Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published in the National Association of Scholars’s weekly CounterCurrent newsletter on July 14, 2026. My colleague, Kali Jerrard, does an excellent job each week analyzing the latest developments in higher education, and I’m happy to crosspost her work here. To subscribe to CounterCurrent or browse past editions, visit the National Association of Scholars’s CounterCurrent archive.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (the Report), authored by Vanderbilt University and Washington University. While my initial analysis of the Report was brief, it warrants a closer look, especially now that National Association of Scholars President Peter W. Wood has offered his own critique.

While there are strengths to the Report, it swings back and forth between chastisement and timidly restating what critics have said, Wood argues.

Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, convened the group of 10 scholars to diagnose and address the state of academic scholarship within the humanities and social sciences. Directed at university chancellors and presidents who are concerned at the state of things—but not barring other concerned parties—the Report narrowly tailors its focus to university leaders who wish to promote “excellent scholarship in these vital fields.” But Wood wonders, “How many chancellors and presidents share this concern and seek to promote ‘excellent scholarship’ in the relevant fields?” I imagine we’d have a better chance of striking gold under our Midtown office than finding enough caring college presidents to make a difference.

Wood’s summary of the three main report sections is best read in his own words, but I will take a moment to address the third section of the report, which has drawn the most applause and criticism.

According to the third section of the Report, the real problem within the humanities and social sciences is that,

In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.

Politicized scholarship in the humanities is the crux of the issue. Indeed, the Report lists examples of political excess, which Wood says are the closest the Report gets to describing what actually went wrong in the humanities. He also explains that points b, c, and d get more “expansive treatment” by the Report authors with footnotes and explanations, and also receive the most criticism. As one example from the Report,

The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project.

This does not at first glance seem especially inflammatory, “but they are followed by examples that touch academic nerves,” says Wood. Corresponding to point b,

Under ‘b’—constraint of scholarship by political commitment—the Report invokes ‘Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organized around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense.’

American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Chapters at both Vanderbilt University and Washington University were swift to condemn the Report as distorting the state of the humanities and social sciences within the institutions themselves and within academia. Even worse, the AAUP statement expresses that the Report “proposes a shocking intrusion of university administration into faculty governance and portends greater threats to academic freedom that should concern all faculty.” The AAUP chapters were not alone in their criticisms of the Report. But maybe it is time for university administrations to step up, take a stance, and roll back the ideological corruption they allowed to proliferate within higher education.

While the Report concludes with some insight into how the humanities and social sciences have become politicized, it does not offer concrete steps to solve the issue at hand. Wood ends by saying,

The result was a report that never settled on a single line of argument. The compromise was apparently to give each his due and to stitch the whole together with the thread that, no matter the besting problems in the humanities, excellent scholarship is still being written … They have given us instead a tepid diagnosis that will do nothing to set things right.

It seems, at least on paper, that higher education is waking up to the many problems—most of them self-induced—and the continuing loss of public trust that afflicts the sector. I had hoped this year’s wave of institutional self-assessments would lead to meaningful reform. But, as with the Yale Report published earlier this year, I worry that this Report will amount to little more than lip service.

Until colleges and universities stop hiding or rebranding “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives, root out ideology in the classrooms, and take accountability measures to prove they sincerely wish to restore public trust and promote excellent scholarship, these internal reform efforts are likely to be believed less and less.

Read Peter W. Wood’s article in full here, as well as David Randall’s perspective on the Report here.