There’s a unique move, equal parts noble and petty, that academics have long since mastered. With utter intellectual seriousness, they assess and wade into scholarly debates, arguing with their sharpest logic and most passionate rhetoric for the side they have decided is right. Much like Cicero, they then forward their argument through smearing and undermining their opponents, landing the lowest blows they can get away with in whatever contexts they are acting. The pettiness usually comes out locally, as faculty ensure their opposing colleague gets the least desirable class schedule, worst office, or smallest allocation of departmental resources of various kinds. There’s generally at least one professor in every department who embraces these tactics, and they can hold grudges for decades. In the case of the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences” the team of scholars led by Paul Boghossian have decided to forward their favored position in a decades-long scholarly debate not only through passionate argument but also by hobbling their opponents through the suggestion that their position justifies the politicized slurs increasingly leveled against humanistic study. The salvation of the humanities in higher education, they insist, must lie in the elimination of this line of scholarly thought via hand-picked committees backed up by administrative force.
The scholarly debate over objectivity that occupies most of the “Report” is long standing. I recall learning about it with keen interest as I entered my doctoral degree program over twenty-five years ago, at which point it had already been going on for some time. It’s a complex topic, as one can glean even from the short summary contained in the “Report,” so I expect it will continue on in the scholarly literature for many more decades to come. This latest contribution will certainly reignite the debate and provide more fodder for heated scholarly discussion.
In the normal course of academic life, we’d just continue to let this debate play out, as we have for the last several decades already. This is how knowledge progresses: all sorts of ideas are expressed, some persuade enough peers to get past review and be published, others respond, and the debate plays out in the slowness of academic time. That all ideas reasonably persuasive to someone will be given an airing and many of those will be met with passionate rejection by others is an expected part of the process. That some will consider these ideas a threat to all that is good and holy points to a necessary tension in the way we have configured disciplinary-based knowledge production. We don’t want to let ridiculous or insane ideas through, but at the same time, we do want to make space for new ideas, which are often viewed as crazy on first blush and never convince some of their validity. (Einstein’s theory of relativity springs to mind here.) Where you draw the line between compelling new ideas and dangerous lunacy is the crux of the debate, every time. But there isn’t a way out of this bind unless you want to change the whole system of how we create knowledge in universities, eliminating the free exchange of ideas and the persuasion of peers as the standard for knowledge creation. Unfortunately, this is precisely what the Vanderbilt report is suggesting.
We might view the “Report” as just another contribution to the academy’s debate over the status of knowledge and objectivity. But it wasn’t published in an academic journal, or presented as a keynote at a scholarly forum, or just put out there on Paul Boghossian’s social media as a kind of defiant manifesto against a set of ideas that have in certain fields become settled and accepted knowledge. It was produced in response to an explicitly politicized question by a pair of university administrators seeking guidance on how to respond to frustrations expressed to them by politicians, donors, parents or others who dislike aspects of humanistic study as it is currently practiced in higher education. That context for the publication of this document changes the implications of its content dramatically.
It’s one thing to savage one’s colleagues on the academic battlefield while “accidentally” breaking their favorite coffee mug. Proclaiming them responsible for the so called “decline of the humanities,” and suggesting to those with institutional and political power that the containment of these aberrant thinkers is necessary to preserve higher education in America is something else altogether.
It’s important to remember this basic point when reading: the authors were tasked with diagnosing a problem for the sake of seeking a solution. They rightfully begin by examining whether this “problem” exists outside of the media echo chambers deliberately created by bad faith political actors. There have, after all, been plenty of strongly written arguments asserting the lack of validity in the claims that the humanities are experiencing a “crisis” of any sort. Boghossian and his team announce their focus on scholarly production and then separate out what they consider spurious claims from those which they assert have merit. Those who disparage the humanities are right, they claim, only when they question the legitimacy of knowledge produced in fields where the social construction of knowledge has become a widely accepted idea and utilized accordingly. That knowledge is illegitimate because, in the authors’ opinion, it is inappropriately intellectually grounded and can be tarred with the brush of being “political” rather than “objective”.
But if we take a moment to recall the origins of the “Report” – a president’s request for clarity on whether the humanities are, indeed, problematically politicized, so as to assist administrators with the interlaced political, fiscal, and communications challenges they face – we might well ask how exactly this answer helps. When a parent is unhappy about how disrespectfully a US president is being treated in a history class or a donor threatens to withdraw funds because of how conflicts in the Middle East are examined in a political science class, are they concerned that the authors of the scholarly sources assigned as readings in those classes assumed certain things about the nature of knowledge production or are they just mad that the content of the courses doesn’t reflect their political positions? The “Compact” recently extended by the Trump administration to university administrators as a way to avoid threatened federal funding cuts or fines was not concerned with the nature of knowledge production, just how far the knowledge generated in certain fields differed from the president’s ideological beliefs and political program for the country. Recent legislation in the state of Texas restricts content, not method. To take another aspect of the “crisis”: are students choosing business or computer science majors over English or Philosophy because they think classes in ethics or literature ignore the truth of objective knowledge in the world? Falling enrollments and complaints from those funding higher ed are the practical problems facing university administrators right now. It’s hard to see how nuanced arguments about the social construction of knowledge provides useful guidance for administrators on how to face down the crude political attacks and financial exigencies of our current moment.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this framework is exactly what administrators need to overcome these challenges around the humanities right now. What recuperative actions are implied? If scholars who are incorrect in their judgment on the nature of knowledge production are what’s wrong here, how do we address this issue? The authors are cautious about insisting that they are not advocating an administrative takeover of academic departments or unilaterally determined punishments of erring individual scholars. In their view “nothing in this report warrants any intervention” beyond “first steps.” Such steps consist of greater “scrutiny” for suspect departments, and an “intensive investigation,” conducted, if need be, to ensure a proper pre-determined outcome, by “minority voices within the discipline and from adjacent disciplines with better [sic] standards.” These “reliably broad-minded disciplinary experts” can be counted on to “take the problems seriously and can be relied on to take a measured view,” in short, the view espoused by the authors of this report. But what actions are likely to come from negative findings? What steps naturally follow these “first” ones? Surely, even greater administrative surveillance of departments who fail their litmus test. But that’s hardly sufficient to address an urgent problem. “We’re watching them” will only go so far for university administrators who agree with critics that certain departments generate and teach problematically politicized pseudo-knowledge. Indeed, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has already cited the Vanderbilt report as evidence of a problem in humanities fields in higher education, charging administrators and governing boards with reforming them to ensure they are “serving the American people who fund [them]” by bringing under closer administrative control things like “faculty hiring and evaluation practices.”[1] So perhaps presidents should conduct a purge of scholars who might be successful within their fields but who espouse ideas the “reliably broad-minded experts” (or Secretary McMahon) consider incorrect? Fire chairs and deans who encourage or reward such thinking for poor performance? Enact massive cuts in funding to cause the shrinkage or elimination of that area of study in the university’s curriculum? Censor certain courses or force a rewrite of the curriculum? Perhaps some sort of academic gulag or reeducation camp is in order?
Let’s go a step further and say that some sort of corrective action was taken, and all humanities scholars admitted their error and began to publish and teach their fields “correctly” in the view of the authors of this “report.” Sadly, even “objective” knowledge doesn’t always align with the political agendas of politicians, donors, and other powerful actors in our society. How will we then reassure politicians, donors, parents, and parts of the public and help to recapture support for the humanities? Or should we just trust that after explaining to them that this new knowledge was produced under the most rigorous of standards and is not politicized at all but simply accurate, politicians and donors will, out of respect for scholarly standards, simply accept our conclusions as true, unarguable, and worthy of support?
To be clear, I find many points made by Boghossian and his team worthy of engagement. Although I am among those apparently perpetuating the downfall of the university in my general stance on this subject, I can still recognize scholars making points that merit spirited debate. What I object to is the replacement of that free debate with force, and rhetorical assertions to the contrary aside, in the highly politicized context of this “Report” compulsion is precisely what their answer to this question invites. In so doing, it perpetuates the loss of intellectual freedom in the United States, which is happening at an alarming rate through federal extortion, state legislation, targeted pressure campaigns on administrators, and coordinated media attack. The authors have, unintentionally or not, lent their considerable social and academic prestige to an additional means of assault on the humanities. I have no doubt they believe passionately in the position they have taken in this debate, but forcing others to conform to it in order to “save the humanities” is either profoundly politically naive or deeply cynical.
If I had to identify what the “very heart and soul of what a university should be for” it would not be disinterested inquiry but free debate. As an adherent to the philosophy of knowledge production that allows for the messiness of human commitments, beliefs, desires, priorities, weaknesses, and material constraints to play some role in the eventual knowledge each human scholar produces, I believe that one of the most valuable functions of universities is their capacity to serve as forums for the free and open deliberation of ideas in all their incompleteness and imperfection, including ideas about how the knowledge we generate is produced. If anything strikes at the heart and soul of higher education, it is intellectual compulsion. That is true whether the compulsion emerges from the negative report of an ideologically uniform review committee enabling an administrator to act, or a donor or politician insisting they do so.
I will allow that disinterested scholarship is an ideal for which we might strive, but as this “Report” reminds us, it is damnably hard to achieve. As the group of “reliably broad-minded experts” most likely to be tapped for staffing such powerful committees, Paul Boghossian and his colleagues will have a hard time claiming the writing and publication of this “Report” was an act of disinterested inquiry rather than a power move that, Ciceronian style, forwards their position in the republic through smearing their opponents and giving them institutional authority over those opponents. As a member of a humanities department that will doubtless fail to impress such broad-minded colleagues when they come trailing all the power of the president behind them, all I can say is, “et tu, Brute?”
Julia Schleck is Professor of English at Colorado State University. She is the author of Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
[1] Linda McMahon, “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards,” August 3, 2026, https://www.ed.gov/media/document/national-call-action-university-presidents-and-governing-boards-114351.pdf
