Interestingly, the report immediately narrows its scope down to that last complaint, that scholarship has been overrun by political goals, distorting disciplinary standards and producing bad research.
…there are limits. If an astronomy department becomes an astrology department, deference would obviously be a bad thing. This raises the question of when outside scrutiny is warranted, and what that scrutiny should look like. (The report’s own stance here is v moderate.)
This report is addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields. The charge to the committee, submitted in August 2025 and formulated by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University, reads as follows:
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Yes. It is an anti-intellectual practice to do an end run around reason and rigor by appealing to quasi-mystical political dogmas that cannot be challenged.
It replaces Liberal Science with something far easier and far older: substituting what must be true according to their own simplistic moral certainties for the harder discipline of asking whether their own political dogmas might be false.