The Weekly: Has politicization harmed the humanities? Yes, but…
Praise of the ‘Vanderbilt-Wash U Report’ can be found, but with a large dose of criticism.
There has been much online commentary over the past week about the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The Report, commissioned by Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University Chancellor Andrew D. Martin, and authored by a distinguished commission of ten scholars (five of whom are HxA members), argues that scholarly standards have been distorted by political criteria, dissenting voices suppressed and alienated, and some academic fields have displaced genuine open inquiry with ideological conformity.
This isn’t a new claim, of course, but the prestige underpinning the report and the political context in which these old debates have been made anew have catapulted this report to front-page news across the academy. The Chronicle of Higher Education was the first to cover the report, provocatively asking whether the Left has “ruined the humanities.”
Just as the committee claims their “internal reports” produced a “mixed picture,” so too have the reactions to the report, which have been wide-ranging, but sometimes harsh. In the week since the report was published, academics have taken to the op-ed pages, Substack, and social media to air their praise — but with a healthy dose of criticism.
Matt Lutz, an associate professor at Wuhan University, said of the report that “It’s not perfect, but I loved it.” He concludes that he does not think the report will convince the skeptics who the report criticizes, but he hopes it will spur “an overall improvement to the intellectual life of the humanities.”
This is largely what the praise for the report looks like: Yes, there is a problem of politicization in these fields, but… And the “but” is doing much of the legwork online this week. Reactions and responses largely agree with the broad conclusions, while also identifying key areas where they feel the report falls short.
Nicholas Dirks, president of the New York Academy of Sciences and history professor at UC Berkeley, penned a constructive critique about the second half of the report, arguing that it “abandons caution and mounts a blanket critique of various movements in the intellectual history of humanistic thought, covering an ill-defined suite of views it calls postmodernism.” He concludes:
There are important reasons to be concerned about the loss of scholarly and epistemological rigor in some humanistic work, and even more seriously to accept that there is a cost when political arguments are used in ways that mistake advocacy for analysis and political intolerance for acknowledging that political views can influence scholarship. But in rendering its own verdict on another intellectual disagreement and dismissing an extraordinarily important element of contemporary humanist knowledge, the report too misuses the concept of the political. In so doing, it is not nearly as helpful as it should have been in helping us understand not just the nature of this cost but how best to mitigate it.
The report’s sweeping critique of relativism in the humanities also stirred up negative reactions from those scholars whose work is lambasted in the report. Those scholars criticized in the report describe it as “lazy scholarship” and even “diabolically evil.”
There has also been a wide-ranging conversation about the report’s methodology and the extent to which it can support its conclusions. The report itself acknowledges these limitations when it says:
…our conclusions about the overall state of humanistic scholarship, and in particular about the extent of the problems we have identified, are not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study of these matters. In this connection we must stress that the examples cited below are meant to illustrate the phenomena we have identified, not to establish their prevalence.
The report does not portend to be a quantitative analysis, yet there is a certain irony when a “widely circulated report that slams the humanities for a lack of rigor is ... not itself rigorous,” as UVA Public Policy professor John B. Holbein pointed out on X.
Others critique the report for employing double standards. Regina Rini, a philosophy professor and chair at York University, argued on X that “The Boghossian et al. report on the humanities has some good points, but ultimately it is a failure.” Rina argues that the Report supports there being “some political line beyond which scholarship may be suppressed. It just disagrees with the postmodernists about where that line should be drawn.”
In Thursday’s HxA webinar on the report, hosted by HxA President John Tomasi, Rini and report co-author Ashley Rubin, a sociologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, discussed the report’s findings and limitations. Rini, who said she agrees with most of the report’s conclusions, expanded on her X criticism by explaining that she took issue with its reasoning: “my problem is the argument. I think the argument doesn’t work in a particularly worrisome way.” Specifically, she faulted the report’s reliance on relativism, arguing the conclusions could stand on stronger arguments: “We don’t have to get into fights about relativism.”
For many HxA members, the negative effect of politicization on scholarship and the academy more broadly is old news. The challenge is in understanding what to do about it. The report does not answer this “now what” question. What should happen if a discipline or department falls into a closed, intellectually homogeneous trap wherein knowledge is stalled and intellectual diversity no longer thrives?
HxA Executive Director Michael Regnier wrote yesterday in these pages that the critical politicization issue facing the humanities (and other social-oriented disciplines) is “already being discussed by university leaders” because everyone from faculty to politicians to the public is also asking questions about what these fields should be doing. He continues:
The Vanderbilt-WashU report calls for more study, and for more department-level study, since a national committee cannot parse the scholarly health of a given campus or department. The report’s supporters and its critics, who also don’t want universities acting without local evidence, should take up this opportunity to give an account. In specific fields and in specific institutions, what is the state of scholarship? More reason-giving, more evidence, and more public explanation of principles would be a fitting way for scholarly fields to renew public trust in our universities.
When asked directly in the webinar on Thursday about the report’s implications, Rubin (speaking for herself) said:
Nothing in this report suggests we should go out and start closing departments. The very next step if you have concerns in your own university is to do a faculty-led self-study. Our report looked at field and national level trends. That doesn’t mean your local department has the same problems. But this has to involve faculty; that’s the really important thing.
Despite its limitations, the Vanderbilt-Wash U report joins a growing trend of institutional self-examination that gives us real cause for hope on the internal-reform front. We saw it in Yale’s recent report on trust in the academy. We saw it in Harvard Medical School’s recent report on open inquiry. Now we see it here, in a sweeping report on the state of the humanistic disciplines.
The first step is admitting there is a problem. And now university leaders are trusting and empowering academic insiders to critically examine the factors negatively impacting the knowledge function of our universities. Of course, the harder work of fixing the problems comes next.