The Best Argument for the “State of Scholarship” Report Is Its Critics

When the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis   commissioned a committee  chaired by the New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian to assess the condition of humanistic and social-scientific scholarship, they invited a particular sort of reply.   The  report  that resulted advances a contestable empirical claim: that across several fields, certain politically charged questions have been quietly treated as closed, dissent is recoded as incompetence rather than disagreement, and a good deal of scholarship now serves a moral program settled in advance. One can answer such a charge in the ordinary scholarly way—with evidence, counterexample, and argument. The report invites it, conceding that its conclusions are not yet supported by the kind of quantitative study its critics would demand and urging administrators to consult disciplinary experts before acting.  Instead, the Vanderbilt and Washington University chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have supplied something more useful than any defense the report’s authors could have drafted for themselves: a confession. Their  June 11 joint statement  does two things, and each one proves the case it means to refute.  First, it demands not rebuttal but erasure. The chapters call on their chancellors “to rescind the report” outright—to unpublish it, to make it disappear from the universities’ websites. This is a revealing reflex. A confident discipline meets an unflattering description of itself with a better description. A discipline that has lost confidence in its own standards reaches instead for the delete key. The report asked, in effect, whether some fields have lost the capacity to hear criticism as anything but an attack to be repelled. The first substantive response was a motion to suppress the question.  Second—and this is the part that should make even sympathetic readers wince—the statement defends the disinterested pursuit of knowledge by appealing to a political mission. Weakening faculty governance, the chapters warn, would undermine the university’s ability to address society’s deepest problems, “the inequalities of wealth and white supremacy” and the political consequences of climate change among them. Set aside whether those are worthy causes. The report’s charge was that scholarship in these fields has been bent toward a predetermined political agenda. Offered the chance to deny it, the AAUP instead named the agenda. A political creed produced as a defense against the accusation of harboring a political creed is not a rebuttal. It is an exhibit.  The inversions compound from there. The statement accuses the report of licensing a “heckler’s veto” because it suggests administrators might weigh dissenting and minority scholarly voices within a discipline—while the statement’s own central demand is that a document it dislikes be silenced. It credits the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, and the American Historical Association as the real defenders of free inquiry against political interference. But those are the professional societies of the very disciplines under review. The disciplines grade their own scholarship and, unsurprisingly, award themselves high marks. That closed loop—in which a field’s health is certified only by the field’s own guild – is not a counterargument to the report. It is the mechanism the report set out to describe.  I have  argued before  that the AAUP, statement by statement, keeps disclosing what it actually thinks academic freedom is for. The same reflex appears here. The surest sign that a profession has mistaken a political consensus for a discipline is its inability to treat an outside criticism as anything other than an enemy at the gates. A healthy field metabolizes critique; it absorbs the challenge, tests it, and is strengthened or corrected by it. A politicized field excommunicates the critic and reaffirms the creed. The distinction matters because the humanities and social sciences cannot be rescued by administrators, legislators, or donors. They can be rescued only by scholars who still believe their disciplines are answerable to evidence rather than to a cause—and who can say so out loud without being told they have breached the faith.  None of this settles the empirical question the report raised. Reasonable people can dispute its methods, and  several scholars it cites  say it misreads their work; that is precisely the argument worth having, and  some critics have had it seriously . But the AAUP chapters chose a different path. Asked to demonstrate that their fields remain open, self-correcting, and politically disinterested, they moved to delete the report, then justified the academy by reference to its political ends. They could not have validated the document more completely if they had been retained to do so.  The Vanderbilt and WashU chancellors wanted to know whether the disciplines can still police themselves by scholarly standards rather than political ones. Their faculty critics, given the floor, answered the question; just not the way they intended. The post The Best Argument for the “State of Scholarship” Report Is Its Critics appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .