Despite its seemingly neutral title, the recently published “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” is as far from dispassionate as it is from being methodologically sound. I read the report with care immediately, and quickly concluded that any negative energy it would engender would be just. But I also knew that, if only for myself, before the social media flames ignited I wanted to think through what a response would look like that did not simply condemn the report but mapped a way forward out of the mess the report seems intended to have made.

I wrote recently about anger as an understandable but perilous reaction to the future having been constricted. The best way out of that volatile emotion, which always threatens to keep those in its grip stuck within narrowed possibilities, is to widen what the future offers. That dilation of perspective takes something hard to find when rage is aboil: perspective. A personal lesson for me post 2016 (leading to a major career change) is that outrage is often a bad start for action; building projects require strategy and affirmation. I’m not offering that as a universal truth, but as an individual one that changed my life (and I would like to think the lives of many I’ve been able to work with) for the better.

I also knew that writers more eloquent than I would be swift to offer trenchant analyses. Some that I have found especially thoughtful and penetrating are by Michael Berubé, Agustin Fuentes, John K. Wilson, Joy Connolly, and Jason Rhody. (If I’ve missed something thoughtful let me know.) These scholars rightly criticize the report for its slender evidentiary base, its refusal to show its sources, its wide claims based on minimal references, and its weird obsession with academic discussions from the 1980s and 1990s that have mainly been put to rest. On the latter point, I joked to a friend that the report is best read with a wine cooler to a soundtrack of Depeche Mode and The Thompson Twins. A recent interview with the report’s authors in The Chronicle of Higher Education did little to ameliorate concerns over methods, sources, and objectives. One author avers he felt like “Václav Havel in reverse,” another uses the the hoary rhetorical trope of “I’ve had emails from lurkers who agree with the report,” and so on. It is intimated that AI was used for the research survey but no details are provided for verification through replication.

As I observed in my earlier post, the report insists that the humanities are essential to liberal education (which cultivates us as free people), democratic citizenship, ethical reflection, a sense of historical depth, critical thinking, and intercultural understanding. But none of those humanities affordances are its heart. The most tiresome, unspoken and Trump-era move of the report is to dream of a humanistic rigor that once flourished until overthrown by sloppy relativists (who also happen to be the feminist, queer, Jewish, and scholar of color voices who detailed how a disembodied notion of “rigor” was routinely used to exclude challenging work, especially in philosophy). As the discussions of the Vanderbilt report linked above make clear, none of what it asserts as rigorous truth holds up all that well when the evidence behind the the authors’ broad brush declarations is looked at with a modicum of context and nuance.

One of the most blinkered sections of the report is about social justice. It’s a term that seems especially displeasing to the report’s authors, appearing 13 times, always a negative frame that liberals are attempting to foist in order to displace dispassionate standards and evidence-based argument. Social justice travels throughout the report with words like ideological monoculture, replacement of traditional standards, and cult-like fervor, the subordination of scholarly rigor, artificial consensus, and the promotion of political projects through silencing of hard questions. The thin evidence for how all this works is entirely pars pro toto and highly selective. The paragraph below, for example, strives to gloss social justice as progressive politics as shared academic cultic belief system as non-rigorous work deployed by mobs (albeit and counter intuitively, highly educated mobs):

That’s quite a lexical compression machine to have set to work. And it’s not wholly untrue, even as (like so much of the report) it is far too narrow, simple, and lacking in evidence that demonstrates adequate research has been undertaken before pronouncements have descended.

Social justice got a bad name in part because certain internet influencers have long used shibbolethic terms like SJW (social justice warrior) to demean their perceived opponents. And some X, Bluesky and Facebook users (some against SJW, some self designating as such) have long conducted themselves as if angrily condemning things using a repertoire of key phrases that speak to a certain constituency were a sufficient end. Social media can reward users who cultivate the ability to farm an attention market, create a swarm phenomenon, nurture hive minding, overwhelm dissent. (That reward system is emotional, clout driven, and sometimes financially lucrative; it is generally agnostic of political belief.) There’s a satisfaction in the ability to deploy an angry community, but social media in my opinion seldom fosters positive change. It’s the place we go to have our attention fracked. It is not, as the report intimates, a reflection of scholarly standards or the rigor of the academy.

While social justice might be involved in anything on the report’s list cited above, and may in fact be a goal of someone writing short sharp takedowns on Bluesky, social justice is in the end a more capacious, aspirational, even utopian term than such narrowed parameters allow. Social justice is woven into the liberal arts, the study of which aims to create free individuals (and if you are a medievalist like me, you know that the earliest meaning of free was generous: freedom’s vector is outward towards community sustenance rather than inward towards libertarian personal rights). How did we ever allow the practice of justice — the quality of being fair and reasonable, the impartial application of the law for all to stand equal — to become recoded as bad scholarship? In what world is social justice a diminishment of education’s mission?

Speaking of missions, until this year Yale’s mission statement included these lines:

Now the university’s avowed vocation has been attenuated to

Notice that there is no longer any purpose in that mission — no indication of what research, teaching and activity around knowledge aim to accomplish. Seldom have I witnessed so pusillanimous an editing job, in which a better future is cut wholly from communal aspiration. If higher education does not aim to improve the world today and for generations to come — if higher education does not aspire to social justice, which means a free and generous world for us and the people who will follow after us, so that they will have as many choices for living their lives as we have had — well, then, we are at risk of becoming merely uroboric, curling into ourselves. Why inflict diminishment of ambition and reach on our communities at the very time when so many extramural forces are striving for exactly that reduction?

The ten authors of the report chose to condemn their peers with the argument that it’s for their own good. They set off a torrent of responses filled with righteous ire, and I am guessing that they are enjoying it, taking condemnation of the report as evidence that they are right. The report after all repeats several times an infantilizing framing that academics shout down truths they cannot disprove but do not like. I’m not sure there is anything to learn here other than once again it has been proven that it’s easier to set a house afire than to build together a firmer home.

But it might also be annoying to the authors of the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” to learn that many of their colleagues continue to foster loftier aims. We are not the disciplines of vibes and political whims that the report imagines. We do believe, however, that our teaching, scholarship and research can bring about a better future not as an accident of investigation but through the aim of our endeavors. We believe in the wisdom of history: humanistic study is essential to fostering the good, for individuals and for communities. Rigor does not have to mean being stiff or severe: you can be thorough, exhaustive, and accurate without being unkind. Disinterested inquiry and rigor never exclude epistemological humility, nuance or generosity when evaluating the work of your peers, or when imagining the worth of the humanities and the greater aims of education. Such inquiry does not mean scholarly and creative work cannot have goals, but that such work must be conducted in ways that are truthful, transparent, compelling, persuasive and replicable. Contrary to what the report insists, these long time aspirations of the liberal arts and sciences are laudable, utopian, consonant with social justice — and the very heart and soul of what a university should be for.