The Boghossian committee’s report on humanistic scholarship claims that the main disciplines have widely subordinated scholarship to politics (Boghossian, “Report”). This has led, they write, to a “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards” ( 5).[1] The report’s categorical judgments, however fudged, cast low scholarly standards as the defining feature of humanistic academia today. Standards are so compromised, the authors believe, that the disciplines must be saved from themselves—and from their politicized leaders—through administrative intervention. A university’s senior managers must be willing to set up a parallel review system to override professional peer judgments, since these are precisely what the report says can no longer be trusted.[2]
The report’s evidence and arguments have been subject to shattering critiques from its object of study, humanistic academics.[3] Safe to say, it will not be widely cited as an important intellectual analysis of the “state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.” Nor will it become a document of historical interest because it reflects that state of scholarship: others have noted the minuteness of its elite circle,[4] and I would add the near-total absence of the younger two-thirds or three-fourths of the members of the disciplines.[5] Nor will this report become known as a scholarly instance of the comprehensive impartiality that it advocates: the sketchy references list suggests that the committee did not derive its generalizations about allegedly politicized humanistic methodologies—or politics as methodology—from an analysis of the overall claims of even one representative book devoted to examining methods.[6] Commentators have noted the group’s detachment from, even ignorance of, active research in the fields they discuss.[7] But these weaknesses are features of the report, not bugs, since its audience is not the authors’ academic colleagues but their supervisors in university management (2)[8] —the deans, provosts, boards, and presidents with the institutional power to suspend the faculty’s academic freedom and sweep out the humanities stable.[9]
This whole project is misbegotten. It is a Maginot line facing 180 degrees away from the humanities’ actual practices and real problems, starting with its bad material conditions. It casts the genuine methodological debates that typify any evolving field into the archaic terms of whether or not scholars accept that scholarly facts exist independently of the scholar’s (“political”) values. Different versions of this same problematic are offered, but it is painted across all subfields and questions. In reality, humanities scholars work hard across a dizzying array of topics, regions, languages, genres, and cultures to construct a valid or at least operational relationship between facts and values, evidence and theory, data and hypotheses. What the report takes as the great humanistic blind spot has been the single most discussed, most fretted methodological issue over the past 50 years.
One might expect live disputation as part of the creative process that typifies frontier research. And also expect that this “very high-level committee” would enter the fray as respectful colleagues who take their opponents’ arguments seriously and so work through them. Instead, the Boghossian group presides over the struggles of the rank-and-file as judge and jury while warning that someone might need to summon the hangman.[10] The report intervenes in a complex, shifting terrain by refusing to credit whole swaths of the treated professions with good faith, self-awareness, and basic intelligence about their own methods. The authors refuse to assume Veblen’s spirit of workmanship. They instead lean on the wider culture’s steady deprofessionalization of humanistic expertise.
Personally, I would say that the humanities’ intellectual labor has held up very well, given the relentless undermining of its working conditions that I’ll reference later. But this Boghossian committee uses the same handful of descriptors over and over again to turn a very heterogeneous intellectual terrain into examples of the same epistemic error of politicizing research. They seem intentionally uncaring about non-mainstream discourses and younger scholars and show no interest in understanding what makes them tick. This is a philosophical and an institutional stance. I find it unscholarly as an existential relation to knowledge creation. I think it is unethical, as well as harmful to the underlying disciples it seeks to cleanse.
To make this a bit clearer I’m going to try to offer a more accurate, if informal, summary of what I believe has been going on in the “humanities and humanistic social sciences.” These are the socio-cultural disciplines, broadly conceived, and we can and should extend basic respect to the people who bother to do the endless work to become competent scholars by assuming that they are generally seeking true accounts of cultural systems, systems that are both always changing and always subject to changing accounts about them. (I mean “true” in a main sense evolved by the last 100 years of epistemological scholarship in and out of philosophy: as context- and theory/discourse-dependent in ways that allow for limited objectivity, where the parameters of “limited” must remain beyond my scope here.)[11]
As an example, I’ll use my home discipline of literary studies as it evolved in the 1980s and 1990s, when the report’s core problematic developed. To simplify, in the 1940s and 1950s, literary study and its already-variable methods took for granted a Jim Crow background culture for its almost exclusively European and Euro-American literary canon. Social movements and other forces changed U.S. political culture and discourse enough to start to discredit Jim Crow and reconcile many white Americans to the civil rights movement for racial equality. Universities were a major site of this partial reconciliation. This had many well-studied ripple effects, including in education, one obvious one being the enabled/required expansion of the literary canon and its methods.[12] These are normal historical influences on intellectual change: “non-epistemic” and epistemic changes interact in complicated ways. literary studies and other humanistic fields produced new knowledge as a result—unearthing ideas, movements, communities, histories, that had been neglected or suppressed. As is widely understood, what had gone missing was brought to view, and the terrain of the disciplines and their methods shifted to meet new challenges for their data and their epistemic frameworks. Fields developed new paradigms, adapted old ones, or split off new subfields with their own distinctive frameworks.
A framework that influenced my early career (PhD 1988) was feminist standpoint theory, which I learned especially from Sandra Harding, Joan Wallach Scott, Donna Haraway, and Patricia Williams.[13] Another was Black Studies, which brought changes to the epistemology of perspective, racial identities, and the effects on knowledge of exclusion and power. Similar things can be said of several other cross-pollinating fields —queer studies, cultural studies, critical legal studies, post-colonial studies, for example.
I experienced all this as confusing, stressful, exciting, and also as normal. I learned indirectly from various nasty intellectual feuds that disputes were the conflictual, perhaps dialectical way in which all disciplines advance. Most strong and interesting positions were fought over, challenged, and revised, often repeatedly. I thought, I still think, that this was normal science in Thomas Kuhn’s sense in which a paradigm’s growing burden of anomalies—the evidence for which is always contested—leads to a stronger paradigm, a transformed paradigm, or sometimes paradigm collapse and fitful, non-linear replacement.
At the same time, U.S. higher education was being massified and diversified, the former after 1950 and the latter after 1990. This was happening during Reaganism’s resurgent anti-communism and hostility to civil rights. New capabilities, new perspectives, new questions, new knowledge needs, new social demands for knowledge from universities, and also intensified public demands to block and roll back the new: the socio-cultural disciplines had no choice but to engage with all this.[14] I felt that scholars wanted to respond and respond honestly (though also with an eye to self-preservation). My personal reference points were California politics, Hollywood, and property development: by comparison, academia’s default disinterestedness was off the charts.
All sociocultural scholars unavoidably confront heterogeneous epistemological spaces. The meaning of objects change as they move from 1950 to 1980, from the U.S. to Mexico, or from Black to white communities in the U.S. These epistemic discontinuities were among the lessons of my first-year graduate courses, and had been part of the undergraduate curriculum for many of my peers. Thus, our materials were mixed and our methods hybridized. New Historicism was a prominent example of mixed materials and hybrid or adaptive methods, and was rapidly institutionalized—along with much to-and-fro about the validity of pretty much every major reading its practitioners ever produced.
In the early 1990s I was an assistant professor revising my dissertation on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s theory of subjectivity into a book, and wanting to get further into the issue of the material and institutional shaping of nineteenth century New England subjectivity. I thus had to make the book more sociological, and teach myself a lot of institutional, legal, and social history that I didn’t already know, which wound up as a book about Emerson’s de facto theory of corporate subjectivity in response to changing organizational life (Newfield, The Emerson Effect). I combined historical documents with theory from different fields in growing awareness that what applied to Emerson’s world and its white proto-middle class, with its psychological formation I called submissive individualism, would not apply directly to Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs, and would need adjustments for Margaret Fuller or Henry David Thoreau. The intellectual complexity of cultural study was somewhat frightening and also exhilarating—as it is in our own period. Humanistic fields are interdisciplines, staffed by curious people driven by the positive affect of interest in the sense the psychologist Sylvan Tompkins intended. We borrow often very interesting ideas and practices from other fields because we believe they shed (new) light on an object of study.
In my experience, pretty much all of us worked hard and in good conscience to adapt new ideas correctly, to cross epistemic boundaries with respect and commitment to the labor of intelligent matching and linking, and to not make jackasses of ourselves.
Our work in humanistic disciplines has generally sought empirical evidence in concert with the articulation of theoretical and methodological frameworks. Even in a high-theory program (1980s Cornell English), we saw close reading to be as mandatory a form of empiricism as it had been during New Criticism. We were readers, and mastery of concrete detail was mandatory. Model readers included the ultra-meticulous Barbara Johnson and Paul de Man.
Boghossian and Friends generously note that they accept political motives, hopes, language, and topics as informing scholarship. It’s the subordination of epistemological/ knowledge claims to political goals that is for them such an endemic problem in humanistic academia that it must be subject to increased surveillance by university management and uprooted from above. But the general practice was not “the Subordination of Scholarship to Politics” (Boghossian, “On the Subordination”). It was the attempt to adjudicate relations between method and motives, evidence and conceptual frameworks, texts and hunches, readings and theories. The theory may well have had political language or motivations. The practice was self-reflexive methodological hybridity, not to subordinate facts to values but to accept that criticism always involved puzzling through their entanglements.
No doubt mistakes were made. I certainly made (and still make) many, including misjudgments about whom to talk with and how, and about my grasp of other fields. The disciplines overall have made many mistakes. Again, this seemed and seems normal to me in the common life of organized intellectual discovery. The crime writer Simon Mason has a detective, DI Ryan Wilkins, who assumes, when trying to understand the logic of an event, that “most things are cock-ups” (Mason 75). The question about an apparent knowledge problem in an evolving cluster of (inter)disciplines is: is this not a cock-up?[15] Should it prompt only the non-drama of another case-by-case effort to sift the (context-limited) valid arguments from the crappy ones, as we are also condemned to do in life? What makes these problems of normal science into a crisis of epistemic invalidity that allegedly degrades an entire discipline and its people?
The critics of this report have done a good job of showing that the report’s (cherry-picked) evidence isn’t enough. The committee relied heavily on a prior (illiberal) assumption that their colleagues’ values / politics have corrupted their intelligence such that their research doesn’t engage the complexities of fact-value relations. We can all name research we don’t respect or even hate, but a small number of isolated instances cannot be generalized into a field-wide erosion of epistemic standards.[16] The generalizations here also depend on claims of the parallel corruption of peer-review institutions, particularly professional associations and editorial committees at academic journals and presses.[17] The is the report’s relatively novel claim within its hoary tradition, but it lacks evidence.
Simply put, a given instance when you subordinate your evidence to your thesis—forcing arguments, flogging data—is a cock-up. You do not get to use your theory (or your politics) to skip to your cool conclusion. Your Romanticism professor would demand a rewrite; your editor would get more than one negative reader’s report; your seminar friends would compete to show you up. In the everyday discussions within humanities disciplines during high postmodernism (as now), there was a credible epistemology at work. Its premise was that there was no prior general rule for determining the relation between the data and the paradigm, the reading and the hypothesis, as you moved from case to case. Mostly you had to stay with the object. This premise emerged from antifoundationalist epistemology, for better or worse often drawing on American pragmatism. The background epistemologist of workaday humanities scholarship was not mainly Jacques Derrida but Richard Rorty—or Stanley Fish, or Barbara Herrnstein Smith.[18] One had to induct (or abduct) generalizations as one could without a standard (or “universal”) paradigm or access to one’s state of mind purified of interests. Just as importantly, one found oneself discussing and negotiating the most likely conclusions with one’s colleagues, having to change one’s mind, having to redo the arguments.
Certainly, we made programmatic statements to each other about how criticism might address social struggles—gender equality, postcolonial justice, anticapitalism—just as editors of collections and presidents of scholarly associations feel obliged to do. But there was and is no general or pervasive “subordination of scholarship to politics” in the scholarship.[19] There is the co-existence of scholarship with ongoing discussion, argument, and negotiation about the relationships between one’s values and one’s work, one’s disciplines and one’s worlds.[20] There is one’s duty of mediation in the collective professional deliberation of this multiplicity of factors.
In my experience, the humanities have been a little heartbroken by decades of categorical denunciations of this report’s type. The fields have inclined towards what Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon have called epistemological modesty (13). Where one does find what Appiah calls, citing John Guillory, “the overstatement of aim,” it is often compensatory—and hopefully on the way to building proper scaffolding for its research goals.
The report’s claim of pandemic politicization is bogus. Its call for corrective administrative interventions must be rejected.
**
What might happen if universities can’t or won’t reject the general condemnation and the administrative interventions?
We don’t really need to guess. The Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, soon invoked the report as further evidence that “higher education has drifted from its principles”: “in response to a charge from the presidents [sic] of Vanderbilt and Washington University, a committee of leading scholars documented the politicization of the humanities and humanistic social sciences.” Thus “leading scholars” now agree that “For the good of the Nation, university leadership must seize this occasion to drive essential reforms” (McMahon).[21]
The governing board of one of the sponsoring institutions, Vanderbilt University, issued “A Declaration of First Principles” called “The University and Its Purpose.” It is co-signed by the chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, one of the commissioners of the report, and board chair Bruce R. Evans. The text is a compendium of traditional statements about the value of free inquiry for “breakthrough research” and “transformative education.” It repeatedly calls for merit and meritocracy as though these had been forgotten, but now shorn of any reference to diversity. It further states that merit is at risk “when appointments, promotions, recognitions, publications, and citations are subordinated to political or social goals.” It prescribes multiple forms of direct administrative intervention when such political or social goals are detected, as it assumes is a constant possibility. Whatever nuance Boghossian and company thought they were introducing has unsurprisingly disappeared.[22]
We might also ask, what would someone outside the field, perhaps a member of a governing board, reasonably conclude by reading the report? Most likely that humanistic research has been politicized and is often of low quality. The report makes humanistic scholarship sound a lot worse than science and engineering, producing results that in general a governing board might want to disavow.
What measures might a board member then recommend? They’d have reason to go along with cutting or suspending humanities funding until the university can conduct an “independent” inquiry by a committee with a carefully handpicked membership (like that which produced this report). They may well agree to sanction or fire some personnel until epistemic order has been restored. They may also propose to set up a separate “intellectual freedom” center for the humanities on the model that has appeared in Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, and elsewhere, with staff selected by non-faculty or outside interests (Randall). I omit mention of the scramble on the campus itself, as departments and scholars reposition themselves, their research, and their hiring and promotion to avoid offense. The effect is to be a narrowing and a chilling effect that will hit novel, challenging, innovative scholarship first.
There’s a further issue, which is the likely deepening of the humanities research funding crisis. Since the report describes qualitative methods as slippery and dubious, and since the report’s targeted relativisms are hard to parse, McMahon’s “essential reforms” should further favor the funding of quantitative over qualitative research.
This favoritism was extreme before the Trump administration’s completely unjustified and destructive cutting of research funding at the NIH, NSF, and every other science and engineering research agency across the federal government.[23] And yet the situation remains even worse for humanistic disciplines. Limiting myself to one description, the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council released a “Statement on Research Funding in the Humanities” that reads in part:
In fiscal year (FY) 2020, the federal government spent $46.1 billion on research and development (R&D) in higher education institutions. Were federal agencies to spend one percent of this R&D budget on all humanities disciplines, these disciplines would receive $461 million per year. The NEH, however, spent approximately $32.6 million on research across all disciplines in FY 2019. This comes to well under one-tenth of one percent of federal R&D funding. It appears to us that US humanities scholars operate under funding constraints that unduly impair their scholarly output and limit the humanities’ public benefits.[24]
This is the tip of the iceberg of the problem of scholarship’s material conditions, which starts with the systemic adjunctification of the faculty that deletes research from the majority’s timetable.[25] The committee could have used their “very high-level report written for high-level administrators” to bring this grinding issue to the attention of the very people who control resources. But the committee ignores it completely, while misdescribing and then savaging a phenomenon that—when it does occur—is actually the direct effect of the near-zero funding for research.
That phenomenon is the missing scaffold or bridge between core humanistic methods, particularly text-based close reading, and social problems those reading sometimes try to address.
In his supporting report, “Literary Studies,” Appiah finds the discipline to be prone to the problems targeted in the main report. They are “politicization,” “refusing to engage” (illustrated with an incident of pro-trans deplatforming), “identity as a basis for criticism,” “what, exactly is theory” (theory shouldn’t claim to “have effects beyond [its] original field”), “gesture politics,” “narrowing the focus,” “urging students to engage in activism,” and “partisanship.” These are varieties politics being used to fill a gap between text and world, literary interpretation and practical or political effects, in which critics allegedly have no tools to cross other than their “politicization” –their “gesture politics” of asserted but unproven effects, their sheer “overstatement of aim.”
Appiah favors interdisciplinary work: “Interdisciplinary work can be extremely fruitful, but it surely requires respect for the disciplinary tools and methods of the fields with which one is engaging from a discipline of one’s own” (Appiah 21).[26] I strongly agree. But like the report, his paper presumes poor use of other field’s tools and a lack of interest in learning them. Thus, to repeat, critics supposedly fall back on, even prefer, politicization.
Appiah’s only example is Caroline Levine’s book, The Activist Humanist. Levine, he writes, argued in 2023 that what she calls “anti-instrumentality” underlies much work in the humanities, and that, as a result, much teaching in the humanities actively discourages hopeful political engagement. So she urges a resistance to this thought in the name of an “affirmative instrumentality.” The book ends with a workbook that is designed to help students discover forms of political engagement with the climate crisis that involve no literary attention or material at all. True, the book argues that what she calls “formalism,” a technique evolved in the literary humanities, allows us to understand social life in a way that “sustains collective life.” What has this to do with literary studies? “I hope it is clear.” Levine writes, “that I am reading cities in some of the same ways I would read a poem.” The right kind of formalism, she thinks, allows one to read a poem and a society. Literary study, she thinks, can be enabling for political engagement. But there is no evidence in the book that this is so: The success of the workbook, which she calls an “experiment,” wouldn’t show this, since there is nothing specifically literary about it. And, given the claims for the power of literary studies in advancing social justice, the lack of interest in empirical evidence for these claims is surprising (8-9).
There is indeed a difference between the text’s theory of formalism and its activist’s workbook. But why can’t they be different parts of a multi-methods inquiry? They can be, as is the “normal science” of any interdisciplinary study, where mediation among methods will have to take place. In contrast, Appiah seems to think that any research project involving literary studies must in every stage and component be an act of literary study. This of course excludes literary studies from the interdisciplinary work he elsewhere approves. I see no argument or evidence here that requires us to accept this prohibition.
Let’s try something with Levine’s book. Everyone “knows” that the climate crisis is happening today, not in an unknowable future, and is intensifying by the month, and yet no society is seeing the popular mobilizations that would force governments to act on the required scale.[27] Individuals and populations display combinations of denial, despair, fatalism, anger, grief, as well as various kinds of activism. These combinations need to be better understood if blockages are to be resolved in constructive ways.
One capability that would help is better group collaboration, which is rarer than it needs to be in individualist and neoliberalized societies. The ability to collaborate is, to simplify, rooted in learning how to get through conflicts and differences in order to cooperate across gaps within communities—to cooperate across epistemic spaces. Much of this learning will be experiential, but much can be learned from reading and study of various kinds. Literature and criticism continuously engage the intersections of cognition and affect that are relevant to this issue, and together they have large archives of textual “data” and theories about these issues. Levine’s overall argument is that in spite of some unhelpful inhibitions in literary studies, it has resources that can be used—and used by other disciplines.
One instance appears in Levine’s brief discussion of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s and 1980s. The serial “made a range of sexualities feel familiar and intimate. Maupin was one of the first writers to introduce a trans character into mainstream fiction and one of the first to represent the AIDS epidemic” (Levine, Chapter 4). The serial dramatized “unconventional household arrangements” and allowed readers to ponder and familiarize themselves with these arrangements and with their own feelings about them. They would read the next installment each morning, which enabled them to think gradually about AIDS policy or lack thereof, about the relations between gender, sexuality, and family formations, about what gay culture was and how it was changing San Francisco, about the effects on that culture of the price of rent, and about everything else the Tales covered over many years. We can see Maupin the slow novelist as relevant to climate crisis because his texts helped understand and even create complicated affective communities, communities that may be like those that will be a prerequisite to real climate mobilization. Literature, like Maupin’s Tales, has knowledge about group life and its difficulties that is further elaborated by criticism.
Here’s where humanistic scholarship hits the funding wall. The previous paragraph offers a simple hypothesis, really a hunch, that would need time and effort to turn into a research idea that one might work on for months or years. It would need to be developed, ideally by a group of scholars, before it could attract other peoples’ interest, much less start to generate evidence for what might and might not work about it. It would need to involve scholars from other disciplines, including climate science, psychology, sociology, and so on, for literature reviews, debate to define research questions, hypotheses, methods, sequences, expected outcomes, scopes of work, etc., and this can seem to take forever if several disciplines are involved. The project might need reading groups, focus groups, interviews with some of the original readers of Maupin compared to readers of Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and T.C. Boyle’s climate novels. Who knows in advance what we’d turn up? Maybe it’d be a bust. Maybe it’d be “breakthrough research.” Maybe it would be solid, everyday research that leads to more research. In all of these cases, it would need money for graduate student time, for travel and conferences, for archival work, for the collaboration itself: climate scientists conduct funded research and will expect partial salary buyouts and covered expenses in order to participate in a literary climate project. An interdisciplinary project that shows “respect for the disciplinary tools and methods” of other fields by collaborating directly with their practitioners would produce results with epistemic credibility while costing perhaps $1 million across three years.
One very cheap part of such research might be a workbook—and the undergraduate deliberations that it would structure. A research project called, “Effective Group Psychologies for Responding to Climate Change: Lessons From Popular Fiction” might start with a classroom workbook. It could generate a preliminary proof of concept. And if it is funded in the manner of today’s humanities research, that is where it will end.
The material poverty of the constituent disciplines have long held humanistic scholarship back, back especially from full participation in creating public knowledge in the company of other fields. This poverty is a standing invitation for the categorical dismissals, the snobbish incredulity that runs through the report. Boghossian people, if you all don’t like Levine’s use of the humanities to address the social need for knowledge about an existential issue of our time, why don’t you help her out? Help with specific conceptual refinements and put a hold on the negative metatheory. And use your clout to fix the humanities funding crisis that keeps most of its scholars in low gear.
It’s never too late to stop categorically disparaging minority or marginalized discourses in your disciplines–and to stop miscasting them as having the power to destroy. I invite the members of this report’s committee to call for keeping scholarship in the hands of scholars and not their governing boards.
Christopher Newfield was Distinguished Professor of Literature at UC Sana Barbara, currently directs the Independent Social Research Foundation in London, UK, and writes about culture, universities, and political economy.
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NOTES
[1]“[O]ur review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity. In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” (Boghossian, “Report” 4-5)
[2] Suggesting that at least parts of humanistic disciplines are as astrology is to astronomy, the authors write, “When astronomy as a field morphs into astrology . . . administrators will face a largely unprecedented situation in which disciplinary expertise itself cannot be trusted. In such cases, the administration will need advice from minority voices within the discipline and from adjacent disciplines with better standards, and it will be a matter of substantive judgment where such reliable expertise is to be found” (Boghossian, “Report” 6).
[3] This is a minority report even within the circle of elite private universities. It has been endorsed here and there, and has also been subject to severe criticisms: Levenson’s Facebook post on the matter; Bérubé, “Report on the State of a Report (on the Humanities)”; and Wilson, “Academic Authoritarianism in a New Attach on Humanities Scholars.” See also tweets by Madeleine Baker, Guy McHendry, Chad Wellmon, Rita Felski, Asheesh Siddique; UChicago’s AAUP chapter had an interesting comment on the Chicago origins of the report commission (AAUP UChicago). See Hale; also Moran, Stanley, Afinogenov, Hankins, Leiter.
[4] Levenson (9 of 10 authors from elite private research universities); in Lee, “Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized?” the president of the American Anthropological Association, Carolyn M. Rouse, states, “I don’t think they even bothered to read more of the person’s work or try to understand it in the context,” among other comments on the authors’ failures of connection with the active discipline. In her statement on behalf of the AAA, Rouse writes, “We teach students to listen carefully, examine multiple forms of evidence, situate claims in context, and remain attentive to internal diversity and disagreement. It is therefore striking that a report offering such far-reaching conclusions about anthropology appears to have done so without meaningful engagement with the largest professional association representing the field. The committee did not contact the American Anthropological Association, not its elected leadership, not its editors, not the broad range of scholars who comprise the discipline. This despite there being an anthropologist and a linguist among the committee’s members. This is a central methodological failure of a report that claims to assess an entire field” (Rouse, “Setting the Record Straight”).
[5] Just one of the ten authors received their PhD in the past 25 years. 3 authors were degreed between 1969 and 1980, 2 in the 1980s and the other 4 in the 1990s.
[6] The report’s references list, by my count, two books on humanistic methods: Khiara M. Bridges, Critical Race Theory: A Primer (Foundation Press, 2019); and Özlem Sensoy, and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, 2nd ed. (Teachers College Press, 2017). The report cites one paragraph from the first and two from the second (these two paragraphs take two different positions on objectivity, making the flawed text a possibly useful teaching tool in class). This second book is for high school teachers, and neither is intended as an analysis or construction of methodology for scholars. In the latter category, the report might have studied (not cherry-picked) a serious methods text for scholars like Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson, The Ethnographer’s Way (Duke University Press, 2024). It is concerned with the construction of reliable ethnographic knowledge through rigorous and collaborative research design, working with the “self-reflexive turn” that Boghossian et al. wrongly equate with a bad (politicized) relativism.
[7] See Stanley, “On the Philosophical Muddle That Is the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Sciences“; Afinogenov, “In the Grip of Politics”; Moran, “The Wrong Way to Criticize the Humanities”; Hankins, “Dear Critics of Literary Studies: Do the Reading”; Leiter, “Apparently Anthony Appiah Has Not Read Carnap (Or Thomas Nagel’s ‘The Last Word’).” In the article “When Identity Replaces Argument,” Chronicle of Higher Education editor Len Gutkin agrees with at least two of report co-author K. Anthony Appiah’s arguments: the critique of “identity as a basis for criticism,” and the rejection of Caroline Levine’s claim “that the study of literature should be reformulated under the sign of what she calls ‘affirmative instrumentality” (Appiah proposes these as mechanisms by which scholarship is subordinated to politics). But Gutkin also writes, “what is missing from Appiah’s report is the kind of close engagement with a wide swath of criticism in literary studies that would fill out the picture suggested by the data and by the criticism of [Levine’s] The Activist Humanist” (Gutkin).
[8] Writing, “it’s a very high-level report written for high-level administrators rather than for our colleagues” (Rubin, “Report”).
[9] “Our report provides ground for thinking that some fields may be at risk of warranting this sort of scrutiny. We have identified problems in the humanities and social sciences to which administrators should be alert. And yet we cannot say on the basis of the work we have done that individual departments have forfeited their claim to administrative deference. If administrators are concerned about these problems in their universities, an indispensable first step will be an intensive study of the units in question conducted by reliably broad-minded disciplinary experts (in-house and external) and by experts in adjacent disciplines who take the problems seriously and can be relied on to take a measured view. In our view, nothing in this report warrants any intervention more intrusive than such first steps” (Boghossian, “Report” 6; emphases in original). However, these “first steps” are intrusive. They add and override field-specific peer review with administrative oversight of academic content. For critical explication, see Wilson, “Academic Authoritarianism in a New Attack on Humanities Scholars.”
[10]The sociologist Ashley T. Rubin has joined Boghossian and Appiah in commenting on the report she co-authored. She notes that the chapters of the American Association of University Professors of the universities whose head executives sponsored the report, Vanderbilt University and Washington University of St. Louis, wrote a joint statement objecting it. They write, “In essence, the report proposes giving a heckler’s veto to any syllabus or research project that university administrators do not care for; it suggests it is legitimate to place departments into receivership based on administrators’ perception of faculty politics” (AAUP, Vanderbilt University and Washington University). This is a serious charge: it accuses the report of calling for regularized violations of faculty academic freedom, about which AAUP chapters have core expertise. Rubin doesn’t take the charge or its authors seriously enough to engage it, but reduces it to a symptom of the report’s alleged disease: the AAUP letter is “fresh evidence that some scholars are replacing scholarly goals with political goals.” This move reflects a familiar, broken epistemology of othering about which humanistic scholarship has developed an extensive analysis over the past fifty years (Rubin, “Why Scholarship”).
[11] Conflicts about the nature of truth of course descend from the ancients. The philosopher and sociologist of science, Steve Fuller, has discussed the early modern conflict between Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes over whether the Royal Society of London would have independence from the Crown in exchange for “neutrality” on political affairs. Hobbes (and later, the Trump administration officials) said no (Fuller 88-91). I intend here a sense close to that sketched by Stanley and Moran. Moran writes “There is a similar failure of diagnosis in the accusation that humanities scholarship has been “politicized.” Serious work in political theory or political philosophy is rarely neutral with respect to various core political values such as justice, equality before the law, protection of basic rights, and so on. These can be and are questioned in certain discussions, but much good work in political theory and philosophy take them as more or less fixed points. So, just when and how does this become a distortion of the goals of inquiry? The report offers no such principle, and perhaps no such useable principle can be constructed. Here again there can be no substitute for engagement with the work itself. And presumably the authors of the report do not mean to deny that serious scholarship exists in, for example, Women’s Studies or Black Studies, whole fields of research that owe their existence to a complex historical political context. So, as with the relativism charge, the reader is left without any guidance as to just what kinds of ‘politicization’ are consistent with serious scholarship and which are not. But at the same time, and without framing any such principle of distinction, the report is offering university administrators a possible basis for claiming that some departments and programs are ‘at risk’ of ‘forfeiting their claims to deference’” (Moran, citing Boghossian, “Report” 4).
[12] Rubin notes this trend approvingly (Rubin, “Report Reflections”).
[13] See Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”; Haraway, Primate Visions; Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights.
[14] On “social demands for knowledge” from universities, see Newfield, “Criticism After This Crisis.”
[15] I include among these “normal science” conflicts a (limited) phenomena that one of the authors of the report, Anthony Appiah, generalizes as a major problem in humanistic disciplines: “When a claim that is widely accepted among people who work on, say, Black literature or feminist criticism is contested by a white person or a man, the identity of the person making the claim is sometimes invoked in the criticism.” “I have also seen people criticized because there is a mismatch between their identity and their subject. So criticism of scholars who are white, male, straight, or cis by scholars … who are Black or female or LGBTQ does sometimes reflect a suspicion that the former are very unlikely to ‘get’ questions that are in some sense about the identities of the latter” (Gutkin). Yes this happens, and I have once or twice been on the receiving end of such comments. It’s not fun, but, to repeat, it’s normal. More importantly, such comments may indicate intellectual gaps or blind spots that the target should consider fixing. It’s unfortunate that such intellectual content can get ignored or even othered by condemning the entire genre of ad hominem remarks as having zero or negative value.
[16] For a short explanation of why the quality of academic research depends on its good rather than its bad papers, see Mastroianni.
[17] See anecdotes about mistreatment of “gender critical” authors, the appendices of the Appiah side report on literary studies (Appiah), and Rubin’s comments on the dilemmas of journal editors (Rubin, “Why Scholarship”). Rubin makes good points in her multi-causal analysis of the pressures on academic research, but its conclusions are steered by its priors: “Why did activism become an acceptable criterion in the production and evaluation of scholarship, displacing older norms centered on neutrality, objectivity and methodological rigor?”
[18] A similarly influential stance to Rorty, adapted to literary study and insistent on the role of collaborative interpretative norms, was Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? For detailed arguments about the relations between (empirical) hermeneutics and epistemology, see Smith, On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language; more recently, see Smith, Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene: On Science, Belief, and the Humanities. Smith steadily expanded literary theory into engagement with science and the theory of knowledge: see her Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene.
[19] The report’s sampling bias is not corrected when Boghossian writes, “We quote several scholars professing their allegiance to such a [politicization] doctrine and we could have cited dozens more” (Boghossian, “Letter”).
[20] This relationship is more fraught in literary studies than in other humanistic disciplines, where dualisms of text v. context, aesthetic v. historical analysis have unfortunately structured the field, and I say unfortunately because it has held back interdisciplinary collaboration. Forty years ago, the eminent critic Edward Said was trying to make the conjunctions underwrite ordinary professional scholarship in a title like The World, the Text, and the Critic, but he did not succeed. On continuing resistance to these conjunctions, see Newfield, “Interdiscipline.”
[21] She also noted, “In May, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education boldly acknowledged that the dilution of academic standards, opaque admissions policies, and a domineering monoculture have badly eroded public trust.”
[22] The declaration is also a kind of national security document, demanding that funded research prioritize the “national interest of American society.” On this point and the declaration’s “extreme repression of academic norms and standards,” see Wilson, “Vanderbilt’s Board Declares War Against Academic Freedom.”
[23] Amidst widespread coverage, see Mallapaty; Knott and Quinn; Kornbluth, 7:47; Ruediger, McCracken, and Barefield; Romm.
[24]Executive Council, “Statement on Research Funding in the Humanities”(internal citations omitted). I was the initial drafter of this statement.
[25] For an overview, see Newfield, “Humanities Decline in Darkness.”
[26] Appiah’s side report has moments of the kind of intellectual generosity that I associate with him. I knew and worked a bit with him at Cornell University in the 1980s, and remember him as astute, ecumenical, kind to graduate students, and a particularly good practical problem solver.
[27] This is the central issue in Kim Stanley Robinson’s, The Ministry for the Future, an imaginatively important and yet aesthetically bungled novel.
