Vanderbilt Report’s Assessment of Scholarly Health Should Be the First of Many

At its essence, the report is a call for accountability.

Imagine if, at a certain university, the Astronomy Department gradually morphed into the Astrology Department. Hard evidence was replaced by unfalsifiable speculation. Telescopes were traded for horoscopes. How, exactly, could the university’s leaders — responsible for excellence but not themselves trained astronomers — recognize the change? What signs could they have spotted earlier, before all trust was lost?

This is part of the provocative framing of the Vanderbilt-WashU “State of Scholarship” report that has drawn intense debate this week. Commissioned by the chancellors of the two universities, the report was written by a distinguished committee of scholars charged with assessing the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social science fields. All is not well, the report says. The pursuit of knowledge in humanistic fields is, not always but too often, distorted by politicization — skewed by a priori commitments to certain results and muddled by selective skepticism about knowledge itself.

In arguments that are familiar to HxA members, the report claims that work in humanistic disciplines that support favored (largely progressive-left) political views tends to be uncritically accepted and celebrated, while heterodox work has a way of being scuttled. This can happen by treating politically charged questions as prematurely “settled,” or even drifting away from empiricism into unfalsifiable language games. The result is a distortion of scholarship that calls into question the academy’s legitimacy.

As the report acknowledges, its main conclusions are not backed by quantitative analysis, it doesn’t profile any single discipline, and its “internal” analyses have not been made public. These are significant limitations to the report and its ability to persuade skeptical readers. The report also leaves important points unexplored, such as how ideological homogeneity can narrow the research questions that are asked in the first place.

At its essence, however, the report is a call for accountability in its most basic sense of giving an account. For any academic field to survive and thrive over time, a wide range of stakeholders must be allowed to ask questions about the rules of the game. Questions such as:

• What does this field claim to be doing? Does it claim to pursue some kind of verifiable truth or knowledge, however imperfectly?

• If the field is seeking knowledge, what are the field’s standards of evidence and methods for self-correction over time? (Is it making empirical or normative claims, or both? Does it follow Mertonian norms, or something else?)

• If the field is not seeking verifiable knowledge, how does it evaluate different claims, and is that epistemic standard consistent? Is the field sensitive to positionality and power dynamics within its own work, or only those of its external critics?

• Does the field also claim to be pursuing certain changes in the world, such as a progressive vision of social justice? If so, how does that aim interact with the truth-seeking process, and what are the trade-offs?

The online response to this report has largely followed a predictable pattern. One camp says the report is written in bad faith, a scheme to smear all humanities scholarship and prepare the ground for future censorship or political retaliation. The other camp says the real bad faith is in denying what some humanities fields do instead of simply defending it. Can it be noble for me to embrace “scholar-activism,” but a smear for you to point that out?

It has been heartening, though, to see another layer of online discussion: scholars accepting the challenge and sharing their own reasoned answers to these questions about scholarly purposes, standards, and integrity. We rarely link to social media here at FTI, but I’m referring to posts like Alexander Kustov making the case for a “problem-solving approach” to public scholarship, or David Porter offering an exemplar of scholar-activism on the treatment of Uyghurs, or Regina Rini offering two alternative arguments against politicization.

What most academics seem to know is that the topic of politicized scholarship is already being discussed by university leaders. Trustees, donors, elected officials, accreditors, parents, and even other faculty are asking questions. How should they answer, and based on what information?

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.

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