Abstract
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Peter Bentley, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, initiated some global Zoom meetings with the editors of higher education journals to discuss some of the pressing issues most journals face. One of the major issues that came up for discussion was the decline of quality and sustainability of journals in spite of increasing submission of articles.
Largely repetitive and stereotypical precluding fresh research questions, articles pile up just adding to the editorial workload. Most of them deal with education as a discipline and teaching/learning as if it is the only possible theme. Despite the journal’s avowed objective to address education as a field of multidisciplinary convergence, authors confine to the classroom and settle for hackneyed themes to draft a paper. Let us not write an article in haste for its own sake at the expense of patience to sustained engagement with curiosity. Why do we hesitate to get out of the disciplinary silos promoting shallow empiricism, one of the notable causes of quality crisis.
An effort to transform a heuristic piece into a hermeneutic one with interpretations or explanations is what we expect in an article. Even if we cannot transform an empirical appraisal into an intellectual assessment, it should at least be a sensible pragmatic document with heuristic strength. How to get a pragmatic article graduated to a theoretical one through the process of blind review-based rewriting is the editorial struggle, but most authors have no tolerance to creatively respond to reviewers’ queries. An article at its a priori ontology answering what it means must improve upon itself to be a posteriori with questions how and why. Articles answering how and why generating explanatory knowledge, amenable to epistemological validation, is what any journal would aspire to publish.