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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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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.

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:

On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?

Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”

To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.

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.

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.

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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