In early April, a committee of ten professors submitted a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” to the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, who commissioned it last fall. In the words of its authors, the report was “prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble.”

Of course, there are many kinds of trouble facing the humanities. The committee purports to examine, in particular, “the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.” Its principal conclusion is that there are

grounds for concern, not just in individual disciplines, but systematically. . . . the problems concern the quality of the scholarship and the norms and standards governing its production—norms that often serve to suppress scholarship that challenges a rigidly enforced orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues, and which substitute moral and political standards for properly academic standards in the evaluation of scholarship.

Further, the report offers advice to administrators who may share these concerns about how to take action, recommending that “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.” This guarded prescription receives much less emphasis, however, than the claim that some departments and programs are “at risk” of “forfeiting their claims to deference,” the basic principle of academic life that the faculty and departments—not administrators or governing boards—evaluate the work and make decisions about hiring and promotion in their fields.

These are serious charges with foreseeably serious consequences, so it is not surprising that the report has elicited a spate of commentary. Some have contested the committee’s rejection of “relativism,” which the report alleges is responsible for the degradation of scholarly norms. Others have contested the report’s general description of the state of the humanities. Mostly lost in the discussion, however, have been questionable features of the process by which the report was prepared, the framing it uses to address administrators, and the kind of diagnosis that it offers of the state of scholarship. I will focus on these three aspects here. In my view the process was flawed in many ways, restricted to like-minded insiders; the issues are framed by categories from the culture wars that have no place in serious analysis; and the diagnoses in terms of “relativism” and the politicization of the humanities miss their mark.

First, a preliminary remark. No one could seriously deny the existence of fraudulent or shoddy work in the humanities, just as no one could seriously deny the existence of junk science or the existence of academic work that is simply pointless or trivial. This is the world we live in—the same world in which brilliant work is also produced—and none of the following criticisms depend on denying any of this.

Start with the process by which the report was produced. The chair and convener of the committee, Paul Boghossian, is a philosopher, as are three others on a committee of ten. Aside from two historians, no other discipline is represented by more than one person. Three of the four philosophers (Boghossian, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Kit Fine) even hail from the very same department, at New York University; all four received their training in analytic philosophy, and none represents the history of philosophy or any of the so-called “continental” traditions. The report thus hardly speaks for philosophy as such, much less for the “humanities and humanistic social sciences” as such.

Further, the philosophical issue of “relativism”—long a target of Boghossian, who published a book in much the same vein, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, in 2006—is central to the report’s diagnosis of the current state of the humanities. This is a questionable diagnosis, about which more later, but it serves as a thin justification for why one field in the humanities—philosophy—should be seen as in a special position to pronounce on the intellectual standards of the other fields in the humanities and the social sciences.

When constituting a committee that seeks to understand problems in the current state of the humanities and social sciences, one might think it advisable to start with a broader array of opinion and scholarly background. One might also think it a good idea to include some scholars who are informed by or at least somewhat sympathetic to some of the contemporary trends being criticized. Neither was thought necessary here. Clearly the chancellors who commissioned the report made it more or less clear what kind of report they were looking for, and the people constituting the committee were happy to oblige.

The intellectual trends deplored by the report span several decades and involve the work of generations of writers in many different fields, often disagreeing sharply with each other. Though the committee states that it has undertaken a “review” of these fields, the text of the report displays no interest or familiarity with the content of these bodies of work or with the diversity of the questions they explore. Instead the committee is content to quote from programmatic statements made by some of the more reckless scholars representing some of these trends. One might agree that some of these statements are absurd or incoherent. At the same time, practitioners of analytic philosophy will be aware that the charge of absurdity or incoherence is not an uncommon or even an unjust criticism of many claims made within their own discipline. But they do not take this fact as a condemnation of the discipline as such, or as a call for potentially enhanced scrutiny of their own departments by administrators or colleagues in other departments. They have delivered a judgment on the quality of work in other disciplines and the norms that supposedly animate it without engaging with the work itself in any deep or systematic way, and without including any representative practitioners in the discussion.

Turning to the framing of the report, the fact that the primary audience for their recommendations is high-level administrators and not faculty has been emphasized by more than one committee member. In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Appiah says, “Our focus is on providing leaders with tools for deciding how to address this, and we think the right way is to begin with a conversation.” In a Substack post, sociologist Ashley Rubin writes, “it’s a very high-level report written for high-level administrators rather than for our colleagues.” This may explain the absence of a more representative group of faculty voices on the committee itself, but it does not justify it.

Committee members hasten to add that they are not endorsing any particular remedies but are only interested in starting “a conversation.” But the conversation both within the committee, and between them and the chancellors, has already been taking place without the participation of faculty whose work is being judged and found wanting. This exclusion matters. For while the report is careful to deny that it is calling for immediate administrative control or elimination of this or that program and careful to state that its conclusions are “provisional,” it emphasizes that there are limits to the “policy of deference, according to which the academic affairs of individual units (including decisions about what to teach and how to allocate resources for research) are left to the faculty within those units.” Given the report’s diagnosis of the state of the humanities, the committee is telling administrators that it may be time to exert greater control and abridge the norm of faculty and departmental autonomy. The chancellors cannot have been disappointed with this result.

Of course, the framing of the issues in the report is familiar from the culture wars of the past several decades in the United States. According to the usual charge, the humanities and some social sciences have been “politicized” by the “progressive left,” infected by forms of obscurantism associated with something called “postmodernism.” This amalgam has been a staple of recent right-wing attacks on higher education, and the humanities in particular, and it is never questioned by the authors of the report. We are all supposed to have some idea about what “postmodernism” is and to understand it to be part of “progressive left” politics. Thus the authors write, “The goals vary from area to area, but in a contemporary context they are generally though not exclusively associated with the progressive left.” In fact, there is ample room to question whether there is anything particularly or intrinsically “left” or “progressive” in the work criticized in the report, even if some of its practitioners describe themselves that way. Those practitioners can be confused about their own political stances (if any), just as well as about anything else.

The report does not note, for instance, that several figures associated with postmodernism, such as Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Paul de Man, were hardly “left” or “progressive” in their thinking. Conversely, many genuinely left and progressive thinkers, in the humanities and elsewhere, have no patience with relativism. Meanwhile, right-wing threats to academic freedom get a brief mention in the report, but all that is considered “beyond our remit.” The point is that the amalgam of postmodern, relativistic progressivism enjoys a more robust existence in the culture wars than it does as a description of actual social or intellectual reality. Within the culture wars this amalgam serves to rope together various often conflicting trends so as to identify a common enemy. By themselves these different elements form no particular unity outside of that project. It is as though the authors of the report were so allergic to the very idea of the social framing of knowledge that they failed to notice, and critically scrutinize, the source of their own intuitions, impressions, and categories of analysis. (The cobbled-together nature of the “problem” they identify is clear from their inclusion, in footnotes, of a discussion of the treatment meted out to Rebecca Tuvel, Alex Byrne, and others in the context of trans politics. If we agree in criticizing their treatment, we should be clear that it had nothing to do with either relativism or “postmodernism” and is only very debatably a phenomenon of left-progressive thinking. But trans politics belongs with the common enemy from the culture wars and so it gets thrown in there too.)

There are two parts to the report’s attempted explanation of how some work in the humanities has been corrupted, and they both fail as diagnoses. The first is the claim that some form of epistemological relativism has become rampant in the humanities and has compromised scholarly work. The other is that much work in the humanities is grounded in political aims rather than the advancement of knowledge and understanding.

Regarding relativism, it is well understood in philosophy and elsewhere that this comes in many different varieties, some of them perfectly respectable or even just plainly true. Philosophers such as Jason Stanley and Brian Leiter have responded to the report by pointing out rigorous defenses of one or another form of relativism (including epistemological) in analytic philosophy. Boghossian has replied that they didn’t mean any of that but had a much narrower definition of relativism in mind. The authors are entitled to draw such distinctions, of course, but they had better be confident that university administrators will be at least as subtle in distinguishing good from bad relativism as philosophers themselves.

More importantly, it betrays a simplistic and superficial understanding of the development of intellectual trends in history to suggest that the degeneration of scholarly standards or even the rise of obscurantism in certain domains could possibly be explained by the failure to understand some basic philosophical points about epistemological relativism. Even the most excellent philosophical critique of forms of relativism will not substitute for a social, historical, institutional, intellectual account of the evolution of the humanities over the last fifty years. Pointing to “relativism” (and an avowedly very narrow definition of it) is no better than explaining contemporary social disorder by saying that kids have too much freedom nowadays. The philosopher has a hammer which enables him to criticize different forms of relativism, so the problem he sees has the shape of a relativistic nail.

What, exactly, is the relation supposed to be between espousing some form of relativism and the existence of bad, confused, even fraudulent work in the humanities and social sciences? How could failing to understand the problems with some narrow interpretation of relativism possibly be to blame? If the traditional “deference” to the departments is to be departed from, should deans look for evidence of “relativistic thinking” in some departments and consider putting them under receivership? Clearly the authors of the report are not suggesting anything so absurd, but in that case, what relation is there really supposed to be between the complex social-intellectual phenomenon pointed to and the philosophical diagnosis concerning relativism? The fallacy of begging the question is also prevalent in academic life. Should administrators be empowered to root that out as well?

There is a similar failure of diagnosis in the accusation of 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.”

This is reckless and irresponsible. Given the current climate of the culture wars, chancellors and presidents—in consultation with their donors, of course—will have their own ideas about how to cash this blank check they have been handed, and thus the values of scholarly self-governance will be further eroded. It won’t matter at that point that the authors can claim that they “urge[d] caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act,” that they were not calling for the receivership of any particular department or program, that by “relativism” they meant something very narrow, and that of course there is much valuable, politically inspired work in the humanities. The damage will be done. It is, in fact, already underway at colleges and universities around the country. This poorly argued case that it may be time to restrain the principles of academic freedom and faculty autonomy is not helping the situation.

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