Let’scall it the Vanderbilt Report for short, though its formal name is “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences.”And none of its ten authors holds a position at Vanderbilt University.It is the Vanderbilt Report because it was commissioned by the chancellor of Vanderbiltand Washington Universities, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, both of whom have gained somenotorietyin the last few years for breaking with the lockstep orthodoxies that characterize leadership in most of American higher education.

　　Diermeierbrought studentsback to his Nashville campus when most colleges and universitieswere still locked down, andhehas championed academic freedom and scholarly excellence in an erawhere those concepts are often praised but little practiced.Martinpublicly weighed signing on to President Donald Trump’s proposed “contract” withuniversities, whenit had received the cold shoulder from everyone else. In 2024, he ordered the arrestof more than 100 pro-Hamas protesters who were occupying part of his St. Louis campus.

　　These were among the reasons that DiermeierandMartin were singled out in a2025 Atlantic article, “The Elite-University Presidents Who Despise One Another,” as the leaders of the southern side of a new civil war in American higher education.Sothe stage had been set for a less than cheery welcome from the guardians ofthe status quo. The Vanderbilt Report has been righteously condemned by a “who’s who” of the academic left.

　　The report says that the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies are in trouble. Part of this stems from public misunderstanding, but a significant portion has arisen from the public perception that legitimate scholarship has been inappropriately subordinated to political goals, especially the pursuit of social justice. The report doesnt validate this perception across the board, but it finds enough warrant for it to warn that universities need to recommit themselves to disinterested inquiry.

　　Harsh responses to such a report were predictable,and being easily found,I will say little about them. These critics consider that the Vanderbilt Report is “politicized.”Their criticism of the Academy’s left-leaning tilt is unacceptable because (a) it strengthens the hands of right-wing ignoramuses, (b) the humanities ought indeedsupportthe liberatory causes of the left, (c) the report grossly overstates the concern, and (d) so what?

　　I too find fault with the Vanderbilt Report but for very different reasons. It is maddeningly understated. Except when they are taking aim at my own discipline, anthropology, the authors of the report pull their punches.They cite plenty of instances of academic malpractice in a wide range of fields, and of course it is good for the public to be more familiar with this problem. But this data could have supported a compelling case for deep and systemic reform. The authors decline to make one.

　　Instead,they have presented thirty pages of tepidcritique, apology, and self-cancellation. The timidity is palpable. They repeatedly declaretheirown findings “provisional.” They avow that they lack the “quantitative evidence” needed to pass “peer review.”Readers are assured that outsiders (i.e., academic administrators)should defer to the expertise within the very disciplines the report critiques. Narrowing thescope of the report to the “quality of scholarship,” they set aside the quality of teaching, the shape of the curriculum, and the recruitment, appointment, andtenuringof colleagues. Finally, they express no concern about admissions to graduate programs.

　　No amount of post-modern, self-exculpatory social justice word play will convince the public that a scholar who is ardently committed to a political cause can be trusted to be the judge of his own case.

　　It would, in fairness, have required a longer report to address all these matters. A case for meaningful reform would require an examination not only of “the state of scholarly work in terms of scholarly papers and books, but also the scholarly work of teaching students and articulating the standards of scholarship. But such a report is clearly warranted by the Vanderbilt Report’s stated goals. Readers will note that the charge begins with a wide-open door:

　　As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we areconcerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic socialsciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steadydrumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within thosedisciplines.

　　Further along, however,Diermeier and Martinname a specific concern:

　　manydifferent voices have suggested that humanistic disciplineshave allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge inthose fields.

　　And theychargetheir “commission of eminent scholars” to:

　　examine the state of scholarlywork in their respective areas andto evaluatewhether these allegations are justified.

　　If the authors really wish to halt the “dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials,” it will clearly be necessary to expand their lens to include more than just scholarly papers.

　　To reach that, theCommission would have to recognize that the “distortions” in the pursuit of knowledge that undermined public trust are at least as much about what happens in the classroom as they are about scholarship.And those distortions are even more visible when the public learns that nearly all the members of the philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies departments are registered Democrats, consider themselves on the far left of the American political spectrum, or some other indicia are recognizably at odds with American public opinion. Thepublic is not ignorant of these matters. They are reportedfrequentlyand emphatically by polling organizations and other researchers and have filtered into the nation’s political discourse.

　　The Commission complained about the lack of empirical measures for the “politicization” of scholarship, but where such measures are indeed available, the Commission simply ignored them. The party registration of a scholar is by no means proof of errant epistemology in that scholar’s published work, but it surely is a factor to be considered.

　　Thisisn’tsome Trump-era corruption of the concept of academic freedom. Arthur O. Lovejoy, co-founder in 1915 of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) andthe architect of the American version of “academic freedom,” held that the doctrine couldnot protect membersof the Communist Party because such membership required them to subordinate the pursuit of truth to whatever “Party Line” was dictated to them.

　　Public trust in the integrity ofthe humanitiesstill hangs by that thread. No amount of post-modern, self-exculpatory social justice word play will convince the public that a scholar who is ardently committed to a political cause can be trusted to be the judge of his own case.The public might wellbe willing to countenance academic departments in the humanities in which the zealous advocate of a cause must persuade others who are indifferent to it or skeptical that his work meets scholarly standards.But that is preciselywhat doesn’t happentoday.And the Vanderbilt Reportlargely turns a blind eye tothissituation.

　　Perhaps oddly, its eyes do seem to be wide open in the field of anthropology, which theCommissioners label “an extreme case,” where:

　　wesee awidespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals ofobjectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politicallycharged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.

　　How curious that the report can be simultaneously so right, and rather wrong. It is perfectly true that anthropology is in a bad state, as I am in a position to know. I was a tenured member of a research university’s anthropology department, from which I resigned in 2005 to take up a provost position atacollege. I wasnot unhappywith my colleagues nor was I ill-treated by them, despite significant differences in our social and political views.But it was already plain at that point that thedisciplineas a whole washeaded over a cliff.

　　Anthropology is afairly youngfield of inquiry,stirred to life in the nineteenthcentury by the first systematic and would-be scientific efforts to comprehend both human diversity and human commonality.Most of these early efforts were tied up with evolutionary theory, but thereemergedfrom this a determination to discover and record the plain facts of human existence in all places of the inhabited globe. Over the course of about 125 years, anthropology built an unparalleled record of world ethnography.

　　It varied in quality, of course, though not in ambition. The scholarly standard was to get the facts, which sometimes entailed heated debates as to what should count as fact. Should we define marriage so broadly as to include social arrangements in which men were mostly incidental?Is the division of labor by sex a feature of human society everywhere?How does inequality take root inseemingly egalitarian societies? A disciplineisprobably betterdefined by the questions it wrestles with than in the answers it finds, and anthropologyfounda great many such questions.Sometimes, of course, as in the case of Margaret Mead, the answers offered byparticular anthropologistsgained more purchase than they should have.Over time, anthropology morphed from a young science to a sanctuary for utopian dreamers, totalitarians,post-colonialists,champions of ThirdWorldism, and an ever-expanding collection of advocates of odd claims with no scientific basis.

　　Which brings me back to the Vanderbilt Report.Its admirable clarity in critiquing anthropology has created some healthy debate within the discipline. I left the profession of anthropology some twenty years ago, but I kept up my professionalmemberships, journal subscriptions, and friendships with a fair number of anthropologists.SoI have had a ringside seat to the discipline’s response to the report.At the center of that report is a section on scholars who:

　　explicitly repudiate the idea thatscholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusivelypolitical conception of the enterprise.

　　Many people within the discipline agree with that characterization, though they don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing. In his2021 presidential address to the American AnthropologicalAssociation, for instance, Akhil Gupta announced that anthropology indeed has a “political project,” namely:

　　to challenge the culturally dominant commonsenseof capitalist consumerism.

　　Where does thatleaveanthropologists (like me) who reject this idea?But Gupta was not alone in configuring anthropology fora political purpose.The report cites otheranthropologists whoweighed in, such asFernando Villanea,who explained that anthropology now exists to“serve the interests” of people whom anthropologists in theold days hurt—presumably bydescribing them accurately.Yet another anthropologist, José Santos, is quoted as explaining that contemporary anthropology pursues “not voyeurism but advocacy,” as if the goal of objective description was a kind of pornography. Clearly the Vanderbilt Report was not off base in seeing anthropology as a politicized discipline.

　　Nevertheless, the officialdom of the discipline did not take it lying down. The most important response came from Carolyn Rouse, current president of the American Anthropological Association, who began with an across-the-board dismissal: “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.” 

　　Rouse’s response is worth reading in full. She worries that “the report risks conflating intellectual disagreement with intellectual decline.” This is a proposal for a fair battlefield, and my fellow anthropologists at Heterodox Academy are willing to meet her there, but Rouse has a poor track record of meeting the not-like-minded in honest exchange. In 2023, she stood behind the American Anthropological Association’s decision to cancel a panel on “biological sex” differences, proposed by several of my colleagues, on grounds that it was potentially dangerous to “the safety of LGBTQ+ members,” and the AAA also had “concerns over scientific integrity.” Sex differences have long been a fundamental category of analysis, certainly as pertinent to the community of LGBTQ+ activists as anyone else, but in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rouse asserted that because intersex individuals exist, in her views treating sexual binary as real and important would be illegitimate: “to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.” 

　　Obviously, at that time she felt quite secure in her progressive posture. Is it bad for a document like the Vanderbilt Report to force such a person to make a public defense of her discipline’s intellectual culture and scholarly norms? I take this to be a very welcome thing, which could possibly open the way to fruitful discussion and real reform. Why did the report decline to do as much for other disciplines? Anthropology clearly is not the only scholarly discipline deeply infected with political partisanship and groupthink.

　　It feels like a missed opportunity.Would that the Vanderbilt Report consistently showed the same vigor and depth ofitscritique to all disciplines in the humanities. Instead, it devotes pages to pointless distinctions, excuses, and evasions in the vain hope of mounting the narrowest possible critique of disciplines that have recklessly abandoned their core responsibilities.I suppose the members of the Commission flinched at the prospect of facing their colleagues after laying out the unvarnished truth. Butperhaps theyhave made peace with it. In either case, ChancellorsDiermeier and Martinshould consider thereport asmostly feathers,with a steel spine hidden in the middle.