It’s not because of the trash talk. Through a forest of caveats, and they go on for pages, the report winds its way toward its accusation. The humanities and humanistic social sciences, the report suggests, display a lack of intellectual rigor. In academic terms such accusation, no matter how eloquent and/or qualified, boils down to “You ain’t got shit.” The charge presents a visceral threat to the esteem of the accused. For all the prefatory argumentation—twelve pages!—two questions rise instantly and demand answer before any serious evaluation of the charge can begin. Who, exactly, is lacking intellectual rigor and what, exactly, did they say?

As I proceeded through those first twelve pages, I began to get that “clickbait” feeling. The social media post that led me to the report had promised a fight. As I read, I kept waiting for the fight to begin. As the caveats grew in volume and number, I began to suspect that I had fallen victim to hype. Then, at long last, on page twelve of thirty, a citation. Three, in fact, with verbatim quotation, full reference, and accompanying paraphrase and argument. Finally, the fight! The accusation had been clearly stated, alleged offenders identified, the evidence readily available for review and evaluation. I put down the report and resolved to take on the accusations and their targets point by point.

Charge: “In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.”

Defendant #1: Akhil Gupta, anthropologist, University of California, Los Angeles.

Offense: “For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that ‘anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism’ (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added).”

Analysis:

Regarding the first clause of the charge, I found nothing in Gupta’s text that would “explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” The direct citation in the report is an exclusively positive statement that contains no negation of any kind, let alone an explicit one. Nor did any such repudiation appear elsewhere in the published text of the address. On the contrary, Gupta argued that politics drove anthropology’s founding figure, Franz Boas, to expose a lack of rigor in the scholarship produced under the dominant paradigm of his time. Social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century asserted “that cultural development could be correlated to race, that there was a hierarchy of racial types, and that the white race had a greater aptitude for producing civilization as compared to other races” (Gupta and Stoolman, 780). Through Boas’ work and legacy, Gupta argued, “Scientific racism was shown to be false by demonstrating that arranging cultures in a hierarchy was analytically untenable” (Gupta and Stoolman 781). Boas’ anti-racist politics, “preceded, informed, and exceeded his scholarship on race and racialization” (original emphasis), according to Gupta. But Gupta asserted that such politics served to further knowledge and understanding, a far cry from explicitly repudiating understanding as a goal. 

What of the second clause of the charge regarding the assertion “of an overtly and exclusively political conception” of scholarship? Yes, the report’s direct citation of Gupta did express an overtly political conception of anthropology. But nothing in the citation nor in the rest of the address indicated exclusivity of such conception. Rather, Gupta framed his address as a provocation and invitation to collaborative, imaginative reformulation of anthropological work, writing that “we fully realize that there is no singular ‘we.’ The more than ten thousand anthropologists in the United States probably have more than fifteen thousand different positions on what ‘anthropology’ (somehow always in the singular) should do about any particular issue. If what we are hoping emerges from this article are debates about the future of anthropology, then the ‘we’ is an invitation to join that debate, not to impose a singular view on anybody or to posit a single disciplinary dominant” (Gupta and Stoolman, 790). Nor is this caveat a singular gesture restricted to a footnote. The entire second section of the address is devoted to a counterfactual history of anthropology, imagining what the discipline could have revealed if it had taken a path guided by the analytical lens that he proposed in his address. Provocation to dialogue together with the self-conscious indulgence in historical fiction does nothing to impose a singular and definitive view of anthropology, whether political or otherwise.

Gupta did not argue for or propose the analytical adequacy of anthropology’s “political project to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.” These are not his politics! At least not exclusively. He proposed a distinct political project for anthropology: decolonization. Further, he presented his “decolonizing lens” as itself inadequate as he expressed it in the address. He raised and left unresolved the tension within his own proposal between efforts that effectively reinscribe a US-centric focus and ones that arise out of contexts around the globe. Through both explicit invitation and implicit need, his address called for discussion and counter-proposals that could easily include “non-political” approaches. But these would need to do more than approaches that have, according to Gupta’s presentation, been proven false and lacking in analytical rigor even as they billed themselves as objective, scientific, and by implication, non-political.

Defendant #2: Fernando Villanea, anthropologist at University of Colorado, Boulder

Offense #2: “In a reply [to Gupta’s address] published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that ‘the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,’ but rather to ‘serve the interests’ of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023).”

Analysis:

The report’s direct citation of Villanea did contain an assertion that could, at least on its face, “explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding” when it downplayed truth as inherently subjective. But the report left out the sentences immediately following that assertion: “Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality.” This evocation of the subjective/objective difference does not easily line up with the knowledge/politics difference that grounds the report’s charge. Once one codes knowledge as subjective and politics as objective, the valuation of knowledge over politics—i.e., the position that the report favors—runs counter to traditional understandings of the aims of scholarship. Traditionally, scholarship seeks knowledge so as to establish an objective and therefore common understanding of the world, eschewing politics insofar as it expresses subjective (and implicitly divisive) orientations toward reality, e.g., visions for the way the world ought to be but is not. Villanea’s piece affirmed the value of objective and common understandings of the world. He would love for all scholars to know how their scholarship, both their own individual work and the collective scholarly enterprises to which they contribute, has affected and continues to affect how people live. In this way, Villanea’s assertion of fidelity to objective reality squares with traditional understandings of the value and aim of scholarship.

Through his subjective/objective coding, Villanea did not repudiate but rather subordinated knowledge and understanding as goals of scholarship. Villanea noted that the expression of truth is a product of choices. The human impact of knowledge and understanding—and, one may note, the infinite number of truths—raises the question of which truths to state, which objects of knowledge one ought to pursue (the “truth we choose to tell”). Villanea argued that that question depends on—is subordinate to—the value of that knowledge. There Villanea suggested the priority of the historical, social, political (read: objective) realities of the impact such knowledge has and continues to have. Understanding remains a necessary step along the way to the goal of scholarship, which, according to Villanea, is knowledge-based service to human beings. As all scholarship, political or otherwise, answers to the demand for the relevance and value of the understandings it produces, it is difficult to see anything fundamentally subversive about Villanea’s proposal.

Defendant #3: Jose Leonardo Santos, anthropologist at Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota

Offense #3: “Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that ‘all ethnographies’ — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal ‘not voyeurism but advocacy’ (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion.”

Analysis:

With all due respect, I can make no sense of the report’s interpretation of the text that it cites. Neither in the context of ethnography, nor perhaps in any context, can advocacy avoid “describing the social world and making sense of it.” Advocacy describes the social world in a way that suggests particular courses of action and/or reflects the interests and perspectives of particular parties within the social world. To be sure, one can argue that advocacy offers faulty, biased, and/or inadequate description, but to suggest that it offers no description at all leads to an unimaginable conception of advocacy.

Voyeurism, in contrast, can be imagined as potentially lacking such description. Taken in the literal, pathological sense, voyeurs are satisfied in the seeing itself. They do not need to bring what they see into language—a symbol system that allows communication with others—in order to satisfy their desires. They see for themselves alone and to satisfy only themselves. Taken figuratively, voyeurism in ethnography would offer descriptions of the social world that would make sense only to the author of those descriptions or to a body of readers that would necessarily exclude participants in the social world described. For such a voyeuristic approach, “describing the social world and making sense of it” is, explicitly and intentionally, “not on the menu” for such participants as potential readers.

Concluding reiteration: “Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.”

Analysis:

In its first clause regarding scholarship and social goals, the logic of this accusation sinks below the level of fallacy to simple contradiction. Taken literally (and figuratively, and really in any sense), Gupta’s proposal of a political project for anthropology, Villanea’s call for anthropology to “serve the interests” of those who have been harmed by anthropology, and Santos’s assertion of ethnography as advocacy, all call precisely for “scholarship in the service of a social goal.” The report describes its cited evidence as meaning exactly the opposite of what the text plainly indicates, even explicitly directing readers to restrict themselves to the plain meaning of the text.

In its second clause regarding the alleged rejection of the aim of understanding, the accusation finds no purchase whatsoever in the cited or uncited text from Gupta. In the case of Santos, the rejection of voyeurism in favor of advocacy requires grasping, articulating, and communicating understanding. Only in the case of Villanea could the cited text be “taken literally” as a rejection of the aim of understanding. Taken in its immediate and uncited context, however, Villanea calls for understanding as a necessary aim of scholarship.

Summary and Reflection

Ok, that was the fight, or at least the first skirmish. Out of thirteen pairs of argument and evidence, only two could be considered successful while the other eleven failed. The report’s presentation of thesis and its citation and interpretation of evidence consist overwhelmingly of non-sequitur, mischaracterization, reading out of context, and plain contradiction. The following chart documents and summarizes this failure of the argument:

Evaluation of Argumentation       

Key

Red: Radical failure stemming from non sequitur or contradiction

Orange: Complex failure stemming from contradiction and lack of support in context

Yellow: Simple failure stemming from mischaracterization

Green: Success

Coming in a report that levies charges of lack of scholarly rigor, a report whose lead author is an epistemologist, no less, such catastrophically incoherent argumentation calls for explanation. How did such highly trained and credentialed scholars come to express such shockingly flawed reasoning?

Consider the context. This report was not a blog post, not an off-the-cuff hot take, but a “report” commissioned by two chancellors of universities, written by a committee of ten scholars, their names listed with full titles on the title page (names and titles that reappear, each on its own line, in the preface). Why all the fanfare? The lead author of the report, Paul Boghossian, wrote a book on the subject of the report. It was hardly a mystery what the committee was going to find with him designated as chair (he was also charged with selecting the committee members). Why not have him simply produce another essay? Why not a series of blog posts from the committee members? The format of a report produced by a committee chosen by leaders of academic institutions claims the highest degree of gravitas. We as readers are supposed to take these claims with the utmost seriousness.

Consider further the seriousness of the charges levied. Just short of academic dishonesty, lack of rigor is the most devastating and fundamental attack that can be made on the reputation of a scholar. The report asks us to take what it says seriously, and by virtue of the gravity of the charges, the accused deserve that the readers’ evaluation of those charges be conducted with the utmost seriousness as well.

So I did. And in the very first instance of actual presentation of evidence, I found the report’s argumentation fundamentally unserious. That is to say, the report’s argument can only hold validity, and only potentially, if one does not take it seriously; only if, when it refers to “such remarks,” one does not insist that the argument apply to the actual text cited; only if one acts as if the qualifiers “explicitly” and “exclusively” should be ignored; only if the phrase “taken literally” is not taken literally.

How did the most highly trained scholars come to attach their names to an intellectual product so fundamentally unsound? The answer to that question requires serious thought and elaboration that I will not fully delve into in this response. I will say only that I believe the answer has to do with the accelerating expansion of the information space and the corresponding social isolation of interpretive communities from one another, leading to experiences of shock when these communities do experience one another in the publication and reading of missives such as this report. Boghossian doesn’t read Gupta, certainly not seriously. And vice versa, I imagine. Their lives and livelihoods, their comfort sitting around a table at a workplace, are most likely little affected by and independent of their evaluations of one another’s work. There is simply too much information to consume—too many books to read—to spare time for work not closely and operationally connected to one’s own.

Which brings me to the answer to the question in the title of this essay. Having spent the time and energy that I did to read and evaluate argument and evidence up to this point, and having seen how empty the argument was when taken seriously, I can read no further. Which is to say, not only do I choose to read no further, but I feel called to read no further, obliged to read no further.

Many would say that scholarly rigor would require that I read the whole report before criticizing it. I respectfully disagree, because if one is to take scholarship seriously, one should also take seriously the scholarship that one is not reading when one is taking time to read the scholarship that one is reading. So before I read another word from the report’s authors, Paul Boghossian, Chair, Silver Professor of Philosophy, New York University;Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law, New York University;Kit Fine, University Professor, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, New York University;Joseph Henrich, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University;Katherine E. Fleming, Professor of History, New York University, and President and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust;Jason Merchant, Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago; Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities; Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University; Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University; Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Hawaii; Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University, I feel obliged to read the work of Jessie Stoolman, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.   

Stoolman, then a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, likely prepared the ten pages of footnotes and works cited in the published version of Akhil Gupta’s address, discussed above, and is credited as co-author of same. For an address that only takes up twelve pages of actual prose, with a significant amount of that space—lines at a time—consisting of in-text citation, ten pages of references is remarkable. To be clear, volume of citation does not indicate validity of argumentation. Nevertheless, it does display a degree of rigor and diligence that the authors of the report failed to show in the twelve pages it took them to arrive at a proposed connection between argument and evidence. As this was the first time I have encountered any of these authors, and having found such glaring faults in the reasoning of the report, and having seen evidence of due diligence in the work of Stoolman, and given the finitude of time and energy that one may devote to the consumption of information, and all else being equal, surely Stoolman deserves my attention before I would read any more of the report or the work of any of its authors.

And perhaps before reading Stoolman, I should read the work of Gupta. In contrast to the first twelve pages of the report, Gupta’s address taught me something about the world (specifically, the history of anthropology) that I did not know before, and this from someone who, according to the report, repudiates the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge. Gupta might agree that I should read him before Stoolman. But Gupta might instead suggest that if I wish to properly explore and evaluate his proposal, I should first read certain other authors, then read him, then read certain others, and so forth. You can see where this is going.

When Ninian Smart established the first department of religious studies in the United Kingdom in 1967, he had read every book published on South Asian religion in English. Some thirty years later, Oxford University Press—a single press—produced 48 titles in that area in a single year. It has become impossible to “read everything.” If it were possible to read everything in one’s field, if one did not have to redefine fields into smaller and smaller subdivisions in order to claim mastery of a defined intellectual territory, one might be able to argue that, for the sake of fulfilling the duties of academic citizenship, one should read a report such as this one in its entirety. But that is not the world we live in. There are too many books to read and too many great ones. There is no scholarly consensus on how to reduce the amount of information one consumes so as to most fruitfully participate in meaningful exchanges of information that contribute to the general enrichment of collective life through education and research.

Surely the choice of format and title, “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” constitutes an effort to build some consensus about how to make such reduction, perhaps by arguing that one not read or take seriously the work of scholars, particularly in the humanities, that do not share the authors’ presumptions of what knowledge is and how it ought to be produced. The report models that imperative through its failure to read and take seriously the work that it cites as lacking in rigor. But such a reduction only exacerbates the problem it seeks to solve.

The character and consequences of the accelerating expansion of the information space defy many if not all traditional strategies of reduction, and certainly defy any singular masterful perspective that could act as a lever on the whole. In such an environment, scholars are often left to their own devices—to their own self-selecting informational worlds—to determine how they will navigate the sea of information in which we swim. My own strategy is generally conservative. I look to read work that strikes me as brilliant or that helps me to approach brilliance in my own work. I rely on the suggestions of people whose work, to my eyes, contains such a spark. If any readers of this essay, having made it this far, judge it to contain such a spark, and if they ask for suggestions on how to find more of them, I have many recommendations. But with all the diamonds that are out there, I cannot recommend this report which has shown itself to be, for lack of a better word, shit.

Kerry Mitchell, Ph.D., received his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Religious Studies, and currently serves as Director of the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies Living-Learning Center at Indiana University, Bloomington.