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Daniel M. Rothschild
Free the Inquiry
Among the strengths of America’s higher education sector has been an uncanny ability to change and remake itself in the face of social, economic, political, artistic and intellectual changes—not just superficially and marginally, but significantly and even teleologically.
While the aspirational aesthetics of our universities—a pastiche of the ancient British and European institutions by way of pre-revolutionary New England and the mid-Atlantic—remain largely unchanged over the past century, their activities, outputs, constituencies, and funding sources have changed dramatically. This adaptive ability redounds to the benefit of universities and to the so-called higher education “system” as a whole, ensuring resilience and a (sometimes begrudging) willingness to change in response to internal and external challenges.
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Last week, a committee of scholars convened by Vanderbilt University released a report on the state of humanities and social sciences scholarship across the United States.
As one of the signers of the report, I am all too familiar with the fact that activist scholars sometimes play fast and loose with logic and evidence to justify conclusions dictated in advance by a political program. Those who dissent can risk serious damage to their careers. Journals have been forced to apologize for research they have published — not because of poor logic or manufactured evidence, but because the results were politically unacceptable.
You’ve heard the critique.
The humanities and social sciences have been corrupted by political aims, and their disciplines have tossed out rigorous research standards in favor of advancing social-justice causes favored by the political left. This has made for an impoverished scholarly landscape, filled with laughable claims and obscure jargon.
Over the past several months, a group of high-profile scholars convened privately to study whether this criticism holds water across several fields within the humanities and social sciences. “The first thing to say,” they concluded in a report published Friday, “is that we reject the complaint in this bald form.”
A new report on the state of humanities scholarship made waves in higher ed circles when it was released Friday, and has since drawn criticism from professors across the humanities.
Commissioned by Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis chancellor Andrew Martin, the “State of Scholarship” report finds fault with disciplines including anthropology, philosophy and history—not for their content but for the quality of their scholarship, which the report’s authors argue is too often driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Critiques of the report are broad and varied.
