wemptronics
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"Reform academia!" is back for another round, baby. Back in June it was kicked off again with a report titled "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences"PDF.
Before I start, I recently read a complaint that there's not enough explanatory meat to accusatory potatoes. I only have time to bring readers up to speed on the latest, but I can try to summarize the landscape in three relatively uncontroversial bullet points. Feel free to skip.
- Conservatives have left academia. Poof. Gone. The extent of their disappearance depends on the discipline and how their presence is measured. Scholars, research institutes, and at least one advocacy organization have used numerous methodologies to measure this over the years and decades. They all point the same direction. Conservatives have absconded or been eradicated from most of the social sciences and humanities. A conservative identifying professorate still exists as a solid minority in STEM and a few other disciplines.
- Critics of this trend, worry worts, and doomsayers tend to accept that political affiliation is a proxy, however imperfect, for what types of ideas one can expect to circulate around and exit the knowledge production machine. They fear edging ever closer towards total political homogeneity, at least with regards to one side of the left-right dichotomy, has negative effects on scholarship, the profession, and the institutions that make it all possible. These critics pull variations from one of two reasons-to-worry buckets, (1) the nature of a monoculture or something like it threatens to corrupt the truth seeking efforts behind the purpose of scholarship, as rigor is replaced is with conformity without exposure to competing ideas, and (2) scholars in a democracy face the potential threat of the public turning against them if they are seen as illegitimate, and they may do something like elect politicians that promise to pour kerosene on the ivory tower, set it alight, and bash any knowledge right out of the heads of those who attempt to flee.
- Critics of the criticism often assert this is a natural (let the chips fall where they may) or necessary (doing anything about it would impinge on academic freedom or how else do we fight fascism?) arrangement. They say conservatives do not want to do what they do because of a disinterest, can not do what they do usually because of of their conservatives values, or they accept conservatives could do what they do and want to do it but this itself would be a corrupting force.
Feel free to correct or enrich my 3 simple statements. If you'd like a more thorough overview of the lore behind the "Reform academia!" discourse I found this 2021 discussion contains many still relevant observations that border on identical to the ones in my post today.
My report will not focus on the content of Vanderbilt report too much. You can read it or the Yale report that preceded it earlier this year. Nonetheless, it's worth pasting the Vanderbilt report's preface:
As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.
The complaints have been various in nature. Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.
Like the Yale report, and quite unlike angry rants from Bret Weinstein, this time the criticism comes not from any single dissident professor that discredits themselves with a pivot into punditry, nor is this a treatise posted by the Young Republicans of Oklahoma State stamped with Charlie Kirk's seal. This is serious. This is an interdisciplinary call out from the report's 10 authors: 4 philosophers, 2 historians, 2 linguists, an evolutionary biologist, and even a sole associate professor of sociology. They hail from Harvard, NYU, Princeton, and UofC. If credentials can move the "Reform Academia!" genre of discourse into action, here they lay.
The authors are careful, too. Effort is made in the report to distinguish the work from Trump, MAGA, and external efforts at reform like Civic Centerism. They do not condemn higher education, these people are invested in its success. They want to improve it. The authors don't judge entire fields* too harshly, they share a few examples of suspect scholarship and soften the edges. Almost 20% of the content is dedicated to the problem of relativism in the humanities, which I suspect provides an out -- something to blame -- in exchange for the support of more fence sitters. John Sailer thinks it avoids the problem, however the authors do write what has been written before by the Sailers of the world with credibility he will never obtain. There is no path available to navigate around the elephant. The authors state, in part, the "[political] skew in the professoriat may play an indirect role in undermining public support for universities, and also in discouraging full participation in academia on the part of students who find themselves culturally and politically alienated from their professors."
* With the exception of one.
Here's something else. The report is "addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences", which means it is decidedly not addressed to faculty. Scholars in the critics of criticism camp have responded anyway, and my read is that it is the same circle the wagons tactics as prior "Reform Academia!" cycles, only this time scholars online work a little harder to make sure the enemy is as visible as he needs to be.
The report isn't a massive data analysis and it doesn't claim to be, but it references "internal reports" each author used to contribute without publishing them. The authors answered why in a later interview:
The decision was made to allow the authors of those internal reports to decide whether or not to make them public. They were the basis of our deliberation. I will make mine, which is about literary criticism, public at some point, and I think others will. But on the whole, I think it was right to do it the way we have, because we need people to think about the main conclusions and the main arguments, which are in this document.
Personally, I'm of the belief that this is fine. The larger the evidence base, the easier it is to nitpick. Any method can be attacked and if the target audience is genuinely institutional heads why bother? I'd like to see these internal reports published, and I suspect if they are released they will make it seem as if the report's edges were softened too much.
Over a month later, and this discourse continues on the chatterbox sites. A big part of that is because of the asterisk above. The Vanderbilt report puts a few scholars on blast, quotes their work, and it grants the problem can be pretty bad in sociology and criminology. Really it only singles out one discipline, Anthropology. Writing in the section on the problems of relativism, take footnote 23:
For an exemplary expression of this odd combination of views, see Fernando Villanea writing in American Anthropologist:
"The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. 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, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests" (Villanea 2023, 184; italics in original; boldface added).
Taken at face value, this is incoherent. Taken more charitably, it is the still bizarre claim that while there are no objective truths about the subtle descriptive matters with which anthropology is concerned, there are objective truths about values and morals — about who is adversely affected by a given position, and about what anthropologists should take as their core values.
Feathers were ruffled. So much so the president of the American Anthropological Association decided to do an interview with The Chronicle that you can read here. If you're only going to read one link here, that's probably the one. I don't want to oversell, because ultimately this was a political move-- consent to an interview to defend the discipline. Her not answering every question perfectly or some deflection is to be expected in these situations. Fellas, Dr. Crouse, a tenured professor at Princeton acting as the face of her entire discipline, failed to meet the moment in a big way. Now half of the internet has reason to believe her discipline is a joke. Can't say I disagree. I still think reform is unlikely.
finished Blood Meridian finally. Terrible book
You are not allowed to say this you... you... Whatever you are, I sentence you to be thrown into a pit. At the bottom, looking upwards to the sky, it will be your own tempest stirring. It will be your body thrashing against red clay walls. It will be your voice that lashes out against the inhumanity and indignity of your sentence as your voice booms in fury, hoping to reach the sky with your intentional heresies. Your mortal vessel may fail before this spirit is extinguished, but with the torture of time pressing on your voice will become detached from its defiance. You will find invectives no longer reach the heavens. Instead they swirl around your hole like a pride of Comanche riders set on scalping your soul.
Lashing out upwards no more the sky will become foreign to you. No longer appearing as an escape hatch or an object of desire, the passing clouds and lazy buzzards will only be seen as through a dull window to a queer place. A dream ready to be forgotten, a land you can never return to. Turned inward, the words will flow only as a meagre tool of weeping utterances. Your incoherent ramblings will no longer escape beyond the bounds of this Promethean existence, landing only as a feeble dribble that falls from chapped lips to bare feet, and you will be forced to look downward to find the pit is now your home. The pit is all you need. The pit is where you belong. You will converse with the dirt that surrounds you. You will say things like "Violence is the eternal dance," and as your only loyal friend the pit will eagerly listen to this newfound wisdom. You will speak to the walls and you will bury your hands into the dirt. You will whisper sweet nothings of despair directly into the ear of Gaia hoping to touch her cruel heart. Eventually, after your madness is cured, she will speak back and say, "Delete this. Delete this right now."
They don't see it that way, of course. They are going down with a ship with a few compartments flooding, and they are only in this position because those specific crews failed to maintain the hull there. Maybe there's still time to close them off. My thing is, if you want to sacrifice those poor souls for the good of the ship you have to give the order, and someone has to do it. This report is nearer to that order than anything put out 5 years ago, but I agree it reads like those on watch are still loftily debating ideas amongst themselves while the ship heels over.
There is something to be said that about the fact they commissioned a report not meant to persuade academics and still spent significant time soothing the usual academic insecurities in apprehension of their predictable responses. If the Academic Dark Web has accepted that lectures about the importance of internal reform to avoid external pressure is proven to be a fruitless task, and now it is time to switch from persuasion to diplomatic letters to the chancelleries, why not go full bore? They are, supposedly, convinced about failures which have been ignored for a long time. People like Jonathan Haidt have gone on the record that he no longer believes internal reform is a realistic possibility.
An idea between "just give up your life and quit, it's what you deserve" and more of the same tired dance is, if the situation is truly dire a crisis past a point of no return, to beg. Beg chancellors and presidents to do something. Create a journal titled Treasons Weekly and publish nothing but taunting insults aimed at the White House until they do so. That wouldn't even require quitting and these are mostly tenured faculty, anyway. I suppose it's unfortunate most of the professional organizations are captured entities, because that'd be a good way to coordinate.
I agree that it's likely we're going to continue on watching a slow suicide rather than any mass demonstration of self-immolation with all the status, money, and pride thrown out for something greater. It's a lot to lose when the study of society and study of humanity can instead just be built again from the ground up in the future, and after the robots take over the role of policy only as a nerdy hobby.
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