The recently released Vanderbilt–WUSTL report on the humanities and humanistic social sciences has already attracted significant attention in debates over academic freedom, the relationship between politics and research, and the state of contemporary scholarship. Praised by some commentators as a necessary defense of free inquiry and criticized by others as a politically motivated intervention, the report presents itself as a diagnosis of intellectual distortion within the academy.
Having read it in full, I found it considerably weaker than either its advocates or detractors have suggested. First, there is the composition of the committee itself. There is only one professor who teaches at a public university. A good 40 percent of them are just committee chair Paul Boghossian’s colleagues at New York University. The rest all teach at some of the most prestigious private schools in the country. The idea that this captures a representative cross-section of these fields is risible. Equally absurd is the fact that they have enlisted a biological anthropologist to rail against cultural anthropology, and from sociology, they have selected someone without a PhD in the field who is one of the most outspoken critics of politically inflected research.
Early on in the report, the central argument is that “institutional openness to a range of ideas” is lacking, and that the result is a “distortion” of scholarly inquiry. Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic piece about the Mellon Foundation is cited, but there’s no mention of the role of the Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, and other right-wing think tanks currently working to overhaul higher education as we know it. But once we are halfway through the report, the focus switches entirely. We are presented with a bunch of cherry-picked examples of alleged relativism in publications over the last 30 or so years. There is not even an attempt to substantiate the central claim about institutional barriers to free inquiry, unless you count citing the titles of American Sociological Association meetings as compelling evidence. Instead, it is just these anecdotal examples, which inadvertently reveal that there is no emergent crisis; in fact, nothing seems to have changed since the turn of the century, and in some parts of the report, since 1968. A persuasive demonstration would require systematic data on hiring, publication, promotion, and disciplinary actions across institutions rather than a collection of anecdotes. This is particularly rich given that the report concerns “the deterioration of scholarly standards.”
Then there is the absurd premise of the entire report. “Even the philosophical study of justice should aim at the truth about justice, not directly at producing a world that is just” (8). If you happen to disagree with this statement, that is apparently an inadmissible position by definition. It seems to me that what they are up to here is precisely what they want to condemn: enlisting institutional power to suppress approaches of which they are skeptical, all in the name of enabling free inquiry. And if there is any doubt that the authors seek to enlist institutional power, the reader need look no further than the first line of the preface, where the report is explicitly “addressed to university chancellors and presidents” (2).
The irony then is that these are effectively intellectual libertarians who cannot abide by their own politics. Again, they have provided no systematic evidence of institutional suppression. In fact, every person involved has managed to secure a tenured position at a top-tier R1, all of them elite. There is only one specific sort of example provided of institutional suppression, and that is Oxford University Press’s hesitancy in publishing transphobic manuscripts. In fact, this gets at the very core of the report: the only real case they cite, beyond a vague gesture to 90s-style postmodernism, is dissatisfaction with the alleged suppression of transphobic research. On that point, there is a lot to say, but I would start by pointing out that university presses are a terrible example. They are private sector entities that often award contracts on the basis of perceived sales and reception. See, for example, the number of academic presses that have recently put out poorly substantiated anti-woke screeds. These were not published because they constitute groundbreaking scholarship; they were published because people would—and did—buy them.
Instead, we need evidence of institutional suppression. None is provided. Instead, reader disdain for transphobic writing is misrepresented as institutional suppression. Again, there is not a single example of systematic suppression presented in the report. In fact, the only institutional suppression mentioned in the report is the suppression advocated by its authors.
And that is the rub. We are currently in a moment where roughly half of US state governments are attempting to use the force of the law to control research, teaching, and hiring in universities. Under the sign of free inquiry, the report’s authors are aligning themselves with state repression, all while pretending that these conditions do not exist.
The other major issue here is that research that they like is represented as objective. Gender is biologically determined? Technical. It’s not? Political. Or take the stated account of criminology: “the relevant expertise is technical and the political goal relatively uncontroversial” (11). Apparently, no politics are involved. By page 12, we are told that scholarship “distorted” by politics is nearly exclusively a problem on the “progressive left.” Rightists? They are men of science.
In fact, they explicitly define “distortion” as “when political considerations are brought to bear in the assessment of scholarship” (15). We are living through a moment when state governments are defunding the humanities and social sciences, all while channeling millions in state funding into right-wing think tanks and “civics” centers on public university campuses. None of this goes mentioned in the report. This is, frankly, delusional. But it is also what I would expect from a group of scholars largely limited to elite private campuses in the Northeast.
Finally, a note on the “relativism” the report’s authors so roundly condemn. The thing is clearly rooted in Boghossian’s decades-old crusade against the specter of postmodernism. But later in the report, we encounter a more substantive account of relativism that turns out not to be relativist at all: the “situatedness” of knowledge. When the report represents anthropologist Charles Hale as a relativist, he explicitly argues that “all knowledge claims are produced in a political context” (21). He proceeds not to reject objectivity, but to insist that “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.” This is such an obvious point as to be banal. It is Althusser’s famous line about ideologists disavowing their own ideological production as non-ideological. It is the report’s earlier representation of criminology as straightforwardly technical. It is the insistence that empiricist work is somehow apolitical simply because it remains ignorant of its own conditions of production. It is the representation of conventional wisdom as apolitical, but a politicized critique of this conventional wisdom as inadmissible.
At the end of the day, there is not a shred of evidence in this report of institutional suppression. Are there a few cherry-picked anecdotes? Sure. But for a report that insists on objectivity, research standards, and fair representation of data, there is no institutional analysis whatsoever, nothing systematic at all. It is argument by anecdote, presumably the unscientific and subjective approach the authors condemn over the report’s 30 pages.
What is the motivation here? Is there a politics in disavowing politics? Of course there is. These scholars are upset that their idiosyncratic takes are not dominant in their respective fields, and so they have come up with an unsubstantiated justification as to why this is the case. Now they are attempting to enlist institutional power to repress views with which they disagree. As I wrote in the context of Florida’s attempt to repress such views, universities are quickly becoming institutions where agreement must be coerced when it cannot be earned.
The authors of this report are either knowing advocates of this coercion, or else they are among the least astute analysts of the current conjuncture imaginable.
Zachary Levenson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida International University. He is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford 2022).
