The recent “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” opens with a familiar complaint: that contemporary scholarship has become overly concerned with social justice and insufficiently committed to objectivity, rigor and the pursuit of truth. The report’s authors are careful to qualify their claims, but the central concern remains clear—they worry that political commitments have increasingly displaced scholarly ones.
Many of the responses to the report (known colloquially as the Vanderbilt/Washington University of St. Louis report) have focused on its methodology, its use of evidence and its characterization of particular disciplines. Those critiques are important. The American Anthropological Association, for example, argues that the report reaches sweeping conclusions without sufficient engagement with the field it criticizes. Others have questioned the report’s reliance on internal assessments that are unavailable for public scrutiny.
Yet there is a more fundamental issue that deserves attention.
Underlying much of the report is a nostalgic vision of the academy as a realm of apolitical objectivity—a 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.
This history matters because the emergence of fields such as women’s studies, Black studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies and critical scholarship on race, gender and inequality did not represent a departure from scholarly inquiry. Rather, these fields arose in response to long-standing absences within it. They asked questions that earlier generations of scholars often ignored because the people most affected by those questions were themselves excluded from the production of knowledge.
The report repeatedly treats subjects such as social justice, decolonization, feminism and antiracism as evidence of a troubling politicization of scholarship. But why should this surprise anyone? As the American academy became more diverse, the questions scholars asked changed as well. Of course feminism became an object of study. Of course race and racism became objects of study. Of course scholars became interested in understanding the structures that shape inequality and exclusion. The perspectives and experiences of scholars have always influenced what they found worthy of investigation. What is different today is that the community of scholars is broader and more representative than at any previous moment in American history.
In his book Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President, former Princeton University provost and president William Bowen reflects extensively on his role in advancing the project of coeducation at Princeton and the incredibly important change that process represented for the university. While many involved had thought about what Princeton could do for women, they did not fully appreciate what women would do for Princeton. Hence, what began as an effort to open Princeton to women became a transformation of Princeton’s culture, intellectual life and understanding of excellence.
The same insight applies to knowledge production. When scholars from historically excluded groups entered the academy in significant numbers, they did not simply add new faces to existing conversations. They expanded the conversations themselves. They introduced new questions, new archives, new methods and new frameworks for understanding the world.
To be fair, the report insists that its concern is not with the expansion of scholarly attention to women, racial minorities and other historically marginalized groups, but rather the methods used to study them. Yet this distinction is less clear than the report suggests, reflecting an underlying commitment to a narrower conception of what counts as legitimate knowledge and how it is produced. Once the academy broadened who could participate in knowledge production, it was always likely to broaden what counted as important knowledge and how that knowledge would be pursued. To accept the former while viewing the latter with suspicion risks preserving the very assumptions that made these subjects marginal in the first place.
What the report identifies as a departure from neutrality may instead be evidence of the success of the academy’s transformation. The humanities have become more attentive to voices once excluded from scholarly consideration. They have broadened our understanding of what counts as a legitimate object of inquiry and whose experiences are worthy of serious intellectual attention.
That development has undoubtedly generated disagreement. It should. Scholarly fields are healthiest when they are sites of vigorous debate. But it is a mistake to confuse the diversification of inquiry with the abandonment of rigor. The more pressing question is whether our conception of objectivity has kept pace with the changing realities of the academy itself.
The report asks whether scholarship has become too political. It never seriously asks whether what it regards as political is, in fact, the consequence of a more inclusive and intellectually expansive understanding of knowledge. Until we confront that question, debates about the state of the humanities will continue to mistake transformation for decline.
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