The Politicization of Scholarship

A new Vanderbilt–WashU report warns that parts of the humanities and social sciences have abandoned the pursuit of truth.

Courtesy Dom Fou/Unsplash

In April, Yale University released a report exploring why Americans have lost trust in higher education. Widely discussed at the time, the report was notable not so much for what it said as for who said it. Many of its conclusions—for instance, that the “high tuition-high aid” model invites distrust—were fairly obvious. The Yale report mattered because it was a Yale report, marking a rare moment of self-reflection by an elite university.

Now, another report offers further self-reflection, but with far greater substance. Last week, Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis released a jointly commissioned report on the “state of scholarship” in the humanities and social sciences. The report takes on a question closely related to higher education’s crisis of trust: has scholarship itself been politicized or otherwise degraded?

While hedging considerably, the report’s authors land on a clear thesis: a noteworthy contingent of contemporary scholars subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to political and social goals. These goals, the authors note, “are generally though not exclusively associated with the progressive left,” and involve “turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice, or the elimination of pernicious social hierarchies,” as manifested in causes such as anti-racism, feminism, and decolonization.

Despite identifying this progressive trend, the report’s committee is not recognizably conservative. It is composed of mainstream academics. That includes several philosophers from New York University—widely considered one of the world’s best philosophy departments—along with notables like NYU history professor Katherine Fleming, who is also president of the $8-billion J. Paul Getty Trust.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the committee’s concern is not with “viewpoint diversity,” or lack thereof. “The problem,” the report notes, “is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public.” Instead, the core issue is epistemological—having to do, that is, with how certain scholars understand the nature of truth and evidentiary standards.

The report argues that politicized scholarship operates in three main ways. Some scholars simply dismiss unwanted views. Others reject understanding as the primary purpose of scholarship. Still others reject the idea of objective, value-independent truth altogether—in other words, they embrace relativism.

From start to finish, the report blames relativism. In the preface, the committee quickly reject the “complaint” about politicized research in its “bald form”—but nevertheless argues that the “sharpest version” of the critique traces the degradation of scholarship to the “pervasive repudiation of the very idea of scholarly objectivity in favor of the view that since claims to knowledge are inevitably ideological, it is fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds.” In contrast with the tepid Yale report, the committee is scathing in its assessment of relativism: “To the extent that views of this sort have taken hold, they represent a catastrophe for the humanities and the social sciences understood as academic disciplines.”

This is the strength of the report, but also its weakness. It relies on an assumption one might expect from analytic philosophers: that bad scholarship is driven by faulty philosophical views. In the report’s telling, these misguided scholars start with relativism as a foundational premise, which then allows them to dismiss any standard on ideological grounds. These scholars, the report elaborates, are almost inevitably inconsistent, since they believe that their claims about social justice are indeed true; ultimately, they support their views by “giving reasons and marshalling evidence.”

But it’s possible that the report gets the story backwards, with relativism playing a supporting role, rather than the central one. A scholar-activist’s foundational commitment might be to their political goals, in which case relativism becomes just another way to dismiss opposing views without making real arguments. If you can’t defeat your interlocutor’s reasoning, simply dismiss it as cisheteropatriarchal reasoning. From this angle, it is entirely predictable that scholar-activists apply their relativism inconsistently, as it wasn’t a core commitment to begin with.

It’s worth noting, moreover, that the prevalence of scholar-activism is likewise entirely predictable phenomenon, given the explicit commitment of many universities—and their funders. As I’ve reported before, universities have for many years carried out large-scale hiring programs that, in practice, select for scholars who openly embrace social justice advocacy. Every year, the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program hires dozens of fellows who receive special consideration for tenure-track jobs, prioritizing scholars whose research contributes to “diversity” and “equal opportunity.” While funding for the humanities and social sciences is scarce, aspiring scholar-activists can look to deep-pocketed supporters like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for financial backing throughout their careers.

Of course, to sort out the exact causes and consequences of scholar-activism, data on actual scholarship would be helpful. Unfortunately, although the committee “compiled detailed internal reports” on scholarship in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, these reports were not released.

Perhaps it’s best to leave the exact diagnosis open to debate. The key point remains: some scholars have seriously lost their way—and that may warrant breaking norms. Early on, the report notes that disciplines are rightly afforded a great deal of deference. No president, provost, or dean can assess quality in every field. But, as the report notes, “even this foundational principle has its limits.” Time will tell whether Vanderbilt and WashU take their own report seriously.