The Vanderbilt/WashU Humanities Report: Same Week, Similar Diagnosis
Boghossian, Appiah, and Wilentz just co-signed a chancellor-commissioned report overlapping with yesterday’s piece on why the humanities are missing the AI moment.
Earlier this week (well, yesterday, lol), I published a piece (which has been blowing up, cheers) arguing that the academic humanities are missing the AI moment for structural reasons: differential reality-correction across disciplines, a sophistication amplifier that makes credentialed reasoners better at defending installed beliefs rather than updating them, and a fifty-year meta-theoretical apparatus that gets deployed asymmetrically to deflect external critique.
The day after, Daniel Diermeier (Chancellor, Vanderbilt) and Andrew D. Martin (Chancellor, WashU) released a report (full PDF here) on “the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences,” authored by a ten-person committee chaired by Paul Boghossian and including Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Katherine E. Fleming, Joseph Henrich, Jason Merchant, Gary Saul Morson, Gideon Rosen, Ashley Rubin, and Sean Wilentz.
Some gravity here. Boghossian literally wrote Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, the canonical analytic-philosophy response to the constructivist turn that Part 2 of Reality Bats Last traced. Appiah is one of the most cited public-intellectual philosophers of the last thirty years. Henrich is the Harvard evolutionary anthropologist who wrote The WEIRDest People in the World, exactly the kind of broad civilizational-illumination scholar I named in the countercurrent section as the disappearing profile. Wilentz is a senior Princeton historian doing the same kind of public-facing synthesis. The fact that all ten of them put their names on a chancellor-commissioned report saying the humanities are pretty sick is itself news. (Yes, the chancellors are publicly identified with these issues. Yes, the committee was chosen. The names still carry weight.)
What the report finds: “every field we have studied” (philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, music studies) exhibits warning signs of “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 longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
The news-cycle reading is “Vanderbilt and WashU chancellors commission report attacking the humanities” and that really flattens what’s actually happening in this careful, political report. The report is front-loaded with caveats. It says the humanities are essential. It says they contain serious scholarship. It tells administrators to be cautious about taking action on its findings. The authors carefully distinguish themselves from those who think the main problem is ideological imbalance. This is a serious self-examination by serious scholars, channeled through chancellors who could have buried it and chose not to.
The report also lines up with parts of my piece from yesterday in ways worth pointing out, with the obvious caveat that the committee and I are both downstream of a shared late-2020s discourse on academic politicization, so, erm, calling it “convergent” doesn’t mean “independent.”
The report names three sources of “politicized distortion” in scholarship: research being constrained by an accepted political goal, disinterested inquiry being displaced by service to a pragmatic purpose, and the rejection of the idea that one can assess evidence “independently of our political commitments.” That third one maps almost verbatim onto the immunization layer I described in my piece yesterday. The first two land in a different register but in the same direction: the “permission it grants scholars to discard evidence they don’t find personally palatable” sits next to the empirical motivated-reasoning literature my piece engaged at the cognitive level, and the “substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria” sits next to what I called approval-optimization-without-reality-correction at the institutional level. Different vocabularies; overlapping concerns.
On structural-not-partisan framing, the report and the piece are doing related but distinct moves. My piece extended the diagnosis symmetrically to the dissident-right intellectual ecosystem (Yarvin, Rufo, Carlson) as exhibiting the same structural failure mode for the same reasons. The report doesn’t make that move. What it does instead is reject right-wing political intervention as a remedy: distancing itself sharply from the 1776 Commission, the Texas A&M Plato episode, and FIRE’s pivot to right-wing threats. “The remedy for this cannot be to promote politicized scholarship from the right.” External right-wing pressures on the academy are described in the report as potentially “damn near existential” — a phrase that reads, in context, as a hedge against the report being weaponized against the academy from the right.
The committee also explicitly says the political imbalance in academic humanities is “not by itself a problem for scholarship”; the problem is the substitution of political for scholarly criteria, regardless of direction. The Chronicle’s headline, “Has the Left Ruined the Humanities?”, flattens that in a way I really wouldn’t endorse. Both pieces of work are pushing against the same temptation, just from different angles: don’t let the diagnosis get pulled into a partisan attack on the academy. (I mean, it’s gonna, y’all.)
What the report adds that my piece doesn’t: a panel of recognizable scholars and chancellor-commissioned visibility (which will read differently to different audiences, fair enough), and specific case studies that ground the abstract diagnosis in concrete failures. The Hypatia/Tuvel firestorm. OUP’s near-suppression of Lawford-Smith and Byrne. The canceled biological-sex panel at the 2023 American Anthropological Association meetings. Mellon’s 2020 pivot to social-justice criteria. These are receipts, not generalities. The committee also submitted field-specific internal reports on philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, which haven’t been released publicly — only the synthesized general report has. When they do come out, the field-level granularity is the part I most want to read.
What my piece adds that the report doesn’t, in order of how distinctive each contribution is: first, the cross-spectrum structural argument. My piece named the dissident-right intellectual ecosystem (Yarvin, Rufo, Carlson) as exhibiting the same failure mode for the same structural reasons. The report doesn’t make that move at all. Given the political moment we’re in, that symmetric structural diagnosis matters.
Second, the mechanism story. The report describes the symptom (politicization, repudiation of rigor, postmodern license). My piece reaches for the empirical motivated-reasoning literature (Taber & Lodge, Kahan, Mercier & Sperber) and a differential-reality-correction framework to explain why the symptom appeared, persisted, and proved hard to dislodge.
Third, the AI moment as the topical occasion for the diagnosis.
The report also doesn’t mention AI, machine learning, or the civilizational hinge my piece is pegged to. Fair enough — the committee’s stated scope is “the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences,” not “scholarship’s response to AI as a civilizational moment.” Different scope; different question.
The two pieces of work cover overlapping territory from different starting points: theirs anchored in cases and field-level diagnosis, mine anchored in mechanism and the AI-moment test case. They sit alongside each other and answer different questions.
If you came to my piece because it described something you’ve been watching for years, this report is your sanity check. If you came to the report from the Chronicle and find yourself asking why this happened, well, this is the piece you read next.
So, just wanted to bring this to your attention today. I will keep working through the field-specific internal reports as they become available — those weren’t released with the general report, and the field-level granularity is what I most want to see next. For now: a strange week and a clarifying convergence.
Read the report PDF for yourself; it’s worth it.
The main piece is here: Why Are the Humanities Missing the AI Moment?. It sits alongside the Reality Bats Last series: Part 1, Part 2: The Fifty-Year War, Part 3: The Other Pillar, and Part 4: Letting Reality Bat Last.
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The Report is indeed well worth reading. It is pretty clear that Appiah in particular is, as friend says, “hopping mad” about what has happened to Philosophy as a discipline.
There are some wider issues here. If an industry funded by taxpayers—and even the Ivies receive lots of money from taxpayers—has alienated half the political mainstream, that is a deep, deep problem in itself in a democratic society. Treating attacks from “the right” as inherently illegitimate because right is … not helping.
Perhaps it is outside their ambit, but I do not think the authors fully realise the level of contempt, even rage, that is building against the academy. Australia is not exactly known for its dramatic politics (though they are currently getting more interesting), but the head of one of our larger liberal-conservative think tanks was struck, even disturbed, by getting a rush of new members who, quite spontaneously, were asking “how do we close the universities?” A distinct subset further asked “and shoot the academics”.
It is quite clear, for instance, that much of collapse in confidence in mainstream media is a direct result of journalism becoming dominated by elite university graduates whose perspectives and concerns are different, often wildly different, than the general citizenry. Folk such as Matt Taibbi and Batya Ungar-Sargon make this point—folk whose original politics were “working class left”.
But if I were to nominate one issue above others that is generating the rage and contempt, it is pushing that “care and compassion” was hormonally and surgically mutilating and sterilising minors. This is just blatantly evil and it comes straight out of the academy via Queer Theory, Gender Theory etc.
For the historically minded, it calls to mind all the academics who thought Lenin, Stalin, Mao etc were great. It also calls the mind all the utterly disastrous ideas that Western academics exported to non-Western societies. The difference is that now the disastrous ideas are being transmitted domestically.
I am well aware there is still a lot of great scholarship being produced. My Substack posts have references lists full of same. But I also look at the civilisational-level damage being done and think (1) those worthy scholars have done nothing to stop that damage and (2) what they produce is not worth the damage. Moreover, there are lots of folk who are less generous on this than myself.
US colleges all enjoy the unearned tax benefis of being non-partisan. Liars, every one—they are all Dem partisans (Ivy+, top 100 endowments).
US Congress 40-60% Dem or Rep, is non-partisan as an institution because of balanced partisan individuals. Congress should define a 30% quota requirement for D & R professors in order to be non-partisan, or else pay their full, fair share of taxes.
The scholarship & non-replicability issues are downstream of the discrimination against Republicans in earlier personnel choices. Going back to WW II, but especially since Roe v Wade in 1972. College hiring has long been refusing to hire Reps, so of course fewer Rep students go for PhDs.
Unpaid student loan debt is objective evidence that college is not worth it—proof in those millions of debtor cases. There are already high caps on loan amounts govt guarantees, such amounts should go down.
The Big names claim, implicitly, that their prior discrimination against hiring or promoting Republicans is not the cause of any problem, and thus no corrective action is needed, are wrong. But trying to do CYA.
The Demographic neutron bomb is coming for many colleges, and many, or most, Rep voters will be happy as more costly Dem woke indoctrination centers close.