A commission of 10 scholars convened by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis released a report in June concluding that scholarship in the humanities and social science disciplines has been distorted by political motives. This central claim has drawn criticism from faculty across the nation, as well as mixed reactions from professors at the University.
The “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” also known as the “Vanderbilt Report,” was chaired by New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian and explored six disciplines — philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and music studies — for evidence that political considerations and biases have taken the place of traditional scholarly standards.
The commission consisted of nine other scholars alongside Boghossian. According to Inside Higher Ed, eight of the authors are men, with two women and one person of color on the committee. According to the report’s references, the commission conducted research from journals, books and articles. It found that philosophy and history showed the fewest signs of politicization, sociology was moderately criticized for politicization, and anthropology was singled out as the field most heavily influenced by political ideology.
The report's authors describe “politicization” as scholars producing research based on whether it supports a preferred political conclusion, rather than by traditional standards of evidence. According to the report, this can happen when research that challenges a popular political narrative is blocked from publication, or when scholars face professional backlash for reaching "wrong" conclusions.
“[Anthropology shows] a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity,” the report states.
The American Association of University Professors chapters at Vanderbilt and Washington University issued a joint statement after the report’s release. The statement called on the two chancellors to rescind the report, and criticized the authors for not disclosing the report’s funding sources or any potential conflicts of interest.
“The report distorts the state of humanistic and social scientific scholarship at our universities and in the academy overall,” the AAUP statement reads.
Prof. Akhil Gupta, a sociocultural anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Inside Higher Ed there were errors in the manner in which the authors chose to cite Gupta’s work when making the claim that anthropology has abandoned searching for truth by favoring political advocacy. The report cites a line from Gupta’s 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, in which he wrote that the field’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.” Gupta called the use of this quotation out of context a “cardinal academic error” and an excuse to “bash interpretive disciplines.”
At the University, several faculty took issue with the report, saying there was not appropriate evidence for some of the claims made. The Cavalier Daily reached out to 11 humanities professors — five did not respond by time of publication, two said they were unavailable for an interview and four participated in a written or oral interview.
In a statement to The Cavalier Daily, Antonia LoLordo, interim chair of the Corcoran Department of Philosophy and George C. and Clare F. Downing Memorial Professor of Philosophy, said she was skeptical of the report’s central claims, specifying that although four of the 10 authors are philosophers, their conclusions do not reflect a consensus across the humanities discipline.
“The authors have not made public the full body of evidence lying behind these claims,” LoLordo wrote. “I don’t find either claim particularly plausible, although perhaps if they’d laid out the evidence I would feel differently.”
Part of the report’s discussion of philosophy is based on a footnote in the report describing pressure against universities over books in the philosophy of sex and gender. The discussion includes the Oxford University Press’s initial decision to not publish philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith’s “Gender Critical Feminism” and the dropping of Alex Byrne’s “Trouble with Gender” due to public pressure. LoLordo argued that the report’s framing of this as internal politicization is not necessarily a problem in the humanities. She said she has colleagues studying these subjects whose work is “rigorous” and “meets the highest scholarly standards.”
“The primary source of political pressure on it at the moment seems to be laws like the ones in Texas regulating what can and can’t be taught in higher education classrooms, restraints on federal funding for any work that is judged to include ‘gender ideology,’ etc., rather than internal pressure from within the humanities themselves,” LoLordo wrote.
Texas’ Senate Bill 37, passed in 2025, gives political figures greater authority over the curricula of public universities and allows university officials to decide the importance of certain elective courses as “foundational, civic-focused, broad and necessary for the workforce.”
In a statement to The Cavalier Daily, Victoria Baena, assistant professor of English and director of the department’s undergraduate program, agreed that the humanities face challenges like funding uncertainty and declining student enrollment, but that the report does not accurately diagnose the cause of the issues.
“In characterizing changes in higher education as a loss of standards, the report seems disturbingly nostalgic for a time when university research was carried out by an almost exclusively white, male and elite faculty cohort,” Baena wrote.
According to Baena, the report overlooks what she said she believes are more pressing threats targeting humanities — the instability of academic labor and the financialized model of universities.
“Around 75 percent of faculty in the U.S. are contingently employed, without stability or benefits,” Baena wrote. “The financialized and market-driven model of the university squeezes higher tuition out of students while closing humanities programs … and pressuring students to choose more ‘useful’ careers.”
Corinne Field, associate chair and associate professor of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Department, agreed with LoLordo’s skepticism of the report’s evidence arguing that the sources behind the evidence and makeup of the commission are flawed. Field pointed out that the citational apparatus of the report is a “disaster,” and she also noted that the commission's makeup, and where its members work, could shape the claims the report was able to make.
“We can’t make assumptions based on identity about what [the report’s authors] think or what their expertise is,” Field said. “But I do think that the focus on a report that is by people that are at private universities is not very helpful for our situation here, where we’re lucky enough to be at a public university.”
Field’s critique was centered on the report’s footnote 13, which claims scholarship in the philosophy of sex and gender assumes that transgender women are women “in every sense.” Field argued that the footnote completely misunderstands the fundamental debate of the field — which she said is the question, “what is this category, women?”
“WGS as a field has, since the 1980s, been dedicated to asking, ‘what is this category, women?’” Field said. “If there’s any agreement in the field, it would be that the category [of] women changes over time, [it] does not travel across cultures.”
Like Field, Sandhya Shukla, professor of English and chair of American Studies, remarked in a statement to The Cavalier Daily not just on the report’s conclusion about the fields she studies, but also on how the conclusions were reached. The report’s discussion of American Studies is based on a paper by Richard Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, who argue that American Quarterly — the leading journal of American Studies — promotes a politically biased worldview for a discussion of American Studies that Shukla wrote is everchanging.
“A coding of journal articles in terms of positive or negative portrayals of America illuminates very little about a complex and changing interdisciplinary project that is much more interested in ‘how’ nation has been imagined and lived, than the ‘what’ of any stance like exceptionalism,” Shukla wrote. “That’s a problem of method and theory.”
Shukla also argued that Kahlenberg and Lin’s statement for American Studies to teach an “honest and hopeful account of American History” itself is an ideological demand.
“They are really arguing for an ideological agenda, for an academic field, in a strange echo of what they and other critics of ‘liberal' or ‘left-wing’ humanities decry,” Shukla wrote.
Baena, Shukla and Field agreed on the core idea that humanities is vital to open up ways of understanding an interdisciplinary world.
“This increase in epistemic diversity — a wide array of ways of knowing — is an undeniable boon to knowledge and, to my mind, one of the most precious gifts that a research university can offer,” Baena wrote.
Shukla described the humanities as a space for exploring the boundaries of freedom.
"I see the humanities as the intellectual space in which to best explore the contours of freedom — of expression, of possibility, of fulfillment," Shukla wrote.
Field also looked ahead, discussing where the conversation might go regarding the humanities field beyond this report — who can even get access to an interdisciplinary humanities education.
"I think [the report] is old news," Field said. "I see real debates ahead over what kind of education people can have access to, and who can have that access. … In an age where AI is increasingly offering to summarize and generate information for us, who's going to have access to an education that's interesting and pleasurable and exciting, and opens up their world? This is such an important question right now."
Vrinda Vashist is a staff writer on the news desk. She is a second-year student in the College.
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