This part kind of blew me away. Just amazing how some people, who I probably disagree with on most things but are reasonably intelligent, just miss the incredibly obvious subtext and refuse to believe it even when spelled out explicitly right in front of them (as Carvalho did on this call).

All the free speech warriors who go apoplectic when a professor comments on race or gender in lecture complete ignore the actual state-enforced censorship of ideas sweeping the country:
pen.org/report/americas-censored-campuses-25-web-of-control

Yeah I did a double-take at "semilingual" - extremely out of date and broadly seen as offensive/demeaning nowadays; no one seems to use it anymore academically in any subfield I'm aware of.

There were fewer people, from fewer countries, with relevant degrees and qualifications! And assistant profs today, including people from "perceived intellectually shortchanged groups", get hired with CVs that would've been good enough for tenure back in the day.

In the US, 30+ years ago it was much more common to be hired by your PhD granting institution. I work with such a person (who is very aware of these things, and a staunch advocate for students and academic labor more generally)! There weren't 50-100+ applications for every job!

I can maybe buy the argument that tenure denials used to be more common. At the same time, it's harder to get a job, and get promotions, today than it was in the past.

Guys in Cohen's generation rambled a bit teaching EFL, did a PhD eventually, and then often got tenure-track jobs by referral.

But then, right after discussing how difficult it is to publish in top-tier journals now, he laments that *some people* are getting hired too easily:

But the most problematic part of Cohen's piece is about hiring and promotion standards in the field. Cohen makes a fair point about perfunctory external review committees in some countries (he was lavished with a vacation for doing this).

lower quality publications, too: various trends in learner motivation research, computer assisted language learning, language learner strategies (*cough*). More contemporarily, I'd say AI has exceeded translanguaging in this regard.

Cohen also takes aim at research fads and buzzwords, focusing on translanguaging. I find most applications of translanguaging flawed (though feel it does good as a policy/political project), so I sympathized a bit. But looking back, you can identify other fads that led to a ton of superficial/...

That's not to diminish the contributions made in that time period. Some do stand the test of time! But highly influential early work in a field also tends to go hand in hand with low-hanging fruit (admittedly, how low becomes much clearer only in retrospect - that's how science works).

journals can't hold all of it. Look at Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, MLJ, etc 30-50 years ago: you could publish simpler studies in shorter format. In part this was due to youth of the field and academic standards of the time, but also there was simply less competition to publish.

He also points out the proliferation of shoddy/predatory journals and the limited applicability of research findings to language teaching. Those are fine points to make, but on the shoddy/predatory journal note, it ignores that there are many more people doing research today, and 'top tier'...

Things aren't perfect, though.

Cohen laments the slowness and difficulty of academic publishing, and disparities in funding to support OA publishing. All agreeable, but also misses the long view: Publishing wasn't quicker (paper copies, anyone?) and OA was not on the table for anyone!

To start off, by most agreed on indicators of rigor, applied linguistics research is better than it ever was. Early AL research was plagued by weak(er) designs, application of statistics, and statistical power.

We've also made a lot of progress in covering more languages and areas of the world.