A new report on the dangers of politicizing humanities in academia

Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, was previously the Provost of the University of Chicago. He was deeply invested in the Chicago Principles, which include free speech, institutional neutrality, and scholarship and teaching (adjudicated purely by merit) as the two overarching goals of a University.  I hoped he would succeed Bob Zimmer as President of our University, but after Zimmer fell ill with a brain tumor, Diermeier got the offer from Vanderbilt, and since Zimmer did not resign (sadly, he died later), Diermeier left.

At Vanderbilt he’s putting into place the Chicago Principles, and enforcing them more rigorously than we do here. When students held a sit-in in the administration offices, for example, he had them expelled and arrested. And he’s been busy writing and speaking about the goals of academia and how the principles first forged here promote those goals (see here and here, for example). When someone recently referred to Vanderbilt as “The University of Chicago of the South”, someone else responded, “No, Chicago is now the Vanderbilt University of the north.”

Along with Andrew Martin, the chancellor of St. Louis’s Washington University, Deirmeier commissioned a group of ten scholars to examine the issue of how scholarship in the humanities has become politicized, something that the two thought was endangering the value of the humanities and, indeed, of universities themselves. Headed by Paul Boghassian, a Professor of Philosophy at NYU (not to be confused with Peter B.), the group of ten produced a long report (29 pages when I printed out the pdf, which can be found here). The upshot is that yes, the humanities are becoming politicized and endanger scholarship in many ways (see below).  Although the ten authors do consider empirically-laden humanities areas like economics, history, and anthropology, they deliberately leave out science, though there is no end of discussion of how science, too, is becoming politicized to its detriment (see, for example, “The ideological subversion of biology,” by Luana Maroja and me, or “The peril of politicizing science” by Anna Krylov).

If you click on the first screenshot below you’ll go to the report (more information is apparently forthcoming), and the second screenshot gives a summary of the report by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you’ll find more digestible.  Note that while the Chronicle piece refers to “The Left” as ruining humanities, the Boghassian et al. report explicitly assert that the erosion of the humanities is not due to the Left per se, but to the fact that most professors are on the Left, and that the Left has adopted some principles (e.g., relativism and postmodernism) that has played a role in eroding scholarship.  But they add that this is a danger of any ideology that infects academia, whether it be from the Left, the Right, or something else.

The Chronicle summary; click to read.  Brian Leiter at our Law School has also written his comments on the report, which are generally favorable, but see below.

What I’m going to do is simply group a few quotes from the big report (indented) under bold headings that I made myself.  The point of the Boghassian et al. report is not to indict anybody, or conclude what needs to be done, but simply to raise the problem as a serious issue, intending to promote discussion about what needs to be done. (And yes, they do think that something needs to be done, particularly in anthropology, which comes in for a drubbing.)

The problem:

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi.2 However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.

Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized (§3 below). The sharpest version of the complaint traces this distortion in scholarly standards to a 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 (§4 below). The result of this distortion, the complaint continues, is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes as scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is in fact a mix of tendentious, biased research, feeble academic agitprop and jargon-laden nonsense. To the extent that this is so, the complaint concludes, these scholarly disciplines can no longer play the valuable role they have traditionally played in the advancement of human knowledge and so risk forfeiting their claims to deference from concerned administrators and support from the wider public. . .

The importance of the humanities (There’s a nice discussion of this in the report, bearing on why they are worth saving through unpolluted scholarship.)

But who is going to help you decide what satisfactions are really worth pursuing? Which outcomes are worth aiming for? What is worth wanting? Who will help you decide whether John Stuart Mill was right to say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill 1985)? Indeed, who will let you know this question is even worth asking? And where will you learn that one reason for studying the nomothetic sciences is that understanding how the universe works and how we fit into it would be worthwhile in itself, even if we never put the knowledge to profitable use?

The answer, we think, is clear. These are the questions you learn to answer, however provisionally, with the help of literature and the arts, critically appreciated, through the study of philosophy and history and sociology and anthropology. Some humanistic disciplines take matters of value and meaning as a central focus; others aim to describe and explain the human world without pronouncing judgment; but all play an indispensable role in refining our conception of what is possible for human beings and which social arrangements we wish to aim for. If these disciplines are to help us answer these important questions, it is crucial that they use the right methods in search of the right answers. Their task is not to manipulate us into following a party line but to provide each free person with the tools for making their own informed choices.

The disciplines we are discussing prepare us for a free life by developing critical thinking and analytical skills, enhancing cultural understanding and empathy in a world of increasing global interconnections, teaching ethical reasoning and civic responsibility, and providing intellectual resources for creativity and innovation. Because their study is intrinsically worthwhile, they contribute directly to the intellectual and imaginative flourishing of those who study them. By defending and investing in the humanistic disciplines, we affirm our commitment to a society that values critical inquiry, empathy and the full spectrum of human potential, all informed by a clear-eyed view of who we are and where we’ve come from.

This goes along with my own view, though the report focuses on “good scholarship” in the humanities as “good scholarship that produces truth.” I’ve discussed before to what extent “truth”—in the sense of what exists in the universe and can be verified empirically—actually exists in the humanities. I concluded that in the arts, like music, literature, and so on, that no, there is no “truth” to be found; there are only different interpretations.  I suppose you can say that some interpretations are better than others, but such claims must be supported by facts. Other areas of humanities, including economics, history, and anthropology, do make assertions about what exists, and in those cases there is a provisional “truth” that can be adjuciated empirically.  These considerations are completely missing from the report, which suffers from a dearth of real examples (to be fair, the authors don’t want to demonize anyone).

The focus on good scholarship

Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs. The critique we take seriously is that this scholarly enterprise has been damaged in recent decades, not just by a general erosion of standards, but also by a reconceptualization of scholarship as a form of political activity, answerable in part to extra-academic standards.

The three ways that scholarship can be politicized. This is the heart of the discussion.

We have identified three main forms of politicized distortion in recent humanistic scholarship.

a. On the first track, scholarly claims are constrained by the requirement that they cohere with an antecedently accepted political goal, although this is not how the constraint is explicitly described. Rather, unwelcome results or debates are dismissed as having been rendered moot by “settled science.”

b. On the second track, the scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose. On this track, the existence of discourse-independent facts is not denied. Rather, it is claimed that, for epistemological reasons, our scholarly representations can only be partially constrained by such facts, the rest of the slack being taken up by the practical purposes that we allegedly have in devising these accounts.

c. On the third track, the idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected. On this view, good scholarship cannot be distorted by political values because it is, at bottom, irredeemably constituted by such values.

The first of these routes is not philosophically problematic, in the sense that it makes no questionable claims about the nature of truth, evidence and so forth. However, this style of scholarship is deeply problematic, especially when questions are closed by demonizing opponents to suppress dissent. It is often bad scholarship, since it treats questions as closed that have not in fact been resolved by appropriate scholarly standards; but it is not bad philosophy.

One example of erosion: sex differences

The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it.12 Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise.

This is something that Luana and I discuss in our paper. There is in a fact a moiety of scholars who don’t think that there are real differences between the sexes, or if there are such differences, they are due entirely to socialization and bigotry.  What is taboo is the idea that such differences might be “innate,” that is, the result of evolution shaping which genes are turned on in which sex, and perhaps those evolutionary differences might be explained by natural selection. This is the subject of Steve Stewart-Williams’s new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shapes the Minds of Men and Women, a good book that came out just two days ago.

The article talks about the wellsprings that can lead to distorted scholarship, including postmodernism and especially its scion: relativism—the idea that there is no absolute truth or knowledge, but there many different and equally valid truths and “ways of knowing”.  Relativism can be used, says the report, to dismiss scholarship on the grounds that it’s simply one scholar’s view of truth, and there are other views. But the report also shows why relativism is self-refuting:

The problem with relativism

While the political appeal of such relativistic views is well-understood, so, too, are their theoretical problems. For it is in fact extremely hard to make sense of the idea that there can be
no such thing as a purely epistemic reason for believing something. The idea that there must be such reasons seems to lie at the root of any viable conception of knowledge and inquiry. We can see this in a variety of ways.

Consider first that the relativism is rarely applied consistently by the relativists themselves. Ifsomeone really believed that all knowledge claims depend on contingent background nonepistemic values, they would have to admit that while they believe that climate change is real,
given their progressive values, the MAGA folks might be entitled to believe that climate change is a hoax, given their conservative values. Similarly, for claims about how many sexes there are, or whether race is real, and so on.

No one takes this tolerant attitude towards such disagreements, least of all the scholars who officially espouse the relativistic views. But with what right do they dismiss these opposing claims, if it really is true that every claim to knowledge depends on a variable non-epistemic context? On a relativistic view of justification, the only way in which such an intolerance could be justified is if there were something privileging one set of background values over the others. But it would be odd to be an objectivist about the non-epistemic values that inform the social construction of knowledge (privileging some over others) while being an anti-objectivist about the natural facts studied by biology and physics.

Moreover, even if proponents of such relativistic views could find it in themselves to be tolerant of these substantive disagreements, they could still not be fully consistent relativists, for
a familiar reason: The relativist would have to admit at least one exception to the relativistic thesis about knowledge, and that would be the thesis of relativism itself.

In his own summary, Brian Leiter, while positive on the report, takes issue with what he sees as its somewhat dogmatic stand on relativism. Leiter says this:

There is quite a lot of analytic philosophy in this report, unsurprisingly given the authors: besides Boghossian, also Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, plus some linguists, sociologists, psychologists historians and other humanistic scholars. This explains some of the rather surprising claims in the report, such as that “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming” (the main citations are to Boghossian’s book and work by his NYU colleague Thomas Nagel). So much for Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and some ways of understanding Quine–not to mention Herder, F.C.S. Schiller, and many other serious humanists. (And what about Boghossian’s colleague Hartry Field?) The report would make itself less vulnerable to dismissal had it not taken that position.

Brian clearly knows a lot more than I about the reach and validity of relativism, but I don’t know what he’s saying here; and I will ask him.

h/t: Greg Mayer