On June 5, 2026, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article in a genre that has unfortunately become all too familiar in that venue titled “Has the Left Ruined the Humanities?” (Find out the surprising answer in Part II, “How the Left Ruined the Humanities.”) The subject of the article was the thirty-page white paper, “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” authored by ten scholars (eight of them men, which might explain the report’s alarmism about scholarship devoted to the study of sex, gender, and trans issues) who were convened by Vanderbilt University president Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis president Andrew D. Martin, both of whom have been aggressively promoting the argument that universities need to rein in their leftward leanings in order to propitiate their critics on the right. That report was issued on June 5th, and was swiftly met with disgust and denunciation in social media from the people who populate my Facebook feed (and if that isn’t a reliable measure of scholarly impact, what is)?
The most emphatic of those responses, so far, is that of John K. Wilson in Inside Higher Ed: “The scholarship underlying this report is terrible, the arguments are weak and the recommendations are destructive to academic freedom and shared governance.” I regret to report that Wilson is wrong on that last count, and the title of his essay, “Academic Authoritarianism in a New Attack on Humanities Scholars,” is accordingly misleading. The authors of the report (Paul Boghossian, Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Joseph Henrich, Katherine E. Fleming, Jason Merchant, Gary Saul Morson, Gideon Rosen, Ashley Rubin, and Sean Wilentz) are not fools, and they know enough to make the appropriate throat-clearing noises about academic freedom:
we must urge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report. In any well-functioning university, administrators are bound by what we take to be a stringent norm of deference according to which non-expert decisionmakers must defer to disciplinary experts in assessing scholarship. Academic disciplines exist for the purpose of producing and certifying this sort of expertise, and any well-run university relies on the expertise of its own faculty and the wider scholarly community whenever the assessment of scholarship is attempted: in the granting of degrees, in the appointment of faculty, in decisions about tenure and promotion, and so on.
So, you see, Boghossian et al. are not recommending that administrators ride roughshod over academic freedom and shared governance. They say as much! But you know how when someone says “I don’t want to say X, but,” the only important part of the sentence is the part that comes after the “but”? Yes, well. Here’s the next paragraph:
Our commission exists only because even this foundational principle has its limits. If and when the department of astronomy morphs into the department of astrology, it will at some point make sense for the administration to object. Well before it comes to that, it will make sense for the administration to say, “You are beginning to lose our trust.” These issues are familiar and relatively tractable when the problems are confined to individual academic units. Administrators regularly rely on disciplinary experts elsewhere, assembled as review committees, for guidance. When astronomy as a field morphs into astrology, on the other hand, administrators will face a largely unprecedented situation in which disciplinary expertise itself cannot be trusted. In such cases, the administration will need advice from minority voices within the discipline and from adjacent disciplines with better standards, and it will be a matter of substantive judgment where such reliable expertise is to be found.
Our report provides ground for thinking that some fields may be at risk of warranting this sort of scrutiny.
Dear reader, I ask that you take a moment and let this sink in. The devolution of a department of astronomy into a department of astrology would be a seismic event, the result of which would be a department of no legitimate intellectual content whatsoever. Boghossian et al. are promising you that their report will provide ground for concluding that some fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences “may be at risk” of becoming the equivalent of departments of astrology. You would think that such an incendiary charge would be followed with clear, convincing, and damning evidence. You would be wrong.
Instead, the report complains, as Boghossian has been doing for decades, that some people in the humanities and humanistic social sciences embrace the idea of “situated knowledge” or other forms of epistemic relativism with regard to human affairs. Apparently, this is a problem for Boghossian et al., so in the interest of intellectual pluralism and viewpoint diversity, advocacy of situated knowledge or other forms of epistemic relativism must be curtailed. The authors also offer us an idiosyncratic view of the relationship between philosophy and justice: “Even the philosophical study of justice should aim at the truth about justice, not directly at producing a world that is just; though the search for an understanding of justice in philosophy of course provides those who learn from it one of the tools for making a better world.” I’ve read that sentence seven times slowly and I still don’t understand it. Here’s the best I can do: The study of justice should aim at the truth about justice and not at producing a just world, which is apparently inappropriately political, though of course—and you have to love that “of course”—it can give people the tools to make a better world.
Oddly, the complaint about relativism is welded to a quite different complaint about people who claim that it is “settled science” that human genders are not binary but rather exist on a continuum. “Often,” the report declares, “that claim about what’s been settled by science is totally exaggerated.” The accompanying footnote explains: “One clear example of this phenomenon is the treatment of biological sex in many areas of the humanities and social sciences. Throughout these areas it is widely held that biological sex in humans is not a ‘binary’ but rather a continuum, divisions in which are ultimately arbitrary, and that settled science has established this so securely that any attempt to treat biological sex as an independent (binary) variable reveals a dubious political agenda on the part of the researcher” (emphasis in original).
At this point I should probably call anthropologist Agustin Fuentes to the white courtesy phone, since he is well known for making precisely this argument (and he is not alone. I cite him only for his 2025 book, appropriately titled Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary). All I can say, as a nonexpert in such matters, is that among the first things Donald Trump did upon retaking office was to sign an executive order decreeing that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” If scholars want to align themselves with this position, so be it; I strongly believe in intellectual pluralism. But it does not seem far-fetched—let alone evidence of a crisis akin to that of a department of astronomy devolving into a department of astrology—if other scholars see that position as being part of a dubious political agenda, since the dubious political agenda has in fact announced itself in so many words. Similarly, the authors complain in another footnote (and much of the most egregious mischief in this report happens in the footnotes, as I’ll show) that Oxford University Press has made a decision not to publish “gender critical” scholarship on the grounds that it is transphobic. Somehow this is taken as a violation of the ideal of scholarly objectivity, rather than, say, as one university press’s editorial decision about what kinds of work it wants to publish.
But then, the report goes consistently bonkers when it comes to trans issues. Let me explain by way of two of those mischievous footnotes. The first is simply garden-variety concern trolling and does not concern trans anything. The authors claim that “It is, of course, [again of course!] widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi.” Here’s how they support this in footnote 2: “American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities, Humanities Indicators, updated 2024.” But in fact the AAAS report says nothing about complaints about the content of syllabi, which means that the most damaging claim here has no support other than the “many people say” trope familiar in the discourse of concern trolling. (Besides, what complaints are we talking about? Homophobic conservative lawmakers in South Carolina objecting to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home?) But that’s small beer; the really bizarre footnote (which, for me, undermines a great deal of the report) is the long footnote 15, purportedly supporting the claim that a disciplinary orthodoxy “will produce and sustain an ideological monoculture in which research that might be deemed incompatible with the shared goal of social justice will not appear.” Buckle up, here we go:
In 2017 the leading journal in feminist philosophy, Hypatia, published an article by a then-untenured scholar arguing that the case for taking a person’s gender to be determined by her inner gender identity was equally a case for thinking that a person’s race can be determined by her inner racial identity and so for recognizing a genuine phenomenon of “transracialism” (Tuvel 2017). The article precipitated an angry firestorm on Twitter followed by an open letter with 800 signatories calling for an apology on the part of the editorial board, partly on the ground that the article “fails to seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions (women of color) in its discussion of ‘transracialism.’” In response, the editorial board, composed of leading figures in the field, offered a “profound apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused.” Among the handful of papers on the issue published in the past decade, all but one—published in a minor journal—takes the position supported in the open letter.
There is so much wrong with this. Let’s start with the fact that the open letter actually called for the retraction of Tuvel’s essay—and that the essay was not retracted. Tuvel went through a social media shitstorm, no question, but she earned tenure and is now chairing her department at Rhodes College.
But what’s really galling is the authors’ implicit claim that the editorial board’s apology has now become the unchallenged orthodoxy in feminist philosophy. How can I put this politely? This is horseshit, easily fact-checked. The editorial board of Hypatia did not issue an apology; some of the associate editors did, claiming to represent a majority of the board but disclosing no names of signatories. In response, Hypatia Editor-in-Chief Sally Scholz and the journal’s Board of Directors publicly disavowed the associate editors’ apology; Scholz wrote, “I firmly believe, and this belief will not waver, that it is utterly inappropriate for editors to repudiate an article they have accepted for publication (barring issues of plagiarism or falsification of data).” The Board issued a statement suspending the authority of the Associate Editorial Board, on the grounds that the associate editors “did not in any way speak for the journal, nor do they have authority to do so.” The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), to which the matter was referred, firmly backed up Scholz and the Board in a formal report. Condemnation of the open letter, and the conduct of the associate editors, was widespread in the humanities; Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, wrote in the Chronicle that the associate editors sought to “undermine the whole process of peer review and the principles of scholarly debate and engagement.”
Lastly, there’s the authors’ closing claim that “Among the handful of papers on the issue published in the past decade, all but one—published in a minor journal—takes the position supported in the open letter.” What kind of slipshod research produced this conclusion? I actually have a dog in this fight: I wrote one of those papers myself, and I critiqued the open letter—not because I think Tuvel’s essay is above criticism (had I been a referee, I would have asked, at minimum, for much more serious engagement with the history of racial “passing”) but because I don’t believe peer-reviewed scholarship should be retracted by means of social media campaigns. I think that would open the door to many kinds of mischief, and as you can tell from the preceding paragraph, I am far from alone in that belief. I made that argument in the pages of PMLA, the flagship journal of the Modern Language Association, not a “minor journal” by any standard. (For the record: “The Way We Review Now,” PMLA 133.1 (2018): 132-38.)
Boghossian et al. claim at the outset of their report that their work is preliminary, not an exhaustive, quantitative study of politicization. “As part of our work, we have begun to develop tools for approaching these questions.” Let me offer my professional opinion that those tools are not impressive. What they consist of here is basically a couple of hammers to pound away at beliefs in “situated knowledge” and other forms of epistemic relativism—and a smattering of deliberately misleading footnotes. And most important, nowhere in the report is there any evidence that anyone needs to conduct external reviews of disciplines in the humanities and humanistic social sciences as if those disciplines were carrying out intellectual fraud akin to that of a Department of Astrology.
And then here are the report’s final paragraphs:
As we have already noted, there are those in academia who would question the value of disinterested inquiry, or even its possibility. But as we have argued, these doubts are the product of philosophical confusion; there is in fact no good reason to question either the coherence or the value of disinterested inquiry, however difficult it may be.
It is largely for these reasons that we regard the failings we have pointed out as so serious. They are not mere problems in the administration or operation of a university, but they strike at the very heart and soul of what a university should be for.
This part, I admit, is impressive. I cannot imagine a more profoundly self-undermining way to conclude a report that is anything but a disinterested inquiry.
But you know what’s most depressing about this whole travesty? If Presidents Diermeier and Martin wanted a comprehensive review of the state of the humanities, they didn’t have to commission this eight-man, two-woman hit squad. They could simply have gone to the World Humanities Report, released in October 2024 by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), an organization comprised of over three hundred humanities centers worldwide. That report was six years in the making and consists of 115 essays, reports, and case studies from over two hundred participants in thirty countries. And it is—you should pardon the phrase—a thoroughly disinterested inquiry, with no ideological axe-grinding or concern trolling. When it was released, former CHCI president Sara Guyer had moved on to become the Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities at Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley News ran an interview with Guyer. And how did the national American higher-ed press respond? If you guessed “with zero column inches,” you win. Because the World Humanities Report didn’t raise the question of whether the left has ruined the humanities, it simply wasn’t newsworthy.
And that’s the problem with the humanities, right there.
