The typically tame world of academic publishing got heated last year, as several journals took flak for editorial decisions about content regarding historically marginalized groups. Now one of those journals has a plan to “transform.”

“I have no illusions about what an enormous challenge this will be, and I fully expect it will make people unhappy on both sides of the barricades,” said Alex Lichtenstein, professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington and editor of American Historical Review, in a new column announcing changes to the journal.

While there “will be failures and limitations, and the pace of change may not satisfy everyone,” he wrote, “my fervent hope is that by the time my editorship ends in August 2021, I will have set the journal on an irrevocable course of change.”

The American Historical Review, the academic publication of the American Historical Association, is one of the discipline’s most revered periodicals, publishing work across subfields. But it made -- in the eyes of many critics -- a major blunder in early 2017 in asking a scholar who has expressed arguably racist views to review a book on inequality and urban education.

In that review, Raymond Wolters, professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware, both praised and criticized the book in question, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits. Specifically, Wolters said that author Ansley T. Erickson, associate professor of history and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, had done her research but he challenged her argument about metropolitan busing programs to promote racial integration in schools.

Most significantly, Wolters chided Erickson for not considering “sociobiology.” To Wolters’s critics, the term blew like a dog whistle endorsing racial hierarchies.

Wolters has defended himself, saying that sociobiology is a well-established concept that, in his words, “focuses on the way biology (including genetic adaptations to evolution in different environments) affects the social behavior of humans and other living beings.”

But the AHR, as the journal is known, quickly apologized. Robert A. Schneider, a professor of history at Indiana University and AHR’s then interim director, said he should have “lingered longer” over the sociobiology plug, and that the journal was previously unaware of Wolters’s views on race and white identity. He also promised that the journal would review its policies and procedures to prevent similar incidents going forward.

Less than year later, Lichtenstein is apparently making good on that pledge. “Rather than simply apologize and move on,” he wrote in his new column, “I have come to believe that the AHR should take the risk of confronting its own potential complicity in the inability of the profession to divest itself fully of its past lack of openness to scholars and scholarship due to race, color, creed, gender, sexuality, nationality and a host of other assigned characteristics.” ...