or more than six months, a group of prominent scholars met in private to research, debate, and diagnose what’s gone wrong with the humanities. Their mandate, as laid out by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, was to ascertain whether complaints about the ideological and methodological deterioration of the humanities are justified.
In a surprise to no one, except perhaps some of the authors themselves, the fruits of that labor, the dryly titled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences,” has ignited an academic brush fire. “Every field we have studied,” the report declares, contains evidence of “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
The report has been derided on Bluesky as a “diabolically evil” attempt to “sow deep epistemic doubt about the humanities and hasten the project of killing us off entirely.” Others warned that the report would lead to “academic witch hunts” of entire fields deemed problematic. (The report singled out anthropology for its “toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”) On the right, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars likened the report to Khrushchev’s momentous acknowledgement of Stalin’s crimes, but he chastised the authors for not going far enough — “a case of the mountain giving birth to a mouse.”
We invited four of the report’s authors — Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Boghossian, both philosophers at New York University; Katherine E. Fleming, a historian and former NYU provost who now serves as head of the J. Paul Getty Trust; and the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz — to respond to their critics. We discussed their findings, the risks of outside interference, and what they hope happens next.