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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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
It is worth reading mathematics professor Peter Woit’s “The Situation at Columbia” series for an inside view of how elite faculty view the situation they are in. A particularly revealing quote:
Ok but academics can’t actually do anything about that(Trump is ruling by decree, even if it’s greatly exaggerated). They are, in fact, making the problem worse, by pushing democrats to nominate people who believe their theories.
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This statement might be even worse than the current state of academia.
They shook hands with the devil and outlawed the academic pursuit of things that didn't line up with their personal politics and preferences. Observations, methodology, objectivity and facts be damned. They reaped the benefits in all aspects of life. Taking great emotional fulfillment and joy, pride and status from the whole thing. Reveling in it for decades. But the devils grown hooves and wings and they don't know how to deal with him anymore.
They deserve no sympathy because they are pretending to speak against this ridiculous state of affairs whilst trying to hold on to all their ill gotten goods without acknowledging it's all tied up with the devil. As soon as they leave they hold no leverage and they know it. That's why the sordid evidence of their activities is proudly on display. Professor of X from the prestigious Y University. That's their argument. 'Look at all this that the devil gave me'.
You would think a university professor had some knowhow, prowess or power by dint of their personal excellence regardless of their title, but no. They can't even leverage the fundamentals of objective academic rigor to half the students that graduate from these institutions in the first place since their conception of academic rigor depended on the exact opposite. Those are your students. This is your product. This is your ideology in action. You are the professors. You did this.
The only dignified thing for these people is to resign. Or be placed in a Jubilee style debate chamber where they have to debate 20 ethnocentric black people that have been rigorously educated by America's top professors to believe that their identity is the best way to understand the world. I'd wager these professors last 10 minutes before their own ethnocentric bias starts leaking out.
Maybe we can nip this new 'Intellectual Dark Web' wave in the bud and finally get a definitive answer of whether the victimary narrative of our time should be slavery or the holocaust. Which is what I'd wager this all comes down to anyway. So many wonderful choices.
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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It makes sense that of all the top institutions, it's Vanderbilt that'd release this. They've made a deliberate effort over the past years to stand out from other august institutions of higher learning in this regard, and have actually been trying to encourage free speech and outreach between political affiliations. I also recall them taking a pretty hard stance against some pro-Palestinian students during the protests, helped in part by said (rather unsympathetic) students shoving a security guard and complaining they weren’t being allowed doordash deliveries during their sit-in/occupation of an (under refurbishment) admin building.
I can't say how well their Dialogue Vanderbilt initiative and free speech commitment are going in practice, but I know it's ruffled some of the usual feathers, which is probably a good sign.
Pretty proud of my alma mater here for at least trying instead of doubling down on "we don't hate conservatives, but if we did they'd deserve it".
Might interest you and others that 3 weeks there was the Freakonomics Radio 679. "Why Does Vanderbilt Keep Winning?" where Diermeier sat down for a long interview about this.
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How old is Crouse? Some of these answers are so incoherent that they sound more like the products of dementia than ideological brain rot. She's not deflecting or gish galloping--she appears to genuinely not understand the questions she's being asked and responds to several with long-winded, completely unrelated anecdotes.
I know politics is the mind-killer, but Jesus. This doesn't sound to me like just "haha academic brain rot." This is entering "maybe grandma shouldn't be driving herself places" territory.
Edit: also, it's pretty rich how she attacks the report for using AI when she can't even summon the effort to describe her own paper in her nonsequitor response. She clearly just copy and pasted (or I guess read, if this was a live interview) Princton's PR blurb about the article, third person references to herself intact.
Got her PhD in 1999, so my guess would be early-50s to mid-50s.
Some of the weirdness is an aspect of this form of academia having aimed for obscurist focuses, but I think her position is still pretty vapid underneath that.
I got nothing then. Burn down the academy; salt the ashes.
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Academia will not reform itself and will not stop trying to overthrow the government, constitution and society that produces and funds it. They will at some point be brought to heel, either by the government or the people. Some president sooner or later will realize all the money and land being sucked up by organizations of useless traitors and fake "scientists", and just take it. That is, if the people don't turn up with pitchforks first.
Whenever and however that happens, exactly nothing of value will be lost. Academia is underwater morally, politically and scientifically. It is fundamentally compromised and incapable of even describing the problem. The above report is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
No, whatever is done about academia will cause lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research.
Given the rate at which things are going, it seems likely that whatever will be done about academia won't actually be done until 2040 at the earliest. The demand for medical and engineering research seems likely to be high enough such that, with the advent of AI and the self-discrediting of academia over the next 14 years, that lots of medical and engineering research will happen in non-academic institutions, allowing for collateral damage to be minimized as the research can still continue at those places. Having that research be done through proprietary or intellectual-property-protected means is probably the biggest downside.
There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.
Darkly funny? That is just obvious reality, and always has been.
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This is ultimately the lesson that needs to be properly taught as to why capitalism outperforms the alternatives. The profit motive, or greed if you prefer to phrase it in a negative way, is not in and of itself good for society, but it is reliable. Which is why it is a good platform to build upon, to align incentives with goals that are prosocial. Fear is the closest alternative, which is why regimes that reject capitalism will tend to reach for fear as their source of motivation for prosocial actions. It's not perfect though, and its inferior to greed; when abused the stick loses its sting. But "truth" is so far off that it's hilarious to think anyone serious would think it could do the job, especially when profit, power and influence are on the table for the taking if you were just bend your principles. And you won't even notice you are bending them, your brain will make it very easy to believe that "truth" aligned with whatever your employer wants to hear, whatever your political tribe wants to hear, whatever your peers want to hear.
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Scams like Theranos aside, you generally need something to sell to make a profit, and you need something that at least sort of kind of works to get people to actually buy it most of the time. Or as Ghostbusters put it:
"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
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Damn, what do you think might happen? Will quality of research get so bad that half of all studies won't replicate? Will doctors start pumping kids full of hormones, and chopping off body parts for no reason? Will AI engineers allocate significant resources to making it more stupid?
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It isn't my sense of things that academia contributes much to medical and engineering research. Maybe Johns Hopkins and MIT do, but not "academia". 99% of universities produce exactly nothing of any scientific, cultural or literary worth.
I don't know about medical, but for engineering, the competitiveness level for professorships is so high that there is quite a lot of talent distributed pretty widely. If one looks around for, I don't know, top quantum researchers, you might be surprised how widely you'll find them. There's still a lot of garbage being published, sure, but that's more a product of the incentive structure demanding more more more in terms of publications. Moreover, while academia hasn't been entirely immune to the general homogenization effects that happened to much of the rest of society, there are still somewhat distinctive flavors that can be seen. For example, (being a bit reductive here), one could say that there's something of a "Berkeley way" of approaching learning problems that is more distinctive on the west coast. Obviously, some of their successes filter over to other folks, but they have sort of a different mindset (purely technically speaking, not about their weird political bubble).
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Do you think such damage could plausibly be within three orders of magnitude of the damage the current system has recently produced?
If "lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research" is a problem worth considering, maybe it behooves the system to fix the problem in a more discerning and deft manner, rather than simply allowing it to fester to the point that outside intervention becomes inevitable? And if the system is constitutionally incapable of fixing the problem... what is there to do but simply accept the costs?
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Doubtful - things that provide real value will be continued elsewhere, in corporate R&D labs if needed. The real losers would be expensive but legitimate research with no practical application, like particle physics or astronomy.
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Relativism is not the fundamental issue; the issue is that social science academics have abandoned relativism. Instead of trying to understand how people and communities work and think on their own terms, they see themselves as either on a civilizing mission; on a mission to create propaganda about the savages in red states for the audience of coastal elites; or on a mission to gather grist for an ideology.
For instance, that president of the AAA:
The lumpenprole is a quaint creature we must study without judgement for after all doesn't he have his own form of nobility?
The prole is a pitiable creature that must nevertheless be crushed and remade in our glorious bourgeois image, because he's a danger to himself and others.
The petit-bourgeois is the very devil's spawn, a pure manifestation of the most evil traits that must be exterminated and never again allowed to exist.
It's the high-low vs middle mechanism. This distinction is down to the perception that some of these classes could challenge the ruling class' hegemony while the other could never do so. A Harvard professor is sure to have hatred of what chuds may still be in his midst, contempt for backwards yokels and love for bottom-feeders. Because it is in his interest.
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Heavily agree as well.
Libertarians have tried for a while to capture academia in the same way that the socialists did in the early part of the 20th century. The libertarians started their attempt in the 70s and expanded up into the 2000s.
They have been maybe the only thing saving conservatives from a complete academic wipeout. I think Jonathan Haidt polled an audience at a psych conference and got 4x as many libertarians as conservatives.
They've managed to get economics perceived as a conservative discipline, it is mostly liberal. Its just that it is 30-40% libertarian/conservative, rather than 0-5% libertarian/conservative.
The "UnKoch my campus" movement is hilariously mixed up about the ideological bent of campuses.
"To the privileged, equality feels like oppression."
To be fair to the UnKoch my campus movement, if you are right then Cato-style libertarians* (or classical liberals, but I think that is a distinction without a difference) are 10x over-represented in certain academic disciplines compared to the general population. Some of that is because we are smarter than leftists or conservatives, but some of it is because Koch-funded groups spent a lot of money making it that way.
* As opposed to LvMI-style libertarians, who I don't count as libertarian because the only liberty they actually care about is the right of racists to be racist, and who have mostly gone full MAGA-authoritarian now anyway.
I'm one of those that has mostly gone MAGA-authoritarian, and I don't find resting everything on the principle of liberty particularly sane anymore, but somewhere in there there's an interesting conversation about why does freedom of association mean only caring about the right of racists to be racist, but backing explicitly racial civil rights policies somehow doesn't, or why is being against immigration "authoritarian" but it doesn't apply to everything from the Covid response to the Federal Reserve.
Shame that this is just a low-effort jab at your outgroup, and the interesting conversation will most likely not happen.
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I can't speak for anthropology specifically, but what Rouse says in that interview does remind me a great deal of what I hear from left-wing professors in my field of religion and theology. Take this, for instance:
I think she is completely sincere in saying this. From the outside we can see that this is a "fifty Stalins" situation, of course. She is criticising a particular movement, but she is criticising it from the perspective that there needs to be more of it, not less.
Nonetheless, internally, I think she's serious, and simply sees the borders of legitimate scholarship as ending somewhere short of the possibility of conservative or traditional anthropology.
It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world. It's supposed to form its own unique culture, and to be free of the currents of the wider culture around it. Should we have built such a system? Well, probably not. But we did, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised when said tower has formed its own bizarre little culture that's significantly out-of-step with the wider population.
What is ‘traditional anthropology’? Margaret Meade’s work was mostly based on lies. Early anthropologists said all kinds of crazy shit. The field has been ideologically driven fan fiction, sloppy research techniques, and actual lies since the beginning.
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The steelman argument for the ivory tower is to isolate them from market pressures and short-term fads, so they can focus on higher pursuits, not to create a cult that thinks itself impervious to criticism from anyone that hasn't been initiated into it, but feels entitled to your money at the same time.
How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?
I don't mean this as a gotcha question. I think the current situation is clearly bad, and I'd like to find a better option that still achieves everything we want universities to achieve.
I think like this. Increasingly massive consensus that produces an increasingly universal political pressure, making clear that the only choices are reform or closure. If you are emotionally comitted to the principle that the humanities must remain open as academic departments, then you cannot apply the leverage that will produce reform.
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This is sufficiently abstracted away as to make it pretty much impossible to make meaningful answers to these questions, but one core that's missing is academia being tied to things that are real. Whether you call that "empiricism" or "truth" or "fact" or "science" or whatever, this connection is fundamental to the value that academia offers society/humanity/civilization/etc., and the current state of academia is the result of academics and their leaders for at least the past few decades taking a machete to that connection with abandon.
It's hard to say what controls could have been put in place and how they could have been enforced to make sure the ivory tower's fads don't turn against being tied to reality. But I believe that any way of saving the ivory tower from its many self-inflicted wounds (or hypothetical ways in which they wouldn't have inflicted them on themselves in the past) would need heavy emphasis on enforcing this, since without that connection, the ivory tower provides almost no value to society beyond being a daycare for young adults.
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No worries, I didn't take it as such, but the question is a lot deeper than it looks like at first glance.
Even though I don't think the 2 particular issues would come up here, as it's hard to make money off anthropology, so I don't see how market pressures or short term fads could enter here, generally I don't think there's a systemic solution. We've spent the last 80 years trying to replace human virtue with systems that will force good behavior on bad people, and all we ever got for it was Goodhart's Law up the wazzoo. Whatever rule you come up with will be gamed the same way peer review and the h-index were.
The other solution of a strongman entering and cleaning up house also has issues, in that some people think the ivory tower is also supposed to be isolated from political pressures. There are many reasons why this is at best unsustainable, at at worst impossible, ranging from "you may be not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you" to the frequent theme of FCFromSSC posts: "the only reason something felt apolitical in the past is that our values were largely converged in the past, and we'll never get it back now that we have values divergence".
Now, just because there doesn't seem to be a fix that doesn't risk other issues, doesn't detract from the fact that something must be done. If our attempt to insulate academia from outside influence ended up in the setting up little cults, we have to get rid of the cults, even if that results in other issues.
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The sealing is insufficient, as it is leaking tax dollars, electricity, telecommunications access, food, water and air, among other notable deficiencies which crave rectification.
Nationalize the endowments and the pensions. Nuke and pave.
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If someone less prominent gave an identical interview, I'd be tempted to call them a weak man. I wouldn't worry about overselling it.
If you're on the fence about reading it, then I'll quote the start of her first answer, as a teaser:
Genuinely the job of philosophers to critique the fundamental basis of things, but okay.
There’s a difference between informed and uninformed criticism, though.
Exhibit A: this thread.
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I'm pretty sure a philosopher who critiqued, say, Maxwell's equations would be rightly laughed out of the room by anyone with a clue.
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Her "I would never do that" is also pretty rich, since she wrote an entire book of invective accusing doctors and and the medical system of racism (Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease).
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