them from Areo and have done so.
We extend our apologies to Areo readers, who should be able to trust our biographies. While nobody needs any kind of qualification to be published on Areo, and we want to avoid being biased by checking the backgrounds of our writers, we do need a way to minimise the risk of publishing false biographical information. We will continue to discuss various options to mitigate this problem in future while aiming to continue accepting articles on their merits, not according to the identities of their authors. We certainly need to read all the comments as they come in so that we can pick up comments about errors or, as in this case, potential plagiarism and will do so immediately.
Thanks again to all of you who continue to support Areo and share our arguments. For our part, we will continue to do all we can to get good, balanced, and thoughtful arguments out there from all over the political spectrum.
Warmest regards
Helen and Iona
Does this fraudulent publication discredit all academic and popular work on free expression and humanism, or only Areo specifically?
And to be clear, I am not critiquing your editorial response to Glynn because I disagree with you or Glynn ideologically (I don’t) or for any other reason than the following
1. Intellectual property matters and people deserve to be praised for their ideas and their writing
2. Careful editorial oversight is key to the confidence people have in journalism and key to mitigating political polarization
Here is another one. This one was really clever of Glynn and really highlighted for me just how skilled he is at this. For example, instead of writing, “faith-belief dynamic” as the original author did, Glynn changed it to “conviction-based dynamic.” Instead of writing “Ideology fills two basic human needs: certainty and purpose,” Glynn writes, “Ideological validation fills two basic needs: confidence and purpose.” Was any of this Glynn’s idea, nope, does he reference the original author, nope. Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/08/ideology-as-addiction.html Sections of Glynn’s article that he took from Charles Smith: Ideology is addictive. Though, unlike addiction, ideology is a conviction-based dynamic rather than a neurochemical process, like addiction, it demands constant reinforcement and replenishment. Like substance withdrawal, ideology withdrawal is a painful process, whose symptoms include irritability, fatigue, insomnia, headaches and difficulty looking at oneself in the mirror… …within insular academic circles, the ideology addict gains validation by communicating and… Read more »
Here’s another example for you: The following section of Glynn’s article actually came from the blog of a guy who wrote about it on Reason several years ago. Glynn not only copies his sentiments and sentences, he even copied the chronological ordering of those sentiments. Glynn is really good at substituting words. Did Glynn reference this guy in his article, nope. Source: https://reason.com/2016/03/07/this-university-of-oregon-study-on-femin/ Glynn’s section: Take, for example, a 2016 paper linking gender theory and climate change, entitled “Glaciers, Gender and Science—A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Climate Change,” co-authored by a team of historians from the University of Oregon, and funded by the National Science Foundation. Here’s the abstract: Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science and glaciers—particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with… Read more »
Helen Pluckrose you are defending a plagiarist and a fraud. You are publicly saying that he needs to be given “more forgiveness” and he should have quoted people instead of just referencing them. 1. He doesn’t reference all of the authors he plagiarizes and 2. If he quoted them, most of his articles would just be quotes. Glynn is a clear plagiarist and anyone doing a day’s worth of research could figure that out. He plagiarized far more than that single paragraph you reference, Helen, I commented about it on your website in hopes you would look closer, my bad, you didn’t. He plagiarized most of that article and all the ones I’ve checked so far. This is irresponsible and lazy editorial practice. It seems you are hiding behind the moralistic position that good writers don’t necessarily need a PhD, this is obviously true, but it is changing the subject.… Read more »
Makes me think of “My Cousin Vinnie”.
All good. Due diligence.
Thank you.