Reading the “Vanderbilt Report” on the humanities, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Wash U, is like traveling back in time to the late 1980s and the height of the culture wars, where the conservative right, accompanied by traditional old-school academics, hurled epithets at the left, centering on the crimes of postmodernism and relativism. The terms were as poorly defined then as they are in this report, and I was as irritated by this sloppiness then as I am now. Then and there and here and now they are equated with allowing for arbitrary conceptions of truth and reality. These conservative critics preferred to use the term postmodernism rather than the more accurate term, poststructuralism, confusing a reference to an aesthetic school with a set of epistemic claims. This allowed them to trivialize the epistemic critiques without engaging them. And in using the term relativism, these conservatives never mentioned that it was a scientific term used by one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein. Relativism (a term that supposed relativists never actually use to describe themselves) does not equal “anything goes,” as the critics would have it. It means that different vantage points open up different information. As a result, much of what anyone knows depends on where one is situated, just as anyone should know when buying tickets to the theatre that the person sitting in the orchestra section is going to have a different experience from the one sitting in the top left row of the balcony. But those who hurl relativist as an epithet seem to be claiming those who grant that things seem different depending on where one is sitting are in fact granting that the person in the orchestra pit can invent any show they want, regardless of what is actually on the stage.
This report’s central mistake is evident in how the authors define relativism: as a view “that there is no such thing as objective knowledge or an objective fact, and that reasons to support a view always depend on contingent non-epistemic values and interests” (footnote 22, p. 21). The authors worry that “contingent non-epistemic values and interests” include political commitments that are being illegitimately used to close down or thwart inquiry in the humanities, and—largely ignoring the politicization of knowledge coming from the right these days—they argue that those most guilty of this “relativism” in academia today are on the progressive left, especially in the fields of anti-racism, feminism, decolonialism, the eradication of class distinctions and criticism of neoliberalism (12). Their favorite examples are debates about trans women. “Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organized around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense. While this view is in fact controversial even among feminist philosophers, the field has devoted considerable energy to closing off discussion by blocking the publication of dissenting views” (footnote 13, p. 13). This view is actually not controversial among feminist philosophers in the same sense that the value of zodiac signs is not controversial in astronomy. Both feminist theory and astronomy have done actual research to discredit any such “controversies.” While the authors of the report themselves note that astronomy need not tarry with astrology, since such things are indeed settled, they do not grant the same prerogative to feminist scholarship on sex and gender, apparently utterly ignorant of decades of research. (They might have profited from including someone in that field on the committee that produced the report or even from a reading of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on feminist bioethics.) The authors’ litmus test seems to be that if they find that the research confounds their presumptions, then the research is confused and unclear, a fallacy that besets those who think that they are the measure of all things.[1]
Let me turn to another problematic aspect of their definition of relativism. I had to wade through twenty single-spaced pages to get to any supposed evidence that scholars in these fields were appealing to “contingent non-epistemic values and interests.” I was happily disappointed, for all the truly solid quotations were offering epistemic grounds for their views. The authors quote the feminist philosopher Kathleen Lennon saying that “most accept that all knowledge is situated knowledge, reflecting the position of the knowledge producer at a certain historical moment in a given material and cultural context.” Similarly, they quote the anthropologist Charles R. Halse saying that “all knowledge claims are produced in a political context; notions of objectivity that ignore or deny these facilitating conditions take on a de facto political positioning of their own, made more blatant and unavoidable by the very disavowal.” And likewise they quote the anthropologist C.A. Loperena drawing attention to the “situatedness” of seeing. Note first that the authors are quoting mostly people in the social sciences (anthropology comes in for the harshest criticism) and not the humanities proper, which is rather curious given the topic of the report, and, more importantly, second, that the scholars being quoted are all offering epistemic critiques of objectivity, not offering non-epistemic reasons.
This report reads like such an anachronistic complaint because, I think, most of these debates have been settled, especially as it has become more widely accepted that claims to objectivity are, to put it mildly, a bit problematic. It has become more accepted that the more inclusive our sources of knowledge, the sounder and better that knowledge is. But here we have this report that purports to be concerned with people having political comments and closing down scholarly debate, yet its primary evidence points in a different direction: the authors want to resurrect the epistemic “view from nowhere” notion of objectivity and delegitimize knowledge produced by people who question those claims. This is, itself, a highly political intervention in the fields of knowledge production.
Consider this one particular case that would surely raise the authors’ hackles. One researcher was concerned that the prevailing epistemic methods did not address how things were for women, so back in the 1970s she set out to do some research on this concern. You could say that she agreed with Kathleen Lennon, who later wrote what the authors find so offensive, that many contemporary epistemologists “no longer regard knowledge as a neutral transparent reflection of an independently existing reality, with truth and falsity established by transcendent procedures of rational assessment.” This researcher was worried that the prevailing procedures of her time in her field were hampering knowledge production even though the procedures had been crafted to get to the most neutral, objective, and generalizable results. In her field, this was the notion that clinical research subjects should be the most typical subjects, which generally meant men between the ages of 18 and 35 because, you know, they didn’t have those extra parts or monthly cycles. So this researcher, at the time the director of the coronary care unit at Johns Hopkins, set out to understand heart attack symptoms in women. She found women were being underdiagnosed because they did not exhibit the same symptoms as men, symptoms that were thought to be universal markers of heart disease. By paying attention to and studying the particular cases of women, she revolutionized our understanding of heart disease, finding that women have an entirely different set of symptoms than men (Healy). In 1991, this researcher, Bernadine Healy, became the first female director of the National Institutes of Health and launched the Women’s Health Initiative to study the causes, prevention, and cures of diseases affecting women. While the culture wars were still raging, the nation’s premier medical research agency, under her leadership, had pretty much proof of concept that the appropriate aims for knowledge production should be not objectivity but inclusivity.
Rather than tell that story, the authors of this report want to double down on their fantasy of objectivity. Their biggest weapon is the charge of relativism, but I have just shown how that is a red herring. The other major charge is that the progressive left is impeding the proper aim of the humanities to transmit knowledge, hampering the pursuit of truth because they have political aims. This strikes me as the ancient fallacy of the pot calling the kettle black. They do not consider their own project—to delegitimize progressive scholarship and to restore the old hierarchies of knowledge production—as political. But what else is it?
Oh, I know what else it is: it is exactly what it accuses their targets of being: shoddy scholarship. It never explains its own methodology or how examples were chosen;[2] it cherry picks anecdotal examples to make its case; its examples do not exemplify the points it is trying to make; and it is not open to actual inquiry but is rife with confirmation bias, repeating the same points that its lead author had arrived at twenty years earlier.
Furthermore, it fails to acknowledge that the humanities in the West were first politicized by none other than Plato, in his own effort, especially in the Republic, to delegitimize philosophical approaches that did not meet his own standards of objectivity. The Republic was very much a political treatise. I’d say that all philosophy since is a footnote to Plato in the same way: I cannot think of a single moment prior to say 1950 (when analytic philosophy turned its back on the world [McCumber]) that the humanities were guided by a “traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship” (4). Marx’s protestations to the contrary, what philosopher, literary critic, or historian did not want to actually bring about some change in the world (Marx 3)? All the major movements and controversies—including that between rationalism and empiricism, materialism and idealism, virtue ethics and deontology—were motivated by a conviction that one view was better than the other for human flourishing. The authors’ cover story that they are purely disinterested is either a fabrication or a fantasy. Or both.
Noëlle McAfee is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She is the author, most recently, of Feminism: A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo 2021).
Bibliography
Healy, Bernadine, M.D. “The Yentl Syndrome.” New England Journal of Medicine 325, no. 4 (1991): 274-276.
McCumber, John. Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2023.
Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5. New York: International Publishers, 1975, p. 3.
[1] I am intentionally using this Protagorean dictum to characterize those who think that a universal account can be offered and so that “objective truth” can be had. But they like everyone else are operating from a particular point of view. The weird irony is that they refuse to see this.
[2] “But with occasional exceptions, 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” (5).
