(Spicer and Roulet, 2014a)
In “The End of Peer Review and The Matrix of Ideas,” Robert Hanna argues that peer review is not only (i) an effective straitjacket that massively stifles creativity and guarantees in-crowd orthodoxy, but also (ii) an effective bottleneck that massively slows down and chokes the dissemination and sharing of creative unorthodox ideas. Therefore, in Hanna’s opinion, we should simply shut down the professional academic peer review system altogether and forever. In diametric opposition to the mechanical, constrictive “marketplace of ideas” thought-shaper, Hanna proposes instead a thought-shaper he calls the matrix of ideas, which captures not only (i) the structured, systematic conception of a grid, but also (ii) the organic, generative conception of a womb. Above all, in the scholarly environment Hanna is characterizing as “the matrix of ideas,” where serious scholars are collaborators collectively pursuing goodness, truth, and knowledge, and not competitors individually pursuing professional academic zero-sum bragging-rights and glory, high social status, high salaries, and coercive moralistic power over their so-called “colleagues,” there would be no commodification, mechanization, or moralization, all of which are endemic, significant problems for contemporary higher education inside the professional academy.
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