A new report on the state of humanities scholarship made waves in higher ed circles when it was released Friday, and has since drawn criticism from professors across the humanities.
Commissioned by Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis chancellor Andrew Martin, the “State of Scholarship” report finds fault with disciplines including anthropology, philosophy and history—not for their content but for the quality of their scholarship, which the report’s authors argue is too often driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth and knowledge.
In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Diermeier said that “the focus of the report is to provide an assessment, not to offer solutions to address the challenges.”
Critiques of the report are broad and varied. National Association of Scholars research director David Randall said the authors rehash decades-old arguments against relativism and don’t go far enough in their recommendations to reform the humanities. “If they’re actually serious about academic reform, they will act rather than sponsor more faculty gab-fests,” he wrote of Diermeier and Martin. Pennsylvania State University communications professor Bradford Vivian wrote on Bluesky that “a better title for the Vanderbilt report on the humanities would be [William F. Buckley Jr.’s] ‘God and Man at Yale Part II.’” Others, including the American Anthropological Association, slammed the report for exemplifying the ivory tower and criticized the authors for failing to truly engage with the professors in the fields they target. Several of the scholars cited in the report said it represents the poor scholarship it claims to seek to correct.
