A new report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences now makes a similar point from inside the academy. The report is careful. It rejects the crude claim that the humanities are simply corrupt or unserious. But it nevertheless finds, across every field studied, evidence of declining scholarly standards, the drop driven, in part, by the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones and by a weakening of older ideals of rigour and objectivity.
But the report is mostly diagnostic. What still needs explaining is why those habits became so powerful, and why they proved so professionally useful. My answer is that critical theory did not merely politicise scholarship. It also made scholarship easier to produce.