Journal of Architectural Education: A Comprehensive Overview

The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) stands as a pivotal platform for discourse and scholarly exploration within the field of architectural education. Since its inception in 1947, it has served as a leading venue for research and commentary, shaping the trajectory of architectural pedagogy and scholarship. Published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) through Taylor and Francis, the JAE occupies a unique position, fostering critical dialogue and disseminating innovative ideas to a global audience of educators, researchers, and practitioners.

Historical Context and Evolution

Founded in 1947, the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) has been the primary venue for research and commentary on architectural education. In 1982, the JAE established a blind-peer-review process, solidifying its commitment to rigorous scholarship and making it the oldest continuing operating journal of its kind. Originally a quarterly publication, the JAE transitioned to a biannual schedule commencing in autumn 2009 (October and March), increasing the number of pages published yearly. This strategic shift aimed to better serve the international community of teachers, researchers, and administrators by increasing the journal’s visibility and usefulness by publishing more, less often. The biannual schedule coincides with the ACSA’s regional and national annual conferences.

Publication and Accessibility

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is listed as the publisher of the journal and has final authority over policies governing publication of the journal, including, but not limited to, budget and appointment of personnel. Faculty members at ACSA full-member and candidate-member programs, affiliate members, and supporting members, receive print copies of the journal as part of their membership and are available online through a live link from the ACSA home page. Subscribers may access issues directly. Libraries, individuals, and organizations interested in subscribing may do so through Taylor and Francis.

Content and Scope

The JAE publishes diverse articles, including Scholarship of Design, Design as Scholarship, Op Arch, Translations, Transactions, Interviews, and several forms of review, from buildings + projects to books and symposia.

The JAE Award

The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) Award was instituted in 1985 and is now given annually for outstanding peer-reviewed articles published in the Essay, Design, Narrative, and Image categories during the preceding academic year. No more than one article in each category will be awarded in a given year. Nominations shall be solicited from the JAE Editorial Board for each year’s awards, for a final decision by the ACSA Board of Directors.

JAE Essay Award

To recognize outstanding peer-reviewed Essays in the Journal of Architectural Education. This award will recognize scholarship that is clearly written, well researched, and well crafted. Essays should make a significant contribution to the ongoing transformation of architectural education and culture of architectural research. Essays should be grounded in relevant discourse, offer an original position, and be supported by appropriate visual and textual secondary sources.

JAE Design Essay Award

To recognize outstanding peer-reviewed Design essays in the Journal of Architectural Education. This award will recognize scholarship that is reflective of a design project or studio, well written, and well crafted. Design essays should make a significant contribution to the ongoing transformation of architectural education and culture of architectural research. Design essays should be grounded in relevant discourse, offer an original proposal, and provocative graphic argument.

JAE Narrative Award

To recognize outstanding peer-reviewed Narrative articles in the Journal of Architectural Education. This award will recognize scholarship that is reflective, well written, and well crafted. Narrative articles should make a significant contribution to the ongoing transformation of architectural education and culture of architectural research. Narrative essays should offer an original proposal and/or history.

JAE Image Award

To recognize outstanding peer-reviewed Image articles in the Journal of Architectural Education. This award will recognize an Image article that offers an original proposal and provocative graphic argument. Images should make a significant contribution to the ongoing transformation of architectural education and culture of architectural research.

Ethical Standards

A member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the JAE endorses its “Best Practices”, as do its publishers. By submitting one’s work for review and publication, all authors attest to, and agree to abide by, the COPE code of ethical conduct.

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Metrics and Impact

The set of journals have been ranked according to their SJR and divided into four equal groups, four quartiles. The SJR is a size-independent prestige indicator that ranks journals by their 'average prestige per article'. It is based on the idea that 'all citations are not created equal'. This indicator counts the number of citations received by documents from a journal and divides them by the total number of documents published in that journal. The chart shows the evolution of the average number of times documents published in a journal in the past two, three and four years have been cited in the current year. International Collaboration accounts for the articles that have been produced by researchers from several countries. Not every article in a journal is considered primary research and therefore "citable", this chart shows the ratio of a journal's articles including substantial research (research articles, conference papers and reviews) in three year windows vs. Ratio of a journal's items, grouped in three years windows, that have been cited at least once vs. It estimates the article processing charges (APCs) a journal might charge, based on its visibility, prestige, and impact as measured by the SJR. It represents the potential financial worth of a journal. It is obtained by multiplying the journal's Estimated APC by the total number of citable documents published over the past five years.

Editorial Structure and Governance

The Editorial Board serves as the primary peer-review body for submissions to the journal and advises the Executive Editor regarding editorial policy and content. The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is an international membership association that represents more than 200 schools of architecture and 7,000 faculty around the world.

Controversy Surrounding the Palestine Issue

In February, as reported by AN, it canceled the Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) themed on Palestine and fired its interim executive editor. The action resulted in the resignation of all 20 members of the JAE editorial board on March 10, shortly before the annual ACSA meeting. After Hamas’s attack on Jewish settlements on October 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and Israel’s subsequent bombing campaign and ground invasion that has killed more than 50,000 people, the majority of whom were civilians, then-JAE executive editor Nora Wendl, a professor at the University of New Mexico, began coordinating a statement of support for Palestine among the JAE editorial board. She sent a draft to Monti and then-ACSA president Mo Zell. “Their response was, ‘This is so inappropriate, this is so offensive. What are you doing?’” Wendl recalled recently. ACSA leadership continued to push back on JAE’s statement. If the word “genocide” was to be used, there would have to be a footnote and citation. The JAE had to “prove” it was a genocide, said Wendl. Wendl was willing to comply. But more obstacles appeared. The combination of identifying themselves individually without the institutional backing of ACSA made Wendl uncomfortable. The experience informed JAE’s board to bring the issue of Palestine’s geopolitical context and related built-environment ramifications into JAE’s core function: scholarly publication.

“Let’s do what we always do,” Wendl said. “Let’s take it back to scholarship. Let’s make a Palestine issue." This decision would break open a much wider fissure between the JAE and ACSA that has resulted in the resignation of ACSA board leadership and the exit of dues-paying member schools. In advance of a meeting between the ACSA board, the JAE board, and the Palestine issue theme editors in early September 2024, Monti and ACSA president Cathi Ho Schar shared the Palestine call for papers with Michael Zaretsky and Adrian Parr Zaretsky of the University of Oregon and Sharon Haar at the University of Michigan, before it had been made public. To be discussed at the meeting last September was a list of sharply critical questions drafted by the ACSA and read aloud by Ho Schar, according to Cruz Garcia, a former member of the JAE editorial board and architecture professor at Iowa State University, who attended the meeting. The questions probed at the “one-sided” framing of conflict in the call for papers. As discussed in an online town hall meeting in March, the JAE board felt that the ACSA’s questions inappropriately sowed doubt about the journal’s scholarly integrity. Regardless, they moved forward and published the call in mid-September 2024.

External Pressure and Accusations of Antisemitism

The JAE board would later encounter similar talking points in a letter dated October 14, 2024. It was signed by the educators ACSA leadership shared the call for papers with-Parr Zaretsky, Zaretsky, and Haar-along with Bijan Youssefzadeh, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Around that time, an open letter titled “Architects United Against Anti-Semitism” circulated, eventually gathering over 700 signatures, though many of the signatories are not identified as architects. The letter broadly aligns with popular interpretations of the Israel-Palestine war that center Hamas as a terror organization. (The call for papers did not mention Hamas.) The letter described the call for papers as an act of “academic malpractice” that was “clearly aimed to glorify Hamas violence and demonize Israel under the pretense of scholarship.”

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The letter’s text stridently objected to calling Israel’s actions genocide, a label the signatories feel is inappropriate because it “requires the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in part or in whole. There is a clear distinction between that and what is happening in Gaza today.” This is because “the State of Israel is fighting a defensive war against Hamas. Despite Hamas embedding itself in civilian populations to maximize casualties, Israel has managed to maintain an unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian deaths relative to enemy soldiers/terrorists when compared to other conflicts,” the letter continues. The letter interpreted the call for papers itself as a prologue to genocide because of its criticism of Israel, declaring that “the ASCA is one of many academic institutions getting swept up in the same type of behavior that preceded the Holocaust for over a decade in German intellectual society. The language of the JAE call was sharply decolonial and anti-Zionist.

Thematic Focus of the Palestine Issue

The goal for the Palestine issue was “to reflect on the global reverberations and social, political, economic, and environmental implications of this historical juncture for design, research, and education in architecture,” said Nora Akawi, a Palestinian architect and an assistant professor at Cooper Union, who commented on behalf of the issue’s four theme editors. Despite past tensions, some editorial board members, like Ersela Kripa, a founding partner of AGENCY, felt that the Palestine call was consistent with ACSA’s generally progressive view of architecture pedagogy. A few days after the call was published, the ACSA issued a joint statement opposing the “prohibition on diversity, equity, and inclusion” in design education.

Escalation of the Conflict and Internal Divisions

According to Monti, this truce was interrupted by the new presidential administration in Washington. One subject line read: “Eff The PaliNazis!!! Strong Condemnation of the JAE’s Alarming, Politically Charged Call for Papers.” Angry letters from the faculty of member schools also made their way to the ACSA presidential administration as well as other actions at state levels. These substantial risks include personal threats to journal editors, authors, and reviewers, as well as to ACSA volunteers and staff. Monti and Ho Schar have noted that the definitions of antisemitism embraced by the Trump administration and developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “appear overly vague and restrictive of free speech. Considering his other clients, it might be hard to imagine ACSA’s legal counsel coming to any other conclusion. Previously, ACSA was advised by Jeffrey P. Altman of the law firm Whiteford, Taylor & Preston. Altman is also listed as general counsel for The Republican Jewish Coalition, which on March 2 issued a press release praising President Trump for expediting $4 billion of military aid to Israel. The ACSA board was not informed of Altman’s relationship to this conservative pro-Israel organization, according to Marcelo López-Dinardi, an associate professor at Texas A&M, and former ACSA board member.

Cancellation of the Palestine Issue and Subsequent Resignations

Four days later, on February 25, Monti and Ho Schar informed the University of Michigan’s McLain Clutter (who became Interim Executive Editor of the JAE after Wendl stepped down in August 2024) of the ACSA board’s decision. Clutter refused to work with the ACSA on a replacement issue and was fired on February 28. Further, Monti and Ho Schar, on behalf of the ACSA board, told AN that “we regret that the decision to halt JAE 79.2 has caused members to question our values and intentions. Monti and Ho Schar also shared that ACSA learned that in two states, which include 12 colleges with architecture programs, presidents at member universities and governors were being urged to restrict the use of state funds for ACSA membership dues because of the Palestine JAE issue. They feared that, in states with IHRA antisemitism statutes, “joining ACSA could be deemed illegal” due to the call for papers.

On March 3, the JAE editorial board sent a letter to ACSA demanding the reinstatement of Clutter and the reversal of the decision to terminate the Palestine issue. They criticized the decision as an attack on academic freedom, intellectual integrity, and ethical scholarship. The next day, they released an open letter that eventually garnered the signatures of 1,500 architectural educators, echoing their demands. That was the last time the JAE editors attempted to work within the ACSA to resolve this rift. In a letter dated March 10, all members of the board announced their resignation. The ACSA’s own board has not been insulated from this wave of resignations. Due to the ACSA’s handling of the Palestine issue, López-Dinardi, the ACSA board member, resigned on March 16. Another board member, Vivian Lee, associate professor at the University of Toronto, also resigned, and José Ibarra, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, who was to begin an ACSA board term, withdrew his acceptance of this board position. “I’ve tried my part, [from] within, to develop a dialogue that I thought was needed,” López-Dinardi said.

Impact on Membership and Future Concerns

At least one school, Portland State University (PSU), has declined to renew its ACSA membership, in part because of the canceled Palestine issue. The architecture school’s director Juan Manuel Heredia put the issue to a faculty vote and the result was unanimous, he said. Heredia called the decision a “pragmatic” one made in the context of budget cut austerity. While PSU faculty have benefitted from ACSA publications, Heredia said the abrupt cancellation of an issue of its flagship journal calls into question their commitment to academic freedom and scholarly publication. (ACSA also publishes a second journal, TAD, that focuses on technology, architecture, and design. Four members of its editorial board also recently resigned.) This issue-and not any broader political alignment among faculty-is what prompted their unified objection.

Much of ACSA’s public programming has been broadly progressive, and supportive of a wide range of social justice or DEI initiatives, leaving ACSA and JAE board members wondering why this critically framed analysis of Palestine became such a red line. For instance, the ACSA Faculty Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture was established to support academics from marginalized backgrounds working in non-tenure-tracked positions. Recent examples of the ACSA research series “Where Are My People” have highlighted the experiences of LGBTQ+ architects and educators. Clutter, the former interim executive editor, sees a “clear double-standard,” he said. “Whether [there’s] a line or no line, to me it’s equally damning for the decision-making of the ACSA.

Looking Ahead

Clutter hopes the rupture with ACSA can be fixed, but he said it’s likely not possible with Monti as executive director, a role he has held for 21 years. “I hope that this rift creates deep, structural reforms in ACSA,” he said. For now, the former JAE editorial board members are focusing on a publishing and scholarship future beyond ACSA, according to Fleming. Coming out of the New Orleans conference, these critiques have pushed ACSA to respond to membership that is unhappy with their decision to cancel the Palestine issue. “I don’t think it’s beyond the scope of reason to believe that in the not-so-distant future, that things like climate research might be censored or have restrictions put on [them],” said Clutter.

In a moment when an Indian doctoral candidate in urban planning at Columbia GSAPP has fled to Canada to avoid ICE and the Trump administration is demanding that Columbia University’s Middle Eastern Studies program be put under receivership, the fragility of First Amendment rights doesn’t seem like abstract quandary. Wendl said that canceling the Palestine issue could prompt higher education administrators to say, “‘This is a topic we don’t touch. “A too-complicit academy is profoundly terrifying,” said Saloojee.

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