The Prince of Peer Review

Image, paperbag academic, by Mariann Hardey, 2025

The Red Pen as a Sledgehammer
There is a moment every academic knows. It is the pause before opening the email with "Decision on your manuscript" in the subject line. It is a moment of vulnerability, a baring of intellectual self to the anonymous judgment of the field. We steel ourselves for critique. We hope for engagement. We accept that rejection is part of the process.

What we do not, and should not, accept is the demolition.

I received a desk rejection recently. It came after a long delay, flagged with an apology from a new editorial leadership. The rejection itself was not the problem; we are all used to rejection. The content of that rejection, however, was a masterclass in everything that is broken in academic culture. It was not peer review. It was a takedown. But, not in a catchy K-Pop tunes manner. 

This Is Not About Rejection
Before we go any further, I want to be perfectly clear. This post is not an angry rant because my co-authors and I research was rejected. Rejection is a fundamental, and often productive, part of the academic ecosystem. Good research is forged in the fires of rigorous, critical, and even harsh peer review. We get "no" far more than we get "yes," and that is the price of admission. I had fabulous rejection the other week (more on this later)…

This post is about the weaponisation of feedback. It is about the specific, toxic culture of intellectual grandstanding that hides behind the veneer of "maintaining standards." The heart of the problem is not the rejection; it is the abruptness and absurdity of the message. It is the choice to use power not to build knowledge, but to humiliate and exclude. The problem is an email that is not a critique but a cudgel, a message so disproportionately cruel and dismissive that it ceases to be a professional assessment and becomes a personal attack. This is not about the outcome. It is about the method, and what that method reveals about the wielder.

A Performance of Power
I’m going to let you look at the feedback's core message. It was a piece of performative grandstanding, a judgment delivered from on high. The author of this feedback refused to engage with a piece of research; instead, asserting their own superiority over it. The entire text was laced with elite posturing, designed to signal that my co-authors and I were not part of the 'sophisticated' club.

Our analysis was dismissed as simplistic, a mere summary lacking any theoretical depth. A core part of our methodology, a well-respected method for analysing social media content, was declared entirely irrelevant to the questions we posed. Our interpretation was labelled as nonexistent. The letter concluded with the stunningly arrogant assessment that the entire manuscript was an incoherent shambles. 

It was, in essence, a Prince Ronald moment. In the children's story, "The Paper Bag Princess," Princess Elizabeth dons a paper bag to outsmart a dragon and save her fiancé a prince named Ronald. But when she rescues him, the prince doesn't thank her. He looks at her soot-covered face and her paper bag and says, "Elizabeth, you are a mess... Come back when you are dressed like a real princess." 

This is the very essence of academic elitism. This is the braying of an individual, likely senior academic secure in their own elite standing, who believes their position grants them the right to not just disagree, but to demean. 

The Collateral Damage of Elitism

This is where the personal and the systemic collide. My primary reaction was not just frustration for myself, but a cold fury on behalf of my co-authors. This was to one of their early publications. 

Imagine, as a junior scholar, stepping into this arena for the first time, only to be met with this wall of contempt. This is how academia bleeds talent. This is how gendered exclusion operates. It’s not always a slammed door. Sometimes it’s an email, dripping with disdain, that tells you your work, your thoughts, your very presence, are a complete failure. It is an act of intellectual violence, a symptom of a much larger disease: a culture that romanticises burnout and offers no structural support. This feedback is the voice of that toxic system, an individual who chooses to use their power to inflict a wound.

The Practice of True Parity
This kind of gatekeeping is precisely why the way we collaborate matters so much. Working with a mix of people at different career stages is not about mentorship, at least not in the traditional, hierarchical sense. This idea of the senior academic "bringing up" the junior scholar is itself a form of patronising elitism. It reinforces the very power structures that allow such toxic feedback to exist.

The real, radical act is to build collaborations based on parity. It is to create a partnership where all forms of expertise are valued equally. My co-authors, one at the start of their career, brings a methodological rigour and a fresh perspective that I, as a more established academic, benefit from enormously. My experience navigating the brutal landscapes of peer review is simply another form of expertise, not a superior one. True allyship is a structural commitment. It means deciding from the beginning that we are building a single project from two equally vital toolkits. The role of the senior academic is not to "protect" the junior one, but to use their privilege to absorb the bureaucratic violence, contextualise the feedback as a systemic failure. 

To be the first to say, "That prince is a bum."

The Empathy Failure​
This entire episode is a catastrophic failure of empathy. Brené Brown’s research defines empathy not as sympathy, not as feeling for someone, but as feeling with them. It is the vulnerable choice to connect. Sympathy stands at the top of the hole, shouting down, "It's messy down there." Empathy climbs down into the hole to say, "I know what it’s like down here, and you are not alone."

This editor, like prince Ronald, is armoured in his own ego. He is the person standing at the top of the hole, declaring that the hole itself is unsophisticated. This feedback is a performance of anti-empathy. It is a strategic choice to use judgment as armour, because to engage empathetically would require him to be vulnerable, to connect with the act of intellectual creation, and to be a colleague. Instead, he chose the power of the pedestal, dismissing the work because it is far safer to judge than to connect.

Rigour vs. Cruelty in the Age of AI Slop
Now, let me be clear. Empathy is not a participation trophy. It is not the pat on the head for a good try. I say this as an editor myself, one who is currently drowning. The sheer volume of work is crushing, but it's the nature of the new volume that is truly corroding. We are all facing a new, specific, and soul-crushing fatigue from the deluge of AI-generated slop. Please, please stop with this slop I repeat as my mantra when I open up my own Editors digital desk. 

As an editor, I receive a relentless slurry of meaningless, plagiarised, hallucinated text. It’s an endless signal-to-noise problem that wastes our most precious and finite resource: our cognitive load. (Which is precious when you are neurodiverse). This new fatigue is a specific kind of burnout. It’s the weariness of a lifeguard watching thousands of bots pretend to drown (they're just waving, right?) It makes you calloused. It makes your trigger finger for the 'reject' button itchy. 

You start to assume bad faith in every submission.

But this is precisely the moment where empathy becomes a non-negotiable professional obligation. Our exhaustion with the system does not give us a license to be abusive to the individual. Empathy is the critical tool of discernment that allows us to distinguish between a bad-faith, automated submission and a good-faith, flawed human effort. The AI-generated paper deserves a form rejection. The human-authored paper, even if it is deeply flawed and requires rejection, deserves a response that respects the labor. Empathy is what allows us to be rigorous without being cruel. It is the choice to critique the work, not the person. It is the difference between saying, "The theoretical contribution is not clear," and "Your work is a big mistake and I am better than you.”

The View from the Other Chair
Again, I am also a journal editor. When I read this letter, I do so with a profound sense of professional failure—not on my part, but on the part of this journal’s new leadership.

In my own editorial practice, this feedback would be a good reason not to go near peer-review ever again. It would never, under any circumstances, leave my desk and go to an author. My job as an editor is to be a custodian of the field. It is to find the value, to guide the author, to protect the integrity of the review process and the human beings who participate in it.

We reject papers constantly. But a rejection should be a tool for improvement, not a weapon of humiliation. This editor's failure to distinguish between critique and abuse is a stain on the journal. Their final, hollow wish that we would not be deterred is perhaps the most insulting part, a feigned elitist politeness after an act of deliberate cruelty.

Rejection as Success! 
Now, let me contrast this with a rejection I received from another journal for a different paper. This one was also a desk reject, but it was the polar opposite in its effect. The editor began by validating the work, calling the topic "highly timely" and acknowledging the "rich longitudinal, multi-method qualitative design". The "no" was just as firm, but it was not a demolition. Instead, what followed was a precise, structured, and generous roadmap for improvement. The feedback was a model of clarity, pointing to specific, actionable issues: an "uneven" integration of theory and data , a lack of transparency in how the different methods were "combined analytically" , and a "conflation" of descriptive observations with conceptual claims. 

This, right here, is what good editorial practice looks like. This is not a "mess"; this is a checklist. For any writer, this is a gift. But for neurodiverse writers, who often struggle with the unspoken rules and subtext of academia, this kind of explicit, logical, and depersonalised critique is an act of essential inclusion. It removes the emotional guesswork and replaces it with a clear-cut task. I didn't feel humiliated; I felt seen, respected, and, most importantly, I knew exactly what to do next.

Again, I know what some readers might still be thinking: "This is just an academic pissed off over a rejection." It is a convenient way to dismiss this entire reflection as sour grapes. 

But that would be a fundamental misreading of the problem, and a missing of the entire point. We are all built to handle rejection; it is the ink we swim in. This post was never about the "no." It is about the how. It is about the profound, unprofessional, and systemic failure that occurs when an editor, an individual in a position of immense trust and power, chooses to issue not a critique, but a personal demolition. This is not about my wounded pride, I have boxing strategies for this part. It is about an abusive culture that masquerades as rigour, a system that protects the egos of its prince Ronalds while it burns the next generation of Elizabeths. This is not a complaint. It is diagnosis.