{"id":4513,"date":"2026-06-17T10:14:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T10:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4513"},"modified":"2026-06-17T10:15:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T10:15:32","slug":"the-vanderbilt-report-a-serious-threat-against-academic-freedom-in-the-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2026\/06\/17\/the-vanderbilt-report-a-serious-threat-against-academic-freedom-in-the-humanities\/","title":{"rendered":"THE VANDERBILT REPORT: A SERIOUS THREAT AGAINST ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE HUMANITIES"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The \u201cReport<\/a> on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,\u201d also known informally as \u2018The Vanderbilt Report\u2019 was published online by said university on June 5. It has created quite a stir, which is not surprising considering it is addressed \u201cto university chancellors and presidents\u201d all over the USA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The report, devised by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University, and commissioned to Paul Boghossian, corresponds to the concern that \u201chumanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.\u201d A red flag to begin with\u2026 It is signed by Boghossian himself (philosophy), Kwame Anthony Appiah (philosophy), Kit Fine (philosophy and mathematics), Joseph Henrich (anthropology and human evolutionary biology), Katherine E. Fleming (history), Jason Merchant (linguistics), Gary Saul Morson (Slavic languages and literatures), Gideon Rosen (philosophy), Ashley Rubin (sociology) and Sean Wilentz (history). Eight men, two women, all white except for a Black person; nine professors from top private universities, only one from a public institution. The report purports to cover the areas of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and music studies (though no specialist represents this specific area). Cultural Studies is not mentioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          This report could be one among many others, but what makes it particularly scary, even from the distance separating Spain from the United States, are two sentences. The authors grant that their conclusions \u201care not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study of these matters\u201d and so, they \u201curge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report<\/em>\u201d (my italics), thus broadcasting that the report is intended to have actual effects on the disciplining of Humanities scholars. Later, they speak to concerned university administrators, advising them to take a \u201cfirst step\u201d: \u201can intensive study of the units in question conducted by reliably broad-minded disciplinary experts (in-house and external) and by experts in adjacent disciplines who take the problems seriously and can be relied on to take a measured view. In our view, nothing in this report warrants any intervention more intrusive than such first steps<\/em>\u201d (original italics). In other words, the report authorizes the beginning of a witch hunt against scholars who don\u2019t meet the standards set by its authors, implemented by the group of \u201cdisciplinary experts,\u201d an adjective that alludes to \u2018discipline\u2019 as in \u2018field of study\u2019 but also to \u2018discipline\u2019 as in \u2018control and punish.\u2019 Academic freedom in the Humanities is thus threatened. If you don\u2019t see it, you simply can\u2019t read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The authors of the report focus particularly on publication, not on teaching, though, of course, both are linked. They complain that publications in the Humanities are often the product of bad or even pseudo-scholarship, noting that ideas still in development are taken as fully tested evidence, and that political agendas overwhelm the search for knowledge (a buzz word in the report). They dispute the commonly held idea in the Humanities that pure objectivity does not exist, insisting that it does and should be a target in research. Truth and reason are also defended as mainstays of scholarship, a point that can hardly be disputed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The only point I agree with in the whole report is that academic prose is tainted by an \u201cextensive abstract jargon, often borrowed from philosophy and sometimes even from the sciences, the result of which is prose that has the superficial form of scholarship but which in fact verges on a kind of nonsense.\u201d Yet, the clear prose of the report is proof enough that nonsense is not always the fruit of convoluted academic writing. The authors protest in another key passage that \u201cthe scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose,\u201d as if knowledge about the world could be obtained with no obstacles but should never be applied in pragmatic ways. Knowledge is thus characterized as an ivory-tower possession withdrawn from the rest of society for fear it could be degraded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          What is to blame for this sorry state of scholarship in the Humanities? According to the report, the legacy of (French) postmodernism, with its call to consider relativism and how this helped the usual suspects, women and the minorities, to abandon \u201cdisinterested enquiry\u201d for the pragmatics of identity politics. In its conclusions, the report maintains that disinterested inquiry is \u201caimed at knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and for the sake of further goods that require genuine knowledge and understanding, rather than ideologically informed opinion, for their promotion,\u201d and should be the main goal of the university. Very conveniently, the authors neglect to mention that thanks to postmodern relativism, people other than white, cis, heterosexual, privileged men learned to see the conservative politics behind the \u2018disinterested enquiry\u2019 so sorely missed from the good old times of the university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          You may check here<\/a> the negative reactions of the scholars misrepresented and misquoted in the report, which happens to be a piece of very bad, tendentious scholarship barely concealing its ominous intentions. I\u2019ll cite, besides, the many complaints voiced on social networks like @BlueSky (where most progressive US scholars meet now), Substack and the academic media, Dwight A. McBride\u2019s article<\/a> \u201cThe Question Haunting That Humanities Report.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 McBride is executive director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity, Gerald Early Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies, and professor of English and women\u2019s, gender and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. As he writes, \u201c<\/em>Underlying much of the report is a nostalgic vision of the academy as a realm of apolitical objectivity\u2014a place where scholars once pursued knowledge free from ideological commitments and where disciplinary standards were insulated from social and political concerns. But that imagined academy was also an academy from which women and people of color were largely excluded. Even after formal barriers fell, their perspectives, experiences and intellectual contributions remained marginalized across much of the humanities and social sciences.\u201d McBride argues that the emergence of the fields associated with the study of race, gender, class, etc (or identity politics), were not \u201ca departure from scholarly inquiry\u201d but a \u201cresponse to long-standing absences within it.\u201d I couldn\u2019t agree more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          McBride notes that the report does not attack \u201cthe expansion of scholarly attention to women, racial minorities and other historically marginalized groups, but rather the methods used to study them.\u201d Yet he also sees, as we all must see, that by questioning our methodology (I\u2019m a woman doing Gender Studies, remember?) our field of research is threatened with radical exclusion on the grounds that we produce bad scholarship and no knowledge. Sooner or later, university administrators will establish learned \u2018disciplinary\u2019 committees with the purpose of dictating proper methodologies of research in the Humanities, and these will exclude critical thinking while pretending to work in favour of truth, reason, and knowledge. This is very dangerous. The report aims at destroying key avenues of accruing knowledge established since the 1960s and is akin to the ongoing parallel attack against Civil Rights and human rights that the right-wing politicians are unleashing all over the world. The report is, in short, pure anti-wokeism under the disguise of philosophical pure reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          At one point, the authors attempt to cover their tracks by coyly noting that although \u201cthe politicized undermining of scholarly standards we describe is largely associated with the academic left,\u201d the \u201cremedy\u201d cannot be \u201cto promote politicized scholarship from the right, let alone to stigmatize and punish serious scholarship from the left. That would be to take a bad situation and make it worse.\u201d This statement supposes that there is a neutral position from which the \u2018bad\u2019 scholarship of the less \u2018serious\u2019 scholars of the left could and should be \u2018disciplined\u2019 into producing \u2018proper\u2019 research devoid of any ideological content, a view which should be laughable if it weren\u2019t so dammed scary. The report, by the way, does not examine any single sample of right-wing scholarship to criticize its rhetoric and methodology, and this blatant silence speaks volumes about the intentions of the commissioners and the authors. This is a tool, I insist, to discipline left-wing Humanities scholars who do not meet criteria implemented from right-wing positions, with the authors presenting themselves as neutral gatekeepers of disinterested enquiry, which is in itself a highly politicized concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Allow me to return to the matter of the low quality of current academic prose, for this is now an important obstacle in the transmission of the critical<\/em> knowledge needed to stop the onslaught of the right. I have already noted that somebody should write a doctoral dissertation about how the heady mixture of Marxism and French philosophical intellectualism, to which we might add Lacanian psychoanalysis, resulted in a language for the initiate that is impenetrable to most persons, including those with university degrees. I believe that a very serious mistake was made when the ugly prose of the key postmodern thinkers was taken as the standard against which we need to measure our publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          At a time of urgent socio-political resistance to the demolition of civil and human rights, we can\u2019t be using a rhetoric only a few understand and praise. We need clear, rotund language that can appeal to as many people as possible within and outside the university. The battle outside is raging, and it\u2019s being won by the manipulative rhetoric of the right on social media, on the basis of a direct language that we in the left might hate but that is very effective. Mired in its twisted academic prose, many left thinkers have lost the ability to appeal to large segments of the population, which is in many ways sadly ironic. We are the new ivory tower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Let\u2019s take advantage of the criticism in \u2018The Vanderbilt Report\u2019 to build a new language for our scholarship and a new methodology than eschews the crutches provided by dense theoretical frameworks to offer instead radical new thinking. Let\u2019s appeal to others by being appealing, and let\u2019s write articles and books that can be read with pleasure even by those who, in principle, disagree with us. Let\u2019s be honestly didactic, in short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Yours, much afraid and very angry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cReport on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,\u201d also known informally as \u2018The Vanderbilt Report\u2019 was published online by said university on June 5. It has created quite a stir, which is not surprising considering it is addressed \u201cto university chancellors and presidents\u201d all over the USA.           […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[869,18,737,27,1052],"tags":[1239,1494],"class_list":["post-4513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-general","category-politics","category-research","category-university","tag-academia","tag-vanderbilt-report"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4513"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4515,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4513\/revisions\/4515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}