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.
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.
So, affirmative action is the solution to political imbalance in the academe? Sounds like the kind of social engineering that would make an authoritarian regime blush.
I read this. Mostly what it establishes is that if you're determined to amass enough embarrassing quotations and stories to fill up several pages, you'll succeed. (To be sure, the Tuvel one is pretty bad, but the Derrida quotation was too predictable.) As they say at the beginning, they don't really have the numbers to say how widespread these problems are. But the devil's in the details and I agree that we have to see what's in the discipline-specific reports.
The methodological hedge is real, though right? The report itself says its conclusions are "provisional" and "not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study." The committee acknowledges it's working from a qualitative survey of warning signs, not a prevalence claim.
On the Derrida vs. Tuvel point: agreed, those carry very different epistemic weight. The Tuvel case is empirically grievous in a specific institutional way — a peer-reviewed journal publicly apologizing for a defensible philosophy paper because of activist pressure. That's a documentable institutional failure with named participants and a specific reform implication. The Derrida quotations are just... Derrida being Derrida, which has been available to quote since the 1970s. Including them does suggest the committee had the conclusion teed up before the survey started, which is part of why the methodological hedge matters. A more careful version of the report would have leaned harder on the Tuvel-type cases and less on the predictable quotation-mining.
That said, the structural question survives the methodological criticism, right? The report doesn't claim X% of humanities scholarship is captured. Its actual claim is more modest: every field surveyed exhibits warning signs of a deterioration in scholarly standards, severity varies by field, and prevalence numbers aren't yet available. Whether you find that diagnosis credible depends on whether the warning signs plus your own observation of the fields add up to a pattern or a curated set of embarrassments. The field-specific reports, when they drop, are what would settle it for serious readers.
At the risk of oversimplifying, what I have observed as a political scientist (an admitted empirical constructivist at that!) and erstwhile director of a digital humanities institute, is almost worse than what you and the report allege. The most strident among the falsifiability-allergic set actually believe the central purpose of scholarship is to advance a political agenda, and efforts that fail to strive towards this noble goal are merely captured by right-wing impulses or worse- neoliberalism. This position is fundamentally irreconcilable with public attitudes towards the academe, however (as if they even care). Their abdication of the pretense of objectivity is worn like a shield against criticism. In other words, in the eyes of some of these disciplines (that are ironically undisciplined) either you are undoing the patriarchal colonialist project or you are a shill for them.
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.
So, affirmative action is the solution to political imbalance in the academe? Sounds like the kind of social engineering that would make an authoritarian regime blush.
I read this. Mostly what it establishes is that if you're determined to amass enough embarrassing quotations and stories to fill up several pages, you'll succeed. (To be sure, the Tuvel one is pretty bad, but the Derrida quotation was too predictable.) As they say at the beginning, they don't really have the numbers to say how widespread these problems are. But the devil's in the details and I agree that we have to see what's in the discipline-specific reports.
The methodological hedge is real, though right? The report itself says its conclusions are "provisional" and "not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study." The committee acknowledges it's working from a qualitative survey of warning signs, not a prevalence claim.
On the Derrida vs. Tuvel point: agreed, those carry very different epistemic weight. The Tuvel case is empirically grievous in a specific institutional way — a peer-reviewed journal publicly apologizing for a defensible philosophy paper because of activist pressure. That's a documentable institutional failure with named participants and a specific reform implication. The Derrida quotations are just... Derrida being Derrida, which has been available to quote since the 1970s. Including them does suggest the committee had the conclusion teed up before the survey started, which is part of why the methodological hedge matters. A more careful version of the report would have leaned harder on the Tuvel-type cases and less on the predictable quotation-mining.
That said, the structural question survives the methodological criticism, right? The report doesn't claim X% of humanities scholarship is captured. Its actual claim is more modest: every field surveyed exhibits warning signs of a deterioration in scholarly standards, severity varies by field, and prevalence numbers aren't yet available. Whether you find that diagnosis credible depends on whether the warning signs plus your own observation of the fields add up to a pattern or a curated set of embarrassments. The field-specific reports, when they drop, are what would settle it for serious readers.
Thanks for the careful reading.
At the risk of oversimplifying, what I have observed as a political scientist (an admitted empirical constructivist at that!) and erstwhile director of a digital humanities institute, is almost worse than what you and the report allege. The most strident among the falsifiability-allergic set actually believe the central purpose of scholarship is to advance a political agenda, and efforts that fail to strive towards this noble goal are merely captured by right-wing impulses or worse- neoliberalism. This position is fundamentally irreconcilable with public attitudes towards the academe, however (as if they even care). Their abdication of the pretense of objectivity is worn like a shield against criticism. In other words, in the eyes of some of these disciplines (that are ironically undisciplined) either you are undoing the patriarchal colonialist project or you are a shill for them.