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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.
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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