Preface:  We have chosen our title, gesturing to Michael Frayn’s comedy, which portrays a bungled attempt at a play by a group of actors not up to the task.  In the first act, we see the play; in the second, the backstage shenanigans that underlie it; in the third act, what remains of the play seems to fall apart.   From our perspective, Act I is this misguided, flawed report; Act II has to do with the backstage politics behind the scenes.  Act III is our critical forum which we hope will leave the play in shreds. 

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In June 2026 the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences,” a joint effort of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, Saint Louis, was released to the public. It was not the first report of its kind from an elite university in the United States. Just two months earlier, Yale University released the “Report on the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education.” The reports have different aims as evidenced in the titles – the former concerned with the state of humanistic scholarship while the latter is more concerned with trust in higher education more broadly. And yet, they share a set of assumptions informed by right-wing attacks on higher education as a politicized, ideology-driven operation.  They take little account of the impact of those right-wing attacks and of the fraught material, financial, and labor conditions that face college teachers.  Indeed, these difficulties are frequently disavowed or obscured in the reports themselves.  Evidence of the complicity of these reports can be found in Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards,” which cites both reports in its demand for conservative university reforms. It is important to note that both reports were convened by elite university administrators and that the faculty composing the committees are almost all from the nation’s elite institutions.  The Yale committee is composed exclusively of Yale faculty; the Vanderbilt-Wash U report draws its members from neither institution but all but one of them come from private institutions. They also represent the most orthodox aspects of their disciplines, contrary to our belief (shared across the humanities and not only by “radicals”) that one of the best aspects of the humanities as we practice it as teachers and researchers is its openness to the production of new and challenging knowledge.   

There are four members of the committee from NYU, two from Princeton, and one member each from Harvard, Chicago, and Northwestern.  The University of Hawaii is the only public institution on the list. Public universities and colleges, which make up the vast majority of the institutions in the US, are not represented in any proportion to their numbers, while liberal arts colleges are entirely excluded.  As for disciplines: there are three analytic philosophers (no representation for continental philosophy, considered an enemy by the likes of its chair, Paul Boghossian).  There is one biological/evolutionary anthropologist (perhaps not surprisingly, cultural anthropology comes in for the harshest criticism in the report), one sociologist, and one linguist. The only humanistic disciplines (the analytic philosophers tend to be mathematically oriented) are literature (one) and history (two).  It should be noted that while women and gender studies merit a dismissive footnote, there is no scholar in that field on the list.  In a report on the state of the humanities, then, really only two (perhaps three—if one of the philosophers is counted) of the committee of ten is in any humanities field. 

The Vanderbilt-Wash U report identifies two major problems with humanistic scholarship: relativism and politically-informed scholarship. This is hardly a surprise if one reads the charge the committee received from the chancellors who convened it, Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt and Andrew D. Martin of Washington University.   It should be noted that both institutions are among the very few that have been providing comments to the Trump administration’s  2026 Compact for Higher Education.  They have taken it upon themselves to provide what some might consider “anticipatory compliance” with the Trump agenda. 

Here is the charge in full:

As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.

The complaints have been various in nature. Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.

To help us assess whether, and to what extent, there is a problem here, we charge a commission of eminent scholars from these disciplines to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified. We are concerned that, without such an examination, the well-documented erosion of support for the humanities will continue unabated.

In order to restore trust in higher education and stem the tide of “problematic philosophical views” and “background ideological views” from “distort[ing] the objective pursuit of knowledge,” they convened a non-representative group of scholars to craft a report that answered the charge in the exact manner the charge demanded.

As revealed in a later interview, this committee did not work alone; they were aided by unnamed research assistants and AI.

These are the scholars who constituted the committee:

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law, NYU.  Trained as an analytic philosopher, he has moved towards more culturally-oriented work. He is a critic of identity politics. He writes the “Ethicist” advice column for the NY Times. 

Paul Boghossian, an analytic philosopher, is Silver Professor of Law, NYU.  His life work seems to be to defeat what he denounces as “relativism” in the academy.  He is the author of Fear of Knowledge:  Against Relativism and Constructivism.

Kit Fine, University Professor, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, NYU. He is an analytic philosopher with work in formal logic. 

Joseph Henrich, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.   This is a separate department at Harvard whose members take “culture” to be a very different matter from the cultural and social anthropologists in Harvard’s department of anthropology. 

Katherine E. Fleming, Professor of History, NYU, and President and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust. Works on modern and contemporary Greece. 

Jason Merchant, Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago. Merchant is also Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.  His scholarship is about formal analyses of syntax and semantics. 

Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of Arts and Humanities; Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University. He is known for his work on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and is referred to as “a vocal advocate for viewpoint diversity.” 

Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University is another analytic philosopher who works in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics. 

Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Hawai’i: Ashely Rubin is a scholar of crime and punishment in the United States as well as “studying how the hyper-politicization of academia is impacting research, teaching/mentorship, and public trust in universities.” She is affiliated with the Heterodox Academy.

Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University: Sean Wilentz is a scholar of American history and liberal democracy who has recently compared his “courage” in criticizing the 1619 Project to Václav Havel’s dissident publications after the Prague Spring.

This forum brings together faculty members from different disciplines and institutions who offer their critical thoughts on a report that some might think is best left ignored, but at minimum is a key symptom of the operations of an entrenched assault on higher education from inside the institutions themselves. The forum includes essays from Roderick A. Ferguson (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University), Zachary Levenson (Sociology, Florida International University), Noëlle McAfee (Philosophy, Emory University), John Modern (Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College), Christopher Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation), and Julia Schleck (English, Colorado State University).