“The norms governing scholarship now often serve to protect a rigid orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues—with ideological tests substituted for proper academic standards”
The idea that there is something amiss in the humanities and the social sciences, and that the problem has something to do with the politicisation of research in these areas, is hardly new. American historian Richard Hofstadter traced American scepticism about the role of university professors in public life to evangelical Protestant suspicion of the “learned clergy” during the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In more recent history, the idea reached a high-water mark during the McCarthy era, and another in the 1980s with the publication of best sellers such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987) and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990).
Our report does not attempt to trace the roots of the present-day critique of the academy to these antecedents. Nor does it attempt to engage in detail with contemporary critics of the humanistic academy and its defenders, a sprawling discussion that has taken place mainly online and in the press. Much of that discussion is focused on undergraduate teaching and its social consequences, a topic we address only in passing.
