A new report on personality studies made waves in top circles when it was released on Friday, and has drawn criticism from professors across the board.
Endorsed by Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis chancellor Andrew Martin’s “State of Scholarship” report finds fault with courses that include anthropology, philosophy and history—not for their content but for the quality of their scholarship, which the report’s authors argue is often driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth and knowledge.
In an email to Within Higher EdDiermeier said “the purpose of the report is to provide an assessment, not to provide solutions to address the challenges.”
Criticisms of the report are wide and varied. National Association of Scholars research director David Randall said the authors are reviving decades-old arguments against relativism and don’t go far enough in their recommendations for reforming humanism. “If they’re really serious about education reform, they’ll take action instead of sponsoring more gab-fests,” he wrote of Diermeier and Martin. Pennsylvania State University communications professor Bradford Vivian wrote in Bluesky that “a better title for the Vanderbilt report on humanity would be [William F. Buckley Jr.’s] ‘God and Man in Part Two.’” Others, including the American Anthropological Association, criticized the report for being an example of an ivory tower and criticized the authors for failing to actually engage with professors in their target fields.’
Diermeier and Martin asked Paul Boghossian, a professor of philosophy at New York University, to examine the “state of scholarly work” in the humanities to determine whether recent criticism of these fields is justified. This includes accusations that humanists misuse natural science, that some philosophers have adopted “problematic philosophical views” about truth, and that humanists have allowed “ideological fundamentals” to distort their pursuit of truth.
The resulting report—dubbed the “Vanderbilt report”—is addressed to “chancellors and presidents of universities who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences and who may wish, in their opinion, to promote excellent scholarship in these important fields,” according to its preface. The authors reject the general criticism of humanity in its broadest form, but agree on some very specific points. Taken together, the issues identified by the authors reflect “a different kind of politics in which the scholarly field is considered subordinate to, or serves political (social or moral) goals beyond the development of knowledge and understanding,” they wrote.
Boghossian chose nine other scholars to work with him—three from NYU, two from Princeton University, and one each from Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University. Eight of the authors of this report are men and two are women. NYU philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah is the only person of color on the committee. Only one of the report’s authors—sociologist Ashley Rubin—works at a public institution, the University of Hawaii.
This is problematic, says Asheesh Kapur Siddique, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Siddique had many criticisms of the Vanderbilt report—to Bluesky, he called it “demonic evil”—but the composition of the committee that assembled it was a primary concern.
“It could be very easy [the report’s] recommendations to be imposed by the state legislature on a public university” and it is very difficult to impose them on a private institution, said Siddique. Within Higher Ed. “The places where all these people work won’t have to deal with recommendations. I think that’s a very important thing. I doubt that most of these academics would want to work at an institution that might face” the political interference that this report inspired.
As soon as the report was released, American Anthropological Association president Carolyn Rouse began hearing from members. Some of them were “angry,” she said.
“I’ve heard words like ‘unfocused'” to describe the report, he said Within Higher Ed. “It’s so badly done—I kept wanting to make a ‘revolution’ to it, like editing it like a paper—but it has all this power because [authors] there are.”
The report will hurt anthropology departments that are already struggling to prove their worth to administrators, Rouse said.
“AAA has been working to help departments find strategies to improve majors by being open about how it can benefit you if you become a doctor, if you become a lawyer,” said Rouse. For management who criticizes people, “this is proof that they were right, and they will close their doors to anthropology.”
The reaction to the Vanderbilt report doesn’t surprise Martin because it addresses “questions that have been debated within higher education for decades,” he said. Within Higher Ed by email.
“The response shows the importance of the issues raised by the report. Many scholars have weighed in on the findings, while others disagree with some aspects of the analysis. That’s healthy,” said Martin. “We expected a strong response because the social sciences are at the core of how our institutions pursue knowledge and educate students.”
‘Lazy Scholarship’
The authors profile more than a dozen humanists in the report and use their work to highlight what they see as the problem of learning. Within Higher Ed they reached five, all of whom said it was the first time they had heard of this report. Several also said their work was misrepresented or taken out of context.
Christopher Loperena, an associate professor of anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said the report misrepresents his work and the broader field of anthropology. He told Within Higher Ed disagrees with “the proposition that social and political research is at odds with the critical inquiry of humanities and social sciences.”
University of California Los Angeles sociocultural anthropologist Akhil Gupta said the authors made a “big mistake” in misquoting his paper.
“In fact, the charge brought by this committee itself has been an invitation to eliminate fields of interpretation. This is not surprising. The first ‘culture’ wars over the West were fought in the Reagan years, and we can expect an attack on scholars of color and organizations that criticize the current establishment of power in the age of Trump,” Gupta wrote in an email. “I wish people wouldn’t waste their time producing this kind of thing that’s meant to stir up controversy and justify budget cuts to people.”
The authors write that Khiara Bridges, an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, “advocates a strong view of reality,” and includes quotes from her book “Critical Race Theory: A Primer.” Bridges said this is a bad representation of his work.
“In the words from the book mentioned in the report, I am not explaining my personal views: I am explaining postmodernism,” said Bridges. Within Higher Ed by email. “The report is irresponsible in representing my interpretation of the claim as my support for the claim. Moreover, it is lazy—an example of the kind of scholarship and analysis I instruct my students not to produce. … The authors of the report owe me an apology.”
Bridges sent a letter to Boghossian on Wednesday, asking him to correct the “misrepresentation” of his scholarship. Boghossian responded Wednesday afternoon and cc’d Within Higher Edand his partners, Diermeier and Martin. In an email, he said he was grateful that Bridges had reached out and was “anxious to correct any misrepresentations of your views that our report may contain.” He also shared several other passages from Bridges’ book to explain “why we read this passage as we do,” he wrote.
“If you misread us, that is, if you actually reject the idea that truth is just an idea and believe that there are objective truths, truths that do not depend on the opinion of the truth seeker, I would accept that clarification, and we would be happy to comment on it publicly and adjust the discussion of your work accordingly,” Boghossian wrote. “Similarly, if your position is that the opinion in question is more appropriate than the report’s phrase ‘strong opinion about the truth’ suggests, I would certainly like to understand the appropriateness, and we might consider amending the quote to include more context if you think that would help.”
Boghossian did not respond Within Higher EdWednesday quiz.
The authors quote Fernando Villanea, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, twice. The second is a passage from an American Anthropologist An essay he wrote entitled “Defense Against Dark Anthropology.” It reads, “The main value of anthropology education is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is self-centered. On the contrary, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the version of truth that we choose to speak. That is the objective truth, so our basic priority should be to serve their interests.”
Boghossian and his colleagues call this quote “incoherent.” They go on to write that “considered more of a contribution, it is still the paradoxical claim that while there are no objective truths about the subtle issues that define affective anthropology, there are objective truths about values and behavior—about who is adversely affected by a particular position, and what anthropologists should take as their core values.”
Vilanea said this episode was taken out of context; his essay was about how anthropology should work for the communities of South Africa.
“To summarize [my arguments] saying that Villanea said ‘I clearly oppose the idea that scholarship aims to know’ is not only wrong, but lazy learning.” “Finally, this report shows the ivory tower in a high position by presenting arguments that are not found in many current academic debates.”
Charles Hale, director of social sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara, who was also quoted in the Vanderbilt report, said. Within Higher Ed that the report “dismisses a large number of scholars” with the broad term relativist—something he said did not accurately represent his work. Although he ultimately sympathized with the authors’ stated intentions, he said “their strategy is ultimately irrational and would leave us weak and vulnerable.”
“Their arguments in clear and accessible language, intelligent presentation of data and evidence, careful consideration of opposing views, rigorous analysis, etc. are all helpful and easily verified,” Hale wrote in an email. “Their call for a return to ‘disinterested scholarship’ reads, quite frankly, like the authors are asking us to go back to the special ivory tower book, keep our heads down, and hope the onslaught will pass us by.”
