There is a line of argument in Emmanuel Lévinas’s 1951 essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” that guides many of my assumptions about what it means to think. Lévinas is discussing Heidegger’s argument that to think is to throw oneself into history and its unfolding dramas. According to Lévinas, this launch seems to produce a rupture with the dominant conventions of Western thought. To think is no longer simply to contemplate, and understanding the world no longer means withdrawing from it. But there’s more to the story.
Still with Heidegger in mind, Lévinas takes care to argue that our often-daring launches into the day’s debates and happenings in no way means that we are transcending the moment’s conflicts. Imagining himself as the culprit in a whodunit, Lévinas writes, “Reaching out my hand to pull a chair toward me, I have folded the arm of my jacket, scratched the floor and dropped my cigarette ash. In doing what I willed to do, I did a thousand and one things I hadn’t willed to do”(Lévinas 3). Frantically, awkwardly, the guilty party tries to clean things up but to little avail. Attempting to wipe away one trace, he’s produced even more. Hence, he points to one of Heidegger’s (and detective fiction’s) great insights: Our actions always breed inadvertent ones.
The Vanderbilt Report has inadvertent traces that deserve severe attention as well. You first see it in all the efforts the committee takes to clean up any suspicion that it is motivated by right-wing interests. It says for instance, “Our call for more searching scrutiny must not be read as a call for replacing ideological scholarship of one sort with ideological scholarship of another sort, or for balancing distorted scholarship on one side with distorted scholarship on the other to achieve neutrality” (Paul Boghossian et al. 6). Here the committee presents itself as an impartial party, protecting the presumably disinterested value of excellence. In their words, they are merely dispassionate actors calling for the preservation of foundational academic values.
The committee takes several steps to critique rightwing forces as well as progressive scholarship. They say, for example, “In other ways, political forces stretching from Washington, D.C. to state capitals across the nation are currently attempting to dictate as never before the substance of humanistic teaching and scholarship” (Paul Boghossian et al. 7). In an acknowledgment of left indiscretions, they write, “Beginning at the end of the 1990s, the watchdog group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) bravely led the opposition to left-wing illiberalism on college campuses” (Paul Boghossian et al. 7).
In an extended critique of rightwing efforts to encroach upon academic disciplines, the report points to outrages at the national and local levels. About the national scene, it states, “[This] dictation has involved federal efforts to pronounce on what is acceptable scholarship, especially, for the moment, in the field of American history, and to threaten any institution under federal purview that does not conform” (Paul Boghossian et al. 7). About goings-on at the state level, the committee reports,
The situation is even more troubling at the state level, where legislative impositions have begun to impinge directly on scholarship and teaching, chiefly by intimidating public colleges and universities. The case of the Texas A&M philosopher instructed by the university to remove selections from Plato from his introductory course syllabus because they violated new rules barring Texas public universities from offering courses that “advocate race and gender ideology” may seem bizarre, but it is also extremely alarming (Paul Boghossian et al. 7).
Despite their assertions that they are detached from political agendas, we can discern the trace—conscious or otherwise—of ideological investments in the document. For instance, the notion of leftist overreach and suppression was a hallmark of repressive discourses in the nineteen sixties. On April 12, 1963, eight white moderate clergymen in Birmingham, Alabama wrote a public statement in response to the civil rights demonstrations taking place in that city. Appealing to “commonsense,” they said, “When rights are consistently denied, a course should be pressed and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and commonsense” (“Letter to Negroes”).
In response, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He began the letter by saying, “I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in” (King 289). King goes on to offer his credentials as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization with branches in every southern state. In doing so, he does more than present his professional credentials, he implicitly calls into question the ministers’ refusal to read the social complexities that surround and implicate them.
Relatedly, in 1969, the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina proposed a little-known bill to the Senate called “A Proposed Academic Freedom Protective Act of 1969.” Informing the Senate of the bill’s intent, Thurmond said, “Mr. Chairman, our Nation’s colleges and universities are in a great crisis today. Nearly everyone admits that a small group of radicals, capitalizing upon the human capacity for discontent, are threatening the American tradition of academic freedom. The militants are mobilizing student opinion, and attempting to polarize the academic community into radically opposing groups.” Opposing direct action to academic freedom, Thurmond continued, “S. 1988 is designed to protect the Federal interest that is, the taxpayer’s interest at the same time that it protects the interests of administrators, teachers, and students. It preserves the distinction between academic freedom and those actions of violence and disruption which destroy academic freedom.” According to the proposal, students could be imprisoned for three years or fined $5000 or $44,000 in today’s terms for occupying or taking over a building.
In the Birmingham minister’s letter and in Thurmond’s proposed bill, there are two policing operations that rely on the construction of critical interventions as excessive. One operation has to do with Thurmond’s proposal that law enforcement be brought in when students and faculty engage in protests that are deemed contrary to the state’s interests. Similarly, the minister’s construction of King and other civil rights activists as promoters of chaos indirectly produces the conditions for King’s jailing.
But there’s another policing discourse at work. That operation has to do with the management of thought, what the theorist Jacques Rancière calls a “policing consensus,” one in which policing is a function that configures the “visible, the thinkable and the possible through a systematic production of the given, not through spectacular strategies of control and repression” (Kelsey). This policing consensus can be expressed through a range of texts and practices—the list of texts allowed on an orals list, the questions deemed appropriate for dissertation research, the methods sanctioned for a discipline’s interrogation, a report about the state of a field, and so on. For the ministers and Thurmond, commonsense means the unlawfulness of direct action even when peaceful and the reshaping of public opinion. The social and intellectual insurgencies of the sixties inspired both forms of policing—one in which the policing of people and the policing of thought would be two sides of the same coin.
It may seem strange to put the liberal ministers and an avowed segregationist in the same ideological umbrella. Dr. King pointed to this curious alliance between the clergyman and segregationist forces, when he said, “I must confess that over the last years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” (King 295). As they construct Black people and direct action as excesses and threats to the social order and as they attempt to return public opinion to the dominant terms of the given order, both moderates and conservatives participate in the undermining of democracy.
The Vanderbilt report is the latest expression in this historical drama. The report’s construction of social justice as especially vulnerable to irrationality comes at a time when the U.S. government and other rightwing forces are bringing the weight of their considerable powers down on what the committee calls “social justice” work but what we may more precisely refer to as anti-racist, feminist, queer, transgender, and postcolonial scholarship. And in keeping with this dialectic of policing, they target not only the books and the courses but the people as well.
This construction of our work accounts for a tragic and dangerous current within the report. In his discussion of that moment where action takes a tragic turn, Lévinas says, “Sherlock Holmes will apply his science to this irreducible coarseness of each of my initiatives, and thus the comedy may take a tragic turn. When the awkwardness of the act is turned against the goal pursued, we are in the midst of tragedy. Laius, in attempting to thwart the fatal predictions, undertakes precisely what is necessary to fulfill them. Oedipus, in succeeding, works towards his own misfortune” (Lévinas 3). In the context of the Vanderbilt Report, there is the comedy that the committee presumes it is unmarked by the conservative discourses it renounces. There is the tragedy—probably unbeknownst to its members—that it is ensnared within the twin operations of policing established decades ago.
Recently, Secretary of Education and wrestling mogul Linda McMahon issued a letter entitled “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” In it, she lauded Vanderbilt’s report and others like it, writing:
Several university leaders have publicly recognized the need to chart a new course to rebuild public confidence and trust. 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 (Linda McMahon).
Situating the Vanderbilt report alongside Yale’s, she continued, “Last month, in response to a charge from the presidents of Vanderbilt and Washington University, a community of leading scholars documented the politicization of the humanities and the humanistic social sciences” (Linda McMahon).
McMahon’s letter, like the reports it praises, hails from the aforementioned conjuncture as well. As the report constructs interdisciplinary and critical work and its roster of largely minoritized authors as rationality’s others, it inadvertently invokes a regulatory agenda for intellectual production and institutional life, an agenda that McMahon’s letter confirms. The letter says, for example, “American taxpayers invest hundreds of millions of dollars into higher education every year. American universities must put Americans and American interests, first” (Linda McMahon). Expounding on some of the specifics, Secretary McMahon argues, “That means prioritizing American students and faculty, orienting the research enterprise to support the country’s economic and security needs, and putting American societal success ahead of global commitments” (Linda McMahon).
In a moment in which international students and faculty have been targeted for protesting Israel’s genocide against Palestinians; demonstrators have been shot for contesting ICE’s anti-immigration policies; universities have been harassed by the federal government because of the presence of Black and Latine students; immigrants of all ages have been rounded up and disappeared in detention centers around the country, the policing of certain scholarship that is constructed as the antithesis of academic values is dangerously tied to the policing of entire communities on our campuses and within our nation.
Expounding on his theory of inadvertent action, Lévinas says, “Our consciousness, and our mastery of reality through consciousness, do not exhaust our relationship with reality, in which we are present with all the density of our being” (Lévinas 3–4). Through her letter, McMahon upends the Vanderbilt committee’s insistence on their objectivity and their remove. Her letter, instead, reveals the committee’s presence in an unprecedented peril for American universities and verifies that the reality that the government intends—with the witting or unwitting aid of our colleagues—is an American academy fit for a MAGA world.
Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies and is the author of In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought.
Work Cited
Boghossian, Paul, et al. Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Vanderbilt University, 5 Apr. 2026.
Kelsey, Fulvia Carnevale, John. “ART OF THE POSSIBLE: AN INTERVIEW WITH JACQUES RANCIÈRE.” Artforum, 1 Mar. 2007, https://www.artforum.com/features/fulvia-carnevale-and-john-kelsey-175243/.
King, Martin Luther. A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row, c1986.
“Letter to Negroes: Withdraw from Demonstrations.” Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-martin-luther-king/. Accessed 6 Aug. 2026.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous : On Thinking-of-the-Other. Columbia University Press, c1998.
McMahon, Linda, “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” 4 Aug. 2026.
