A new report commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University, Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, brought together senior scholars to assess the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The report's conclusions will not surprise HxA members: scholarly standards have been distorted by political criteria; dissenting voices have been suppressed and alienated; and there may be entire disciplines in which open inquiry has been significantly displaced by ideological conformity.
In this webinar, recorded on June 11th, HxA President John Tomasi joins report co-author Ashley Rubin (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa) and Regina Rini (York University) to critically discuss the report’s conclusions, where it leaves work undone, and what a genuine path toward healthier scholarly norms might look like. A transcript of the discussion, including audience Q&A, is below.
John Tomasi: We’re here to discuss this very exciting report that came out just last week — June 4, as I remember. It was commissioned by Chancellors Diermeier and Martin at Vanderbilt and WashU, and it’s a report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. The commission was chaired by Paul Boghossian, the eminent philosopher at NYU, along with a committee of scholarly all-stars. HxA members who’ve seen the report and looked at the list of people on the commission will recognize that a number of HxA members are on it. That’s not surprising: there are now HxA members on over a thousand campuses in the US alone, and we’re in close conversation on a lot of these topics with university leaders around the country. But I want to state clearly that HxA had no role in this report — no direct role at all. In fact, I didn’t even read it until one of those leaders sent it to me by email the morning it came out. We were not involved in writing it in any way.
Having said that, I want to tell you how excited my colleagues and I were as we began reading it. The most striking thing we thought was: these people are doing things the way we do things — at least in some aspects, as we’ll see. For example, they vividly describe the common view that the humanities are thoroughly and hopelessly politicized, that they’re lost — and then the report rejects that characterization, at least in its bald form. It says, correctly I believe, that fabulous work is being done in many humanities and social science departments across the country. Indeed, I’d say some seminal work is being done there. But the report then goes on to state, unblinkingly, that many things are not wonderful — that there are things that are extremely worrying about the state of the humanities, if we truly care about them. I’ll quote: “Every field we have studied shows some signs of these pathologies, a deterioration of scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria, and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
The humanities matter to us because they invite us to ask questions about deep value — what goals are worthy of pursuit, what life is worth living — and the humanistic social sciences invite us to ask those questions about individuals and about social groups as well. These are among the most difficult and important of all scholarly questions, so it’s desperately important that they not be politicized or trivialized by politicization. The report goes on — and I’ll quote again — that “the academic study of social movements is not in service to any particular social movement.” And I would add that it cannot be. As the report says, the task of the humanistic disciplines is “not to manipulate us into following any party line, but to provide each free person with the tools to make their own informed choices.” This is because, the report tells us, the purpose of the humanities is to “prepare us for a free life.” And again, right from the start, they do things the way we do them at HxA. They take on serious questions that insiders see, and they’re not afraid to confront them. The report promises to address the issue of academic freedom head on — it doesn’t use those words, but that’s what it’s doing.
Thus it notes that administrators operate under “a stringent principle of deference to expertise” — and the report affirms this as a principle administrators must respect. But then it goes on: “our commission exists only because even this foundational principle has its limits.” Whole disciplines can go bad. As the report puts it, when astronomy as a field morphs into astrology, we face an unprecedented situation. Somebody ought to do something.
I’ll confess that, reading the start of this report, I had a Walter Mitty moment. Reading the opening pages, I imagined myself in an old-time Western, out by a fire on the prairie with a philosopher-sheriff assembling a posse to round up a band of disciplinary desperadoes and bring them to scholarly justice. We ride at dawn. It made me want to stand up, throw my black coffee onto the fire, and jump onto my horse — let’s ride! But instead, being a nerdy philosopher myself, I quietly read the report, because I wanted to know: in what direction does it ride, and where does it not ride? What topics, what methods, and which forms of evidence does it use, and which does it not? Where does it bring us in the end? What actionable policies, if any, does it recommend? Those are the questions we’re here to discuss.
So let’s do that. Ashley and Regina, thanks so much for joining us. Ashley, I’ll begin with you. You’re a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and you were one of the esteemed scholars on that superstar commission. The main finding of the Vanderbilt–WashU report is that in today’s humanistic disciplines, research is too often distorted by politicization. Could you tell us about that finding and why it’s important?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you so much for that introduction and for having me here. Before I forget, I want to say that I’m going to be speaking for myself and not for the members of the commission, so I’ll distinguish between what the report says and what I think. And I want to encourage people to read the report in its entirety and not rely on summaries of it — by me or anyone else — because it’s a very carefully written report.
Our charge was to evaluate scholarly standards across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and especially to look at the extent to which internal politicization has compromised them. So we acknowledge external politicization, but we were really looking at the politicization coming from within academia. Based on our analyses, we found a middle-of-the-road finding: things aren’t as bad as critics say, nor are they as good as some defenders say. We see, across disciplines, scholarly standards being replaced to varying degrees with political or ideological considerations — and I want to emphasize that this varies a lot across and within disciplines. There’s a lot of heterogeneity, and, as John said, a lot of really good work being done; in some cases, the majority of the work in a field is still really good.
Specifically, we highlight four ways in which politicization is compromising standards. One is explicit statements — in research, at the level of professional associations, and everything in between — where scholars endorse political goals as the point of the work. Second is a consensus that certain research questions, topics, theories, or findings are off-limits, with varying forms of backlash against those who pursue them. Third is a deep skepticism about the possibility or necessity of objectivity, and really about the knowability of the world, which in turn leads to a rejection of important steps in the research process. And finally — a somewhat funny finding, unfortunately — a lot of bad, dense, jargon-laden prose, which on its face doesn’t seem obviously political but which tends to appear in the more explicitly political works, often in the service of political arguments. That’s actually something I’ve written about. So across these four, we’re seeing the advancement of knowledge and understanding being subordinated to political projects.
As for why this is important — speaking for myself — I think this is an issue of trust. My own frustration with my fields is that I’m getting to the point where I have a hard time trusting the research and believing that scholars are actually advancing knowledge. Research is a collective endeavor; I have to stand on the shoulders of giants. I have to use and cite what other people are producing, and if I don’t trust that work, it becomes really difficult to do my own. My personal goal is doing big theoretical syntheses, stitching together a lot of different work — but if the work you’re stitching together isn’t good, isn’t believable, isn’t robust, it’s really hard to do that kind of synthetic work that gives us the big picture of reality. So I look at this as a big issue of trust — and then, of course, the larger issue of trust not just in research but in universities. How is the public going to trust us — with their kids, with themselves, as producers of knowledge — when we’re increasingly losing that monopoly as experts? For me, this is an issue that traverses multiple layers, from just being able to do the thing I love more than anything else — research — to the future of the university.
John Tomasi: That’s a fabulous summary, and I really appreciate your encouraging our listeners to read the report for themselves, because it’s worth reading more than once. Let me ask you about a couple of things you said. I want to zero in on jargon. There’s a lot of jargon in academia, and a lot of serious — indeed seminal — scholarship that we could describe as jargon-laden. Jargon serves a purpose. I still remember, as an undergraduate, the first time I was assigned John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice — I couldn’t read the thing; I didn’t know what any of it meant. And there’s denser jargon than Rawls. So I wonder what you make of jargon, and why it’s worrying. Let me offer a hypothesis and hear how you respond: my sense is that it’s actually the conjunction of some of these concerns that makes jargon a problem. I’m not sure jargon would be a problem if we didn’t also have, say, politicized goals being announced alongside the work — but I might be wrong. Can you say something about jargon, and about whether our concern about it relies on the other criteria you mentioned?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you for following up on that. To be honest, I love jargon — it makes me feel special and smart, and I think that’s one of the reasons we use it. But it’s also a great shorthand. So it’s not really a dig at jargon per se; it’s more about clunky writing. One of my big pet peeves is when we use these specialty words and then don’t define them. In my field — again, speaking for me and not for the commission — we have the term “the carceral state,” and it means at least four different things, often more, and people don’t define which they mean. It used to refer to the infrastructure and the government actors responsible for determining and meting out punishment. Now it might mean mass incarceration; it might mean the criminal justice system; it sometimes means formal social control — which is itself a jargon term that means policing and punishment together — and sometimes it means informal social control, the interpersonal, private policing of each other’s behavior. So it means all these different things, and the problem is that when we’re trying to have a conversation about, say, what causes the carceral state, and we’re all using it to mean different things, it becomes really hard to theorize — under what conditions does it emerge or grow, and so on. So part of what I’m getting at is using jargon in ways that aren’t useful and that block understanding: not defining terms, or stringing together multisyllabic word after multisyllabic word — these twenty-five-cent words — so that by the end you don’t know what it means. When I used to read this kind of thing, I’d think, “Oh my god, I’m so stupid — why can’t I understand this?” And as I matured, I increasingly realized that in some cases I can’t understand it because it’s just bad writing — it’s not that I’m stupid. So I see that as really problematic for communication. To your hypothesis — that it’s the conjunction of politicization and jargon — I think that’s part of it. In addition to the basic scholarly standard that we need to define our terms and focus on communication, we want to be able to have clear conversations in the scholarship.
That’s one thing. But then there’s the more causal story: why are people doing this, beyond my glib remark that we feel special and smart, and beyond the fact that it’s efficient when we’re talking among experts? The flip side is that increasingly people use certain types of jargon as a kind of shibboleth — a way of showing that you have the appropriate bona fides. We use these words that the public doesn’t understand, but increasingly even those of us in academia don’t quite know what they mean, so they become very clunky — again, bad for communication — but we’re doing it specifically for political purposes. In my work I’ve collected a bunch of statements where people say why they’re using these terms, and they justify it for political reasons. So I think that’s part of the causal story. You can do it the purely scholarly way — this isn’t about communication, you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do — and then there’s the question of why people are doing it, and I think the combination definitely becomes problematic.
John Tomasi: That’s great. Those are super-interesting criteria, and the relationship between them is also worth serious study. Regina, I want to bring you in. You’re a professor at York University — thank you for joining us. I’m going to jump right into the fire with you. You were one of the people who commented almost immediately on the report, and you’ve been a very thoughtful commentator. I’m going to read a fiery thing you wrote on X: “The Boghossian et al. report on the humanities has some good points, but ultimately it is a failure.” On your reading, the report supports there being “some political line beyond which scholarship may be suppressed” — it merely disagrees with the postmodernists about where that line should be drawn. So you’re pointing to a line-drawing problem. Can you tell us more about your concern here?
Regina Rini: Sure, and thanks for having me. I think my role here is to be a friendly critic. Just so the audience understands where I’m coming from: I agree with a lot of the conclusions of the report — maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about those in a bit — but for the moment I’m going to talk about my problem with it, which is the argument: how the report gets to its conclusion. I think the argument doesn’t work, and in fact doesn’t work in a particularly worrisome way. A lot of the report is constructed around taking certain positions in philosophy — in metaphysics and epistemology. It frames itself in opposition to relativism, and it enforces a pretty hard distinction between knowledge and politics as exclusive categories. The problem is that I don’t think that framework is stable.
So let me point to where this happens in the report. This is very close to the end. There’s a very nice sentence near the end that says, once we have conceded there are truths to be known in an area of scholarship, there’s no room for the further thought that scholarship may legitimately suppress or distort those truths, even for the sake of advancing what may be a legitimate moral or social goal. Which sounds very nice. But then there’s a footnote, and in the footnote it says, well, actually this is not absolute — there are times when we can suppress, or even distort, knowledge in the pursuit of social goals. The example it gives has to do with nuclear secrets: a physicist might suppress or even distort nuclear secrets, as in fact was done in the 1930s and ’40s. And this sounds like a harmless concession — wouldn’t we all agree you shouldn’t let out things that might cause a nuclear apocalypse? But once you make that concession, you can’t rely on a very firm, absolute distinction between knowledge and politics, because what you’ve conceded is that there are cases where it’s consistent with knowledge to allow politics or moral concerns to intrude on your information-sharing practices. In other words, there’s no longer such a firm divide. And once you make that concession, it’s open for people to say: where’s the dividing line? Why is it about nuclear secrets and not about racial equality or something else? We can have that argument. I’m not saying there’s a slippery slope and you immediately have to allow everything everybody wants. My point is that the framework of the report is based on there being a very firm, absolute dividing line between knowledge and politics, and as soon as you make those concessions, that’s gone — so it’s owed some further, deeper argument.
My own view is that the conclusions of this report are better supported in a different way — not coming from epistemology and metaphysics, but coming straight from politics. I think there’s a very good argument from the need for pluralism. You mentioned John Rawls a few minutes ago. Rawls famously argued that in public debate we engage in public reason — we set aside our background metaphysical and ethical views and try to find a common, overlapping consensus to argue from. I think scholarship, just as much as politics, has to allow for the fact that we come from different places, and that’s a very good basis for an argument to the conclusions of the report — but you can do all that without getting into fights about relativism and a hard distinction between knowledge and politics. So that’s my criticism.
John Tomasi: That’s great. Can I ask you about the last bit, on the positive side? We could talk about what the report says and the degree to which it relies on rejecting relativism — or on pointing out that there are weak versions of relativism that are relied upon too quickly, which the report sometimes does, I think correctly; but that’s different from rejecting relativism wholesale, which would be a stronger position. I want to ask about what you described as a Rawlsian framework. There are various frameworks within science and social science. For example, Polanyi, in an essay called “The Republic of Science,” talks about academics working on the frontier together, where certain breakthroughs are only available at that frontier. The frontier tells us what’s important, and then there’s a strange combination: on the one hand we value conservative adherence to disciplinary norms and procedures and to the giants of the field, and on the other we value the quirky, interesting new thing coming out at the end — like the green shoot on the end of a branch. That’s one rough, metaphorical view of how scholarship happens in social science and the humanities. Polanyi says this is a model for the sciences but also for the humanities. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind? It seems like you’re trying to get at the need for coherence and agreement on standards, with possibilities for change that are recognizable by those standards. Is that where you are?
Regina Rini: I think what you’re saying is consistent with what I’m getting at; I’m coming at it from a different direction. I’m coming at it partly from politics — the idea that public scholarship, not just the sciences but including the humanities, owes a certain debt to the public that supports it, which means being accessible and being representational, and that includes politics. If you have an entire sector of public political views — which in North America often means conservative views — that are very thinly represented in academia, then there’s a legitimate complaint from the public that they might not trust the way academia works. I can give a more sustained argument for that if you want, but it would take a while.
And then, simultaneously, there’s a separate argument from social epistemology — this one will be familiar to some folks. It goes back to John Stuart Mill in the 1850s, who argues in On Liberty that you can’t actually get truthful reasoning unless you open yourself to all sorts of criticism. You need all different kinds of people in the room, arguing back and forth, and it’s that that does the magic work of sharpening your distinctions and making things better. I think Mill goes a bit too far — he’s a bit too optimistic about how well that process works; it’s not entirely clear he was in enough committee meetings — but the basic idea is right. If you don’t have people from lots of different perspectives in the room, you’re going to be worse off. So those are the arguments for why we need more representation of different views when we’re doing academic work.
John Tomasi: That’s great. I just want to note, for the audience, that on that topic HxA hosted a pop-up a couple of weeks ago with Cass Sunstein, talking about viewpoint diversity. One of the things we discussed a lot was how wide the circle should be — reasonable value pluralism, reasonable epistemic pluralism — and how we define “reasonable.” How does a scholarly community do that? So it’s an extremely interesting line of criticism you’re developing.
I want to keep pushing, because we want to get to audience questions, which is an important part of this event. Ashley, I’m going to come back to you. I’d like to ask you to say a few words about methods. As I mentioned with my Walter Mitty example, I was thinking: what methods do they use, and what methods don’t they use? When I read the report the first time, I was surprised how it went off up into the high hills of philosophy, and when I got to the end I thought, “Wait a minute — where’s the rest of the report?” I felt like I was going to get more social science. I got philosophy — and I love philosophy — but I was like, “Are we going to come down from the hills?” So can you address, any way you like, the general question of methodology? What methods does the report use, what methods does it not use, and what does that mean for the strength of its conclusions?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. I’m going to speak for myself on this one. I actually wrote a Substack a month or two ago on how you evaluate a discipline — the difficulties of doing it, what sorts of data you need, and the limitations. First of all, we all used a combination of systematic and more case-study-based approaches to studying what’s going on in a field. For myself, I was looking at sociology specifically, so I was looking at survey data — of sociologists generally, of sociology chairs, and so on. I was also looking at high-profile events and statements made by American Sociological Association presidents or high-profile members, panels that had been platformed, statements and op-eds that people had written. I should mention that my primary focus was on work that’s already been done studying the state of sociology — of our disciplines, sociology was actually the most studied. My internal report was a hundred pages long; there’s a lot of data on the state of sociology, and a lot of debate. So I was primarily looking at already-published work, and then I was also doing some of my own data collection, some of which is still ongoing — because one of the findings was that there’s difficulty in evaluating some of these issues.
So, going back to your question about types of data: survey data, high-profile events, and I was also interested in forms of censorship that have happened, collecting cases of tenure and promotion denials. That’s a really difficult one, because they tend to be confidential — a lot of times the people going through them don’t get the full story, so we don’t actually know systematically what’s going on with tenure and promotion denials where there’s some sort of bias or discrimination based on the research produced, unless it’s big enough that there’s a lawsuit or it gets written up in, say, the Chronicle of Higher Education. So that’s an area where we desperately need more systematic data. Another is the quality of the research itself. That’s really difficult to do — very time-intensive. You basically have two ways. You can read specific studies and evaluate them against scholarly standards; there’s virtually no incentive to do that, and people look at that work with great skepticism, so there’s a big cost — which makes it understandable that we don’t already have many established studies doing it. The other way is to use LLMs or AI, and we’re increasingly getting studies that do that. There’s a great new study in Theory and Society — of which I should mention I’m now an editorial board member, just to flag a conflict of interest, though this was published before I joined — by James Manzi, who used AI, several AIs, to evaluate different disciplines, looking at their level of political neutrality and then at the politics of the non-neutral studies. There are a number of efforts underway to use AI and LLMs to evaluate research, either individually or at scale, and I think that’s going to be really promising for the next phase of pushing this work further.
Some other work I relied on was really interesting — looking at the blind spots and what I call the “monocropping” of sociology. It’s fairly well known that sociology tends to over-focus on inequality. We used to be a much broader discipline, looking at a lot of different aspects of society, but we tend to focus on inequality and on the negative parts of society, looking away from social progress. There are new published reports focusing on what they call the “negativity bias” in sociology; HxA member Fabio Rojas has a Substack about the lack of sociology looking at progress, which John Iceland and colleagues have also spoken about. So there’s this blind spot — specific topics that sociology doesn’t tend to look at, or, when it does, it does so in a very narrow way: religion, the military and war, certain theories about crime that are more popular in criminology than in sociology — essentially anything that can be seen as conservative. The really big one is biology and evolution; there’s an assumption that if you do that work, you’re conservative and therefore bad. So we have these massive blind spots that hamstring us as a discipline, because we can’t make the broader claims about society — we have this very narrow focus at the field level. There have been some really nice studies looking at dissertation topics and article topics, doing word frequencies, looking at the heterogeneity in the field and where the blind spots are. We also have less systematic data on censorship, so there we have case studies. And then the big empirical question is what the chilling effect of those cases is, because people hear about them — so the question is whether they actually have to be that common to have an effect, and that’s something we don’t know. So, sorry — it’s a mix of data.
John Tomasi: That’s fabulous — absolutely fabulous. That’s a feast, a quick feast, which we really appreciate. I want to call our listeners’ attention to the time: we’ll be moving to Q&A in about ten minutes, so if you have a question, please formulate it and put it in the chat. Regina, I want to go back to you, and pick up directly on Ashley’s line of thought, with a little twist. You used the word “pluralism,” so you’re going to get the viewpoint-diversity question. As you know, at HxA we’re intensely interested in viewpoint diversity. We did a big study of the viewpoint-diversity studies of the professoriate — you’ll find it in the chat in a moment — and it found, broadly, that the studies showing the widest ideological divergence tended to be the weakest methodologically. But if you work through that and dig into the more careful studies, you see a pretty remarkable delta over the last thirty years, from about two-to-one to something like five-to-one. It intensifies geographically if you look more closely, of course, but the big finding is that, especially within the humanities, there’s been this change in the degree of imbalance. The report skates fairly quickly over that terrain. It notes that viewpoint imbalance is not inherently a problem — which is a nice philosophical dodge, perhaps — but I wonder if you want to say anything. Is that change in the composition of the professoriate of interest to you when we think about the importance of pluralism?
Regina Rini: Yeah. You mentioned the report says it’s not inherently a problem. I think it is inherently a problem if you have an increasing skew toward one strand of a partisan split in a democratic society — so I do think there’s a worry there. The tricky bit is disentangling two different historical processes that are correlated, where we don’t really know which way the causation goes. At the same time as the professoriate becomes more left-wing, there’s also an increased amount of attacks on academia coming from the political right — going back to Reagan, back to Nixon, all the way back, really, to William F. Buckley in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, seventy years ago. So you have two political processes playing out at the same time: attacks on academia from the right, and an increasing leftward tilt within the academy — and we don’t know which is causing which. There’s a possibility that the causation actually runs from the attacks on academia to the leftward tilt, in the following way: it might be that for three generations now, young conservative people have been told by intellectual leaders in their community, like Buckley, that academia is not the place for them and they should go somewhere else. I don’t know whether that’s true, but the fact that it’s a possible explanation — alongside more familiar explanations, like left-wing bias within hiring committees — means it’s actually really hard to explain what’s going on. And if you agree with me, as I think probably everybody on this call does, that it’s a problem, then we should care about it — and tackling it is really hard, because we don’t have super-clear data showing which of those things is the cause and which is the effect, or whether it’s some self-reinforcing cycle. So I agree that’s something that needs to be thought about and investigated more deeply.
John Tomasi: Well, let me pause and do a bit more together. There’s probably no natural number or natural ratio for how many Republicans and Democrats should be appropriate across the professoriate as a whole. If we think that one’s political orientation matters for scholarship, it’s probably because we think it goes to deep beliefs about social causation and about the value of the world. So it wouldn’t be surprising if those deep underlying values gave people reasons to join the academy — or not — and so some differentiation wouldn’t be surprising. But the delta seems harder to explain. I remember, years ago at Brown, talking with a group of my dear colleagues about the ideological imbalance, and one of them — a well-known philosopher, one of my best friends — said, “Well, we’re just tracking the truth here, dude. This is a conversation where we’re doing public reason, and it’s coming out one way; that’s how it goes.” We’re always arguing — it’s always a conversation, to some degree, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But it’s interesting to me: how is this happening? What explains the delta? We’re more and more tracking the truth now, whereas before it was more evenly divided? Do you want to say anything about the delta, about the change?
Regina Rini: Yeah. I don’t think I agree with the person you mentioned — I don’t know who it is, and I don’t want to speak for them. But we can try to reconstruct the way people usually make that argument, which is to say: the truth is selective for a certain orientation on the world, and that orientation selects for people who lean politically left. That could be true, for all we know. But I would want to see incredibly strong evidence before accepting it — much stronger than we’d normally demand for an empirical hypothesis — because there’s a lot of confirmation bias: a lot of people who are leftist and academics want it to be true. And if you want something to be true, you need to apply an epistemic deficit to the hypothesis; it has to start off below zero to account for your confirmation bias. So to get to the level of evidential sufficiency, you’d have to have a lot of evidence. Maybe we have some — I don’t know; I don’t think we have a lot. So I think we can leave it as a hypothesis that there’s some sense in which scholarly work selects for people on the left, but unless there’s a ton of evidence to support it, I don’t think we should treat it as affecting our decisions.
John Tomasi: Right — and again, we’d need to explain the change in any case. But that’s well said. I wonder if we could go to some questions from the audience. If you’re in the audience: this is a great report and a great conversation, an extremely important one for us to be having across the academy. I want to say again, if I didn’t say it clearly enough at the beginning, how impressed and delighted we are that the leaders of Vanderbilt and WashU proceeded this way, choosing such an esteemed panel to put this report together. The report is incredibly thoughtful. So if you have questions about it, this is a great time to put them in the chat, and we’ll go through some of them.
Here we go — I’ll read this one out: “In the humanities and social sciences, much of what I’ve seen is deeply skeptical of, and downright antagonistic to, the possibility of objective truth — Nietzschean perspectivalism, relativism, self-interest, false consciousness, Freudian repression. Is there any sense of agreement on basic epistemic standards, and on the possibility of ascertaining, if not objective, then at least intersubjectively applicable truth?” Ashley, do you want to take that one?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. I’m going to put this question under the banner of scholarly standards. To have scholarly standards, you need some understanding of how we know that what we’re saying is correct, how we know it’s convincing in some way. What are the shared standards? One of those is going to be about truth and objectivity. And for me, the biggest problem we’re facing right now is that we just don’t agree on the scholarly standards anymore. I’ll say I was pleasantly surprised, the more I learned about the humanities, that there’s a large group of scholars who really do have standards similar to mine. I’d always thought of the humanities as having very different standards about truth and argument than I had in the social sciences, but a lot of what I’d informally refer to as the scientific method was actually really similar to basic scholarly expectations. To make this concrete: things like looking at counterarguments, looking at counterevidence, thinking through the weaknesses of your arguments or your dataset — that’s just standard good scholarship, and it’s something we’re increasingly not seeing in certain fields, certain subfields, some research that gets published. We’re also seeing resistance to insisting on it, for various reasons that people increasingly put under the banner of political justifications. So I think that’s the big problem.
So, yes — I think there are clear standards. Objectivity is difficult to achieve; there are tricks we’ve developed to get there. I personally believe there’s truth out there, and I think a lot of people do, and that the challenge and the fun of academia is figuring out how to get to it. But there are others — a large group — who don’t believe there’s a single truth out there, or who think we can never actually get there, and that everything we’re doing is basically flawed, irrevocably so. And I think that’s the problem.
John Tomasi: Let me push a little right there — and Regina, you might want to comment too. I’m not sure that an avowal of one’s view about truth is what’s going to drive things here. You said there’s disagreement about scholarly standards, and that seems clearly true; that could be healthy in a variety of ways. But I wonder: is there agreement on the purpose of scholarly standards? One claim about their purpose ties it to the purpose, or telos, of the university. Some people — and HxA members typically are in this group — believe the purpose of scholarly standards is to know more about the world, with humility and intensity. But not everyone agrees about that purpose. Do either of you want to say something about that? Regina, do you want to get in, or, Ashley, do you want to reply?
Ashley Rubin: Sure, thank you. I think that’s the problem — we don’t agree on these things.
John Tomasi: What’s the disagreement, as you see it?
Ashley Rubin: So let me make this concrete. There are certain ways to communicate the scholarly process. When we publish, we publish in particular ways: we’re supposed to motivate our research question, to tie it to what we know and what we don’t know, and to explain why this gap is something that needs to be filled and is worthwhile. Some people disagree that we should even be doing that — that there are some topics so important they don’t need justification, and that if you ask somebody to justify why this research question, why this scholarship, that question is in itself offensive. So that’s the basic disagreement we’re having about scholarly standards: what’s the purpose of research, and what’s the purpose of these norms we’ve developed about publishing our research?
John Tomasi: Thank you. Should we pop up the next question — or, Regina, do you want to get in on this one?
Regina Rini: Yeah, sorry — let me jump in a little. I wanted to think about this question of the connection between politics and truth and knowledge, because the report, as I said, tries to frame those as opposed to each other — but there’s a complication. Imagine the following case. You’re at an academic conference, and people are debating some academic topic; they’re debating propositions — is this true, is this false — and debating the evidence. And then somebody raises their hand and says, “You guys, there’s a problem. I think somebody’s been putting some kind of hallucinogenic chemical in the drinking water. I think we’re all just floating off — we’re all high right now, and we’re not quite getting it.” And imagine the chair says, “No, you can’t talk about that. It might or might not be true, but we’re not doing activism right now; we’re not talking about what’s happening in the world or whether to change the water supply. We’re just doing science right now.” That would be a crazy answer, right? If somebody says there’s a causal process interfering with our ability to do good science, you have to attend to the causal process.
That, I think, is a useful analogue to what a lot of critics of the traditional idea of truth are doing in the academy. They’re saying there’s something — like ideology, or false consciousness, or whatever — that is a causal process interfering with our ability to find the truth. That’s the hallucinogen. They might be wrong about that. But it’s a mistake — a misunderstanding of their view — to say they’re not interested in truth. What they’re saying is, “We’re interested in truth, but we have to do some politics first to remove the hallucinogen from the drinking water, and then we can go back to pursuing the truth in an unconfused way.” And the report just doesn’t track that distinction. There are some people who genuinely don’t believe in truth, but I don’t think there are very many of them. There are a lot more people who have this substantive claim — that ideology is like the hallucinogen in the drinking water, and we have to do some politics — and that’s a more complicated argument that has to be dealt with head on.
John Tomasi: That’s fabulous. I love that example, and you explained its importance so well. Let me give us one minute more on that, if you don’t mind. How does what you said bear on the debate about the telos of the university? Some people — Jon Haidt, for example, argued some years ago, when HxA started — think you face a choice about ultimate ends at universities: something like searching for knowledge versus something like pursuing social justice. Does your distinction throw that into question?
Regina Rini: Well, it shows some complications. If you take the view these people have — and again, I want the audience to be clear that I often disagree with this, but I want to understand their view — their view is that there’s something like the hallucinogen in the water supply, and you can’t pursue the truth without first doing something of what gets called social justice, because you need to correct the hallucinogen before you can have truthful inquiry. So those are not opposed objectives; they sometimes — not always, but sometimes — coincide, according to this view. And that’s what has to be honestly grappled with.
John Tomasi: That’s fabulous. Let’s have another question. Someone says: “I agree with you” — I’ll take that as a collective “we” — “about the crisis of loss of rigor and politicization in some parts of the academy. But don’t you have to acknowledge that it’s possible to do philosophically rigorous work that emphasizes perspectivism, postmodernism, and pluralism without sinking into politicization?” Regina, this sounds right up your alley, but I’m going to give it to Ashley instead. I think it might be a softball for you, Ashley — what do you make of this question?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. This ties into what Regina was talking about a moment ago. I think there are really valuable criticisms that critical scholars, postmodernists, and others have offered that help us think about our research methods and our ability to do what we’re trying to do. The problem I have — and that I think the report is getting at — is with people who just completely reject it. It’s not even a question of how we fix the problem. There’s a problem; it’s pretty well documented; we know we have biases — but we’ve also developed tools to get around them. If those tools are flawed, we need to keep fixing them. There’s a difference between saying, “Let’s keep trying to fix the tools, let’s get as accurate as we can possibly be,” versus, “I’m going to throw up my hands; this isn’t possible at all, so we should basically create a fiction and call it science.” That’s the problem I have. So I don’t think we’re rejecting postmodernism out of hand. And I think the focus on relativism in the report is interesting, because it was very carefully defined, but people are reading a lot into what exactly we mean by it. I don’t think it’s supposed to be a blanket critique of everything; it’s the going-too-far that really starts to interfere with our ability to do our job. So for me that’s the big issue. There are valuable critiques you can raise about our ability to do scholarship, science, and so on — but if you can’t even engage in figuring out how to fix it, and you don’t even want to fix it, you just want to reject it, that’s the problem.
John Tomasi: Regina, do you want to add to this? I said it would be a softball for you — do you want to put a curve on it, or something? Mix my baseball metaphors.
Regina Rini: Sure. I definitely agree with Ashley that it would be a huge mistake to throw up our hands and give up on the pursuit of truth. I also don’t know how many people are really doing that. I think sometimes people exaggerate the extent of the shocking view they hold, because it gets attention — on Twitter, from the media, sometimes from grant review panels — so they’ll exaggerate the extent to which they’re saying, “Oh, I’m just refusing to do things the way academics have always done them; I’m opposed to truth now,” and so on. Sometimes I think that’s what’s happening. There are some sincere people who really have given up on truth, but — and maybe this is one place where quantitative research would actually be helpful, though I don’t know how you’d study it — I don’t know how you cleanly divide the people who are sincere from the ones who are putting on airs to get attention. I would really want to know what percentage of people who talk that way really, truly, deep down mean it — that they don’t believe there’s any such thing as truth, even about how to get to the grocery store — and what percentage are exaggerating their suspicion of existing scholarly machinery for effect.
John Tomasi: That’s great. I’ll point out that Heterodox Academy has a research and development team that’s very interested in these questions. There are so many questions now; the national attention is turning to all these issues about the academy, so there are so many opportunities to do really serious scholarly work to help us understand the state of play better. That’s why we think this report is so important — it points us toward the importance of doing those studies.
Let’s get at least one more question in. We’re being invited to talk about teaching a little. So: As important as the politicization of research is — and research is the main focus of this report — this question is about the politicization of teaching, which is arguably a more egregious deviation from what’s appropriate, and of greater public consequence and concern. I was rereading the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration last night — being a nerd — and, as many of you know, it has these stirring passages about the importance of teaching for freedom, about citizenship and the free individual thinking for themselves, and it hammers down on the responsibility to teach in a way that’s liberatory. The specific question is: will there be a report on the politicization of higher-ed teaching? That might be a question for the Vanderbilt–WashU group — I’m not sure whether they’ll do that — but does anyone want to talk about this issue? Regina, do you want to start?
Regina Rini: Sure. I think this is a really important question, because it’s dangerous on both ends. I agree with the questioner that it’s especially egregious for people to abuse the institutional power of being a professor. I remember being a student in classrooms where professors would just get on their soapbox and talk about their views — sometimes about politics; one time it was about basketball — that had nothing to do with the actual lecture. They were abusing the fact that they had a captive audience with no choice but to listen. That’s an abuse of the job, and you should not be doing it. So in that respect it’s very bad. But we also have to be careful on the other side. Teaching, especially at the collegiate level, is not just about presenting an absolutely neutral point of view about what other people have said. Part of the reason you study with an expert is that they have their own opinions — and their opinions might involve things like the hallucinogen-in-the-drinking-water view I described a few minutes ago. We can’t have some sort of filter that says you can’t express those opinions in a classroom. The worst of all is something happening in the US right now, which is governments trying to prevent people from stating those views — that’s not compatible with a model of expert teachers. So what’s really going on here is a certain sort of discipline that individual educators need to impose on themselves: not to abuse the soapbox they have. But if they do abuse it, we have to be really careful that the remedy isn’t worse than the problem itself.
John Tomasi: Since you mentioned remedies, I’ll take my moderator’s privilege and jump in. I mentioned at the beginning that the report says administrators operate under a “stringent principle of deference to expertise,” but also that even that principle has its limits. We’re curious — and HxA is working with a lot of college leaders on this very question — what’s the role of administrators in encouraging a healthier scholarly environment? One way to think about it is that academic freedom stands as an obstacle to administrators doing that. At HxA, we have the idea that perhaps administrators have a role in helping enrich and enhance the exercise of academic freedom — by providing studies like this one that could help people think more seriously, within their own departments, about what excellence might be. Ashley, you might want to say something about this element of the report. What are the practical implications? What might be done after we ride out into the desert with this posse?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. We were really careful in the report to focus on diagnosing the problem; we weren’t asked to make recommendations. But of course people are going to want to know the next step. One thing we say at the beginning is that nothing in the report suggests you should go out and start closing universities or departments or anything like that. If anything, the very next step, if you have concerns in your own university, is to do a faculty-led self-study — because we’re looking at field-level trends, essentially national and in some cases international trends, and that doesn’t mean your local department has these problems. So if you’re going to figure out whether your local department needs some sort of reform, you need to do a self-study, and it has to involve faculty. That was really important.
More personally, I think incentives are really important — getting to your earlier point about how we saw this massive delta, how the change in faculty politicization went off the rails. A big part of it, I think, is that even at the level of admissions and hiring, we started having increasing cases where the university was funding explicitly political faculty positions, and faculty sitting on admissions committees were bringing in students who say, “I want to be an activist,” instead of, “I just want to learn,” or, “I just want to do research.” Increasingly that’s what people think grad school is about, and I think that’s a big reason for the huge shift. So administrators have a big role to play in incentivizing what I’d consider good behavior — thinking about what they’re funding. I’m not an economist, but I do think economists get a lot right about incentivizing human behavior, and that’s something we see a lot in universities.
John Tomasi: I’ll add that we talk to university presidents a lot, and one of the things we often discuss is how they rationally allocate resources for academic excellence. There was an assumption a few years ago that they could do that by relying on the expert judgment of their own faculty — and they can, and they always will need to, for all the reasons described in the report. But we’re increasingly seeing that’s not the whole story: that there’s academic excellence over here, and some other set of things — the free exchange of ideas, viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement — over there. They’re different things; we think they go together; and if you want to test for academic excellence, you have to find more sophisticated ways to test for things like viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and the free exchange of ideas — those elements of the HxA agenda.
We’re coming toward the end. Regina, I want to give you the last word, because you’re such a wonderfully thoughtful critic — a good report deserves great critics, and not all the critics I’ve read have been great; you’ve been remarkable. I’ll give you the last word to say anything you’d like about the report. You can take up that question about application, or any point at all.
Regina Rini: Sure — very nice of you to say. Part of the reason I criticize the report is that I’m sympathetic with the basic intuition, the intuition that there’s a problem. I’ll say this personally: I’m not on the political right, but I find it really unhelpful that when I’m talking to colleagues, I don’t get pushback from the right most of the time. When I go to conferences, I actively seek out the few conservative philosophers I know, because it’s really helpful for me to talk ideas through with them. I’ll mention one — Spencer Case, a philosopher who’s working right now on a book about patriotism, and who’s really fun to talk to about this stuff. It’s really helpful to me; it sharpens my research. So part of my motivation is that I want there to be more people I can talk to who have very different views, whom I can argue with. I’m kind of hopeful — I don’t know how we do this; I’m not an administrator, it’s above my pay grade — but I’m really hopeful that if we start finding ways to encourage more diversity, that’s helpful for all of us and we all get more out of it. So that’s a hopeful note to end on, maybe.
John Tomasi: Thanks, Regina. And I want to thank all of you again for joining this conversation. If you work in a university and you’re not a member of HxA — we’re growing, and we are who we are because of who our members are. So join us; make us who you want us to be. Ashley, Regina — thank you so much for this conversation, and we look forward to more discussions about this great report. Thanks, everyone.
