On the Subordination of Scholarship to Politics
Recently, a committee I chaired released a reportentitled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” Commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, the committee’s charge was to investigate the complaint, increasingly heard not only from those within academia but also from parties outside it, that the standards of scholarship being upheld within the humanities (broadly construed to include the qualitative social sciences) had eroded. More specifically, the complaint was that the relevant standards of scholarship in these areas had become increasingly subordinated to political agendas.
The committee that was assembled to investigate this worrisome charge was a distinguished one (the membership can be found on the front page of the report). Partly reflecting my role in assembling the group, it included, in addition to me, three philosophers (one of whom also ranges widely over literary and African American studies), two historians, one linguist, one sociologist, one anthropologist and one literary scholar.
The committee proceeded by having appropriate subsets of its members look closely at the following fields (often in consultation with outside experts and with the help of two research assistants): philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and music studies. The subject-specific teams generated reports which were then reviewed by the entire committee to inform its findings, which it summarized thus:
