https://president.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026-04/Report-of-the-Committee-on-Trust-in-Higher-Education.pdf

https://higheredstatementofprinciples.com/state-of-scholarship-report/introduction/

thread about the Vanderbilt study:

https://x.com/JohnDSailer/status/2062889451181736037

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5871427&forum_id=2...id.#49917383)

On the Boghossian Report

It's not perfect, but I loved it

MATT LUTZ

JUN 05, 2026

A few hours ago, something of a bomb got dropped on the humanities. A new report was commissioned by the Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University last year, with the goal of assessing the merit of various accusations that have been leveled at the academic humanities in recent years. The mission:

Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.

To help us assess whether, and to what extent, there is a problem here, we charge a commission of eminent scholars from these disciplines to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified.

And a commission of eminent scholars was, indeed, empaneled. 10 scholars from different areas of the humanities are listed as authors of the report, 4 of which are philosophers. And those four - Paul Boghossian, Kit Fine, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Gideon Rosen - are among the most senior, respected philosophers working today. A murderer’s row, if you will. Boghossian in particular deserves mention, both because he served as the chair of the committee, and because some sections of the report clearly have his fingerprints all over it, as many of the arguments are brief restatements of arguments Boghossian made earlier in his 2006 book Fear of Knowledge.1

Bottom line: the committee concluded that there is, in fact, a problem with the humanities. The problem is not quite all-encompassing - there is no area of the humanities in which good work is not being done. Yet some disciplines (anthropology in particular is mentioned) produce an abundance of bad scholarship.

The introduction to the report likens the situation to one in which scholars in the astronomy department stop doing astronomy and start doing astrology. If it’s just one scholar going awry, the department can correct or fire him. If the whole department starts doing astrology, astronomy departments in other universities can call out the rogue department and marginalize it. But what if the entire field - all departments at all universities - is given over to nonsense? Well, then, some kind of outside intervention is called for, by serious and appropriately humble scholars from adjacent disciplines, working in tandem with administration. The report aims to advance such an outside intervention.

I think this report is great. I’ve seen a few criticisms of it online, and I’ll address those in a bit. Some of them make decent points - the report is not perfect - but on the whole, I love it. Let me explain why.

The mission statement of the report shows that the focus of the report is more limited than just a broad “What’s up with the humanities?” It’s not a report that tries to show why wokeness or cancel culture (or anything like that) are bad. Rather, it’s about the quality of the scholarship in the humanities. From the top of Section 3 (the first substantively critical section of the report):

Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs. The critique we take seriously is that this scholarly enterprise has been damaged in recent decades, not just by a general erosion of standards, but also by a reconceptualization of scholarship as a form of political activity, answerable in part to extra-academic standards.

The concern is with whether or not scholarship in the humanities actually produces knowledge or understanding, or whether it is entirely bogus. Astronomy produces knowledge. Astrology does not. This makes works in astronomy potentially good scholarship. But astrology cannot be good scholarship. This is not to say that there are no norms for how astrology should be conducted. Among astrologers, there are doubtless standards for what counts as “good astrology” or “bad astrology.” But whatever merits good astrology might have, it does not generate knowledge or understanding. There are norms, but from an academic perspective, those norms are bogus. The central contention of the report is that the norms for scholarship in much (not all!) of the humanities are also bogus in this way. “We do find grounds for concern, not just in individual disciplines, but systematically.”

The problem is political - that scholarship is being done with the end of promoting certain progressive political goals related to “social justice.” The authors are quick to say that they do not think that social justice is necessarily bad or that it’s inappropriate for academics to promote it, either as part of their work or as activism related to their work. Rather, the problem is that work in the humanities has oriented around this social justice consensus, and in doing so have placed social justice above understanding as the guiding light of their scholarship. “The deeper problem is that an artificial consensus of this sort can only be maintained by distorting the scholarly ecosystem in ways that are profoundly damaging.” And here’s where things start to get philosophically interesting.

The entire conceptual framework thus far presupposes that there is such a thing as getting things right in humanistic scholarship and getting them wrong. There must be something that is correct - genuine knowledge or understanding - in order for distortions to genuinely count as distortions. The term “objectivity” always starts to get thrown around at this point, and the authors treat that term carefully, since it’s so vague and contested. But surely there must be some standard of correctness in humanistic research, or what are we even doing here? Moreover, many of the mechanisms by which the “artificial consensus” of social justice are enforced presuppose the existence of correctness standards. Controversial scholarship is almost never explicitly rejected for having bad politics, but rather for being bad scholarship, for not living up to disciplinary standards. Rejecting bad scholarship as bad is, of course, totally appropriate. But that just shows that we’re agreed that there are correctness standards of some sort. And this is what the report is worried about distortions away from.

So, whence these distortions? In Section 4, the authors identify three “tracks.” On the first track, scholarship is sometimes rejected as being inconsistent with “settled science.” On the second track, the goal of understanding is displaced by other political goals, with work having to clear a political bar in order to count as good scholarship. And “On the third track, the idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected. On this view, good scholarship cannot be distorted by political values because it is, at bottom, irredeemably constituted by such values.”

This is where the report genuinely becomes the “Boghossian report,” for what follows next is a scathing evisceration of various relativist and constructivist views that are widespread in humanities scholarship. A list of quotations follows from humanists endorsing one version or another of relativism. Relativism is the entire basis of the “third track,” but it’s also a convenient tool for those on the “second track;” why pursue truth rather than political goals if truth is a mirage and political goals are so important? Relativism is then criticized as being self-undermining and incoherent, with the criticisms being largely a recapitulation of the central arguments made in Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. (I’ll elide a discussion of the ins and outs of Boghossian’s argument here. That’s a bit more in the weeds than I want to get. Suffice it to say, I think he’s completely correct, and that Fear of Knowledge is a great book.)

And what of the first track? Well, once relativism is dispatched, the flaw with the first track is easy to see. There are facts, and we can attain knowledge of those facts through the use of rational methods. Once this is recognized, we can see that scholarship in the humanities should consist in pursuit of those facts using rational methods. Claims to “settled science” can be made, but only if they live up to those rational standards. The problem is one of making those claims without putting in the relevant work to establish a firm rational basis.

That’s the basic rundown. So, what makes this good?

Much of the critical discussion focuses, in one way or another, on the fact that the report spends so much time debating relativism. Really? The problem with the humanities is relativism? It has not escaped the critics’ notice that Fear of Knowledge was published 20 years ago, and at the time was already a bit stale, since academic debates over relativism and postmodernism were at their hottest closer to 30 years ago. We have, by this point, long since moved on. Boghossian may be eminent within the philosophical community, but is this report little more than him grinding an old axe?

To understand the full context for this criticsm, we need to turn our attention back to the history of the debate over relativism and postmodernism and some attendant divisions within the social structure of the academy. We need, unfortunately, to talk about “analytic” and “continental” philosophy.

To briefly recapitulate part of my last post on the subject, philosophy experienced a kind of divergence in intellectual traditions starting around 200 years ago, post-Kant, with that divergence accelerating sharply about a century ago. It’s nearly impossible to give a characterization of analytic vs continental philosophy that neatly divides the two camps in a principled way; as such, it’s better to think of two different research traditions. Who is reading whom, and who is citing whom? Analytics (mostly) read and cite other analytics, continentals (mostly) read and cite other continentals, and there’s very little overlap. Consequently, there’s been a divergence in writing styles, in technical terminology and attendant conceptual apparatus, and in methodological assumptions. Again, it’s a mistake to try to draw the distinction explicitly in terms of writing style or any of these other factors. But there are two clear clusters of influence pattern.

This is relevant because postmodernist (and “poststructuralist”) philosophers are all within the continental cluster. And it is also relevant because, to the extent that scholars in other areas of the humanities have engaged with philosophy, they have done so by engaging with continental philosophers. So if we expand our influence-pattern analysis to look not just at the philosophy discipline itself, but all of academia, we’ll see that the humanities tend to cluster quite closely with the continentals. (You might expect the sciences to cluster with the analytics on the other side, and that’s partly true, but the connection here is looser, given scientists’ tendency to ignore philosophy.)2

And this, in turn, matters because of how things played out in that debate in the 90s over postmodernism. To oversimplify somewhat: postmodernist philosophy was developed in the 60s and 70s within the continental cluster. No big problem there yet, there are all kinds of philosophical movements that arise within philosophical communities all of the time. But as postmodernist ideas became widespread within the continental cluster, they began to expand into other areas of the humanities aggressively throughout the 80s. (These timelines are vague, of course, but should give you a rough sense.) The analytics (and their erstwhile allies in the sciences) had, to this point, been mostly content to let the continentals make their own silly errors. But with their influence spreading to other areas of the academy, perhaps it was time to take the problem more seriously. The postmodernists, for their part, thought that they had discovered some rather serious problems with science and analytic philosophy. This led to the heated “science wars” of the 90s. Continentals and their allies in the humanities accused the sciences of various political sins that scientists allegedly excused and covered up with their false pretentions to “objectivity.” Scientists and analytics responded in kind by attacking the postmodernist theories that were the basis of the humanists’ critique.

The ultimate resolution of these wars was a stalemate. Neither side convinced the other. The main effect was an increase in the intellectual divisions that existed between the camps. Both sides understood the other as being fundamentally mistaken, and retreated into doing their own work in their own mold, with the other side existing primarily to serve as a punching bag whenever cheap shots needed to be doled out to one’s intellectual enemies.

Things continued to evolve from there. Analytic philosophy has gone through its own convulsions, as foundational positivist texts of the early 20th century fall further and further into history and disrepute, and analytics debate the meaning and viability of a post-positivistic “naturalism” and what role (if any) metaphysics might play in such a picture. Continental philosophy, for its part, has evolved away from its foundational postmodernist texts and taken on a more earnest and stridently political stance that is more explicitly committed to social justice. But these developments occurred largely in isolation from one another, on either sides of a wall that had existed for a long time, and which got very high indeed after the science wars of the 90s.

This brings me to one line of response I’ve seen to the Boghossian report, the response from the continentals and humanists. This response is to absolutely sneer at the report. Boghossian is just relitigating the debates of the 90s. And we won those debates! This is nothing but sour grapes, relitigating old defeats. But this time, he’s hoping to appeal to outside authorities, to the administrators, to tear down our departments. He didn’t win on the merits - he never could! - and now he’s coming back decades later to try to work the refs. Obviously this shouldn’t work, and if it does, it’s approximately the cheapest and most intellectually dishonest thing anyone has ever done. The fucking gall!

But of course the humanists didn’t win those debates in any meaningful sense. Politically, the war ground to a stalemate. And due to intellectual silo-ing, each side is convinced that they won the debate on the merits. But on the merits, the continentals lost, miserably. (“Of course you’d say that, you’re Team Analytic!” Well, yes, I am, but I’m Team Analytic because the analytics were right and the continentals were wrong. I reject utterly the idea that any argument must be hedged and qualified by what side you’re on. The arguments are what they are, and they work or they don’t. Boghossian’s arguments work. I won’t try to show that because then I’d just be rewriting his book and I’m sure I won’t convince any continentals who might be reading this.)

Now, some 30 years later, a popular clamor has reached the ears of the leaders of American universities. Something is rotten in the state of the humanities, many people are claiming. The leaders of the universities are worried. Is this true? Let’s find out!

So they ask Paul Boghossian (and company; all very much Team Analytic, although Appiah is more fluent in the continental tradition) whether there is an intellectual problem in the humanities. And his response is that Of course there is, Jesus Christ! We told you about this 30 years ago and no one in the administration really listened and those putzes even think they won the debate and now look where we are. This is “I TOLD YOU SO: The Report.” And, yeah, fair enough. There’s nothing sweeter than an “I told you so,” and in this case it’s quite well-earned. That’s why I love it.

But I said that there’s a good version of this objection, so let’s get to that. The good version of this objection is that today’s humanists are not the humanists of the 90s. Relitigating these debates over relativism is fighting the last war. The enemy they’re attacking is no longer the enemy as it exists today. The report is blind to the shape of the contemporary threat.

This is somewhat true. But recall, the remit of this report is narrow. The question the authors address is about scholarship, in particular, about “the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs.” That choice of question frames the entire report. There are good things and bad things about this. The bad thing is that it prevents them from considering larger structural concerns about, e.g., academic incentive structures. The people who think that everything that is wrong in academia is a product of adjunctification are mad that the report does not consider the role that adjunctification has played in speeding the degradation of the humanities. And perhaps adjunctification has played a role here, and it’s bad that the report is blind to this. It is also similarly blind to concerns about funding streams, partisan educational polarization, AI use, the relationship between the humanities and the larger “woke social justice” movement, and a hundred other factors that are playing a role. So the report is really quite narrow. But is it too narrow? I dunno. Maybe. But going over every problem with the humanities would require a report that’s much longer than 30 pages, with a much deeper bench of experts to analyze every aspect of the situation. For a report like this, though, you’ve gotta pick your battles. And if you get together a panel of 10 people, 4 of whom are philosophers, then yeah, they’re gonna focus on whether or not there are fundamental philosophical problems with humanities scholarship. Which is what they were explicitly asked to do in the directive to the commission! So while I agree that more is needed on the topic, it’s not clear that more is needed in this report.

In light of this, the better complaint is that humanities scholarship just isn’t that relativist anymore. Again, the continental/humanistic tradition has evolved. And the current version of the humanities is much less indebted to postmodernist relativism. The humanities are not politically hostile to conservatives or conservative-coded ideas because conservatives are so close-minded and it’s all relative and what even is truth, man? They’re hostile to conservative-coded ideas because it is objectively true that conservatives are human garbage and have no place in the academy. So if there is a flaw with humanities scholarship, relativism isn’t it.

But has humanities scholarship really moved away from relativism? The list of quotations that the authors provide in Section 4 is relevant here. Some of them are from foundational texts from the 80s, but many are very recent, with citations to other recent texts. (If I have a criticism here, it’s that they should have gone into more detail here and provided a true laundry list of citations in the footnotes to drive the point home.) It’s undoubtedly true that an endorsement of relativism shapes huge swaths of scholarship in the humanities even today. It is not consistently applied - indeed, one of the central points of Fear of Knowledge is that it’s impossible to be a thoroughgoing and consistent relativist - but it’s at least a background hum in a lot of humanities scholarship. Indeed, it’s this very inconsistency that makes the appeals to relativism so pernicious. When humanists talk about the kinds of moral, political and social concerns that get their dander up, they talk like stark, raving, moral realists.3 But when called on to provide a larger theoretical framework to justify their endorsement of these political projects as a scholastic endeavor, these demands are waved away with a glib reference to relativism.

Remember the “three paths!” There are some unreconstructed relativists who appeal explicitly to relativism to justify their activism - that’s the third path. But the second path is one where relativism is deployed selectively, as a kind of defensive cover fire, whenever it is suggested that there might be some other objective standard of correctness in scholarship that the work needs to live up to. “Of course, we know such standards are a myth,” and then you go on making strident moral claims to pursue your argument. If the third path is becoming less popular, the second is still very much the standard in much of the humanities. So attacking relativism as a source of great mischief in humanities scholarship remains relevant.

The Boghossian report presents a certain theory of the case for the flaws in humanities scholarship. The theory is that there are two kinds of standards that one might appeal to in doing humanities scholarship, epistemic standards of objective truth/knowledge/understanding on one hand, and political standards on the other. While it is hard to characterize the epistemic standards in any kind of precise way, they serve an essential regulative function within all forms of scholarship, including the humanities. Some biased scholarship does acknowledge the importance of epistemic standards (the first track), but the very fact that those standards are acknowledged means that we’re playing the same game, and appeal to epistemic standards can help eliminate the bias. But when epistemic standards are rejected wholesale, either defensively (the second track) or offensively (the third track), the regulative function vanishes, and the whole enterprise quickly goes off the rails. The rejection of epistemic standards is the remit of relativism. Therefore, if relativistic scholarship is purged from the humanities, the second and third track will be foreclosed, and we’ll be in a much better position.

If there is a flaw with this analysis, it’s that it is too sanguine about the prospects of eliminating bias on the first track. Clever people can twist themselves into pretzels to say that any crazy view lives up to the relevant epistemic standards (this fact is one that relativists are extremely familiar with, although they draw wild conclusions from it). And the academy is nothing if not populated with clever people who are adept at twisting themselves into pretzels to support crazy views.

But if there’s a deep truth to this analysis, it’s that there is value in making people go through the pretzel-twisting effort. Scholars should be required to give epistemic reasons for accepting claims about the world, to try to show that their theories correspond in some way to the facts. It is deeply corrosive and academically unserious to respond to such demands with “objectivity, lol.” Yet that is precisely what much of humanities scholarship has become.

Is relativism the only problem with the humanities? No way. Is it the foundational problem with the humanities? Maybe, although I wouldn’t bet on it. Is it a major, central problem with the philosophical underpinnings of the humanities? Absolutely it is! And it has been since the 90s. Boghossian is entitled to his “I told you so.”

Will this report convince people in the humanities to abandon their relativism? No way. Will this report provide intellectual cover for administrators to more aggressively dismantle the humanities in many universities, particularly in departments like anthropology that embrace a relativistic and political methodology? Almost certainly.

Will that be an overall improvement to the intellectual life of the humanities, and to the academy overall? I don’t know. I hope so. I guess we’ll see.

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(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5871427&forum_id=2...id.#49919840)