Editor’s Note: The following essay was originally published by Law & Liberty on August 3, 2026. It is republished here with permission and has been lightly edited to conform to our style guidelines.

Let’s call it the Vanderbilt Report for short, though its formal name is the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences. And none of its 10 authors holds a position at Vanderbilt University. It is the Vanderbilt Report because it was commissioned by the chancellor of Vanderbilt and Washington Universities, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, both of whom have gained some notoriety in the last few years for breaking with the lockstep orthodoxies that characterize leadership in most of American higher education. 

Diermeier brought students back to his Nashville campus when most colleges and universities were still locked down, and he has championed academic freedom and scholarly excellence in an era where those concepts are often praised but little practiced. Martin publicly weighed signing on to President Donald Trump’s proposed “contract” with universities, when it had received the cold shoulder from everyone else. In 2024, he ordered the arrest of more than 100 pro-Hamas protesters who were occupying part of his St. Louis campus.

These were among the reasons that Diermeier and Martin were singled out in a 2025 Atlantic article, “The Elite-University Presidents Who Despise One Another,” as the leaders of the southern side of a new civil war in American higher education. So the stage had been set for a less than cheery welcome from the guardians of the status quo. The Vanderbilt Report has been righteously condemned by a “who’s who” of the academic left.

The report says that the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies are “in trouble.” Part of this stems from public misunderstanding, but a significant portion has arisen from the public perception that legitimate scholarship has been inappropriately subordinated to political goals, especially the pursuit of “social justice.” The report doesn’t validate this “perception” across the board, but it finds enough warrant for it to warn that universities need to recommit themselves to “disinterested inquiry.”

Harsh responses to such a report were predictable, and being easily found, I will say little about them. These critics consider that the Vanderbilt Report is “politicized.” Their criticism of the academy’s left-leaning tilt is unacceptable because (a) it strengthens the hands of right-wing ignoramuses, (b) the humanities ought indeed support the liberatory causes of the left, (c) the report grossly overstates the concern, and (d) so what? 

I, too, find fault with the Vanderbilt Report, but for very different reasons. It is maddeningly understated. Except when they are taking aim at my own discipline, anthropology, the authors of the report pull their punches. They cite plenty of instances of academic malpractice in a wide range of fields, and of course it is good for the public to be more familiar with this problem. But this data could have supported a compelling case for deep and systemic reform. The authors decline to make one. 

Instead, they have presented 30 pages of tepid critique, apology, and self-cancellation. The timidity is palpable. They repeatedly declare their own findings “provisional.” They avow that they lack the “quantitative evidence” needed to pass “peer review.” Readers are assured that outsiders (i.e., academic administrators) should defer to the expertise within the very disciplines the report critiques. Narrowing the scope of the report to the “quality of scholarship,” they set aside the quality of teaching, the shape of the curriculum, and the recruitment, appointment, and tenuring of colleagues. Finally, they express no concern about admissions to graduate programs. 

It would, in fairness, have required a longer report to address all these matters. A case for meaningful reform would require an examination not only of “the state of scholarly work” in terms of scholarly papers and books, but also the scholarly work of teaching students and articulating the standards of scholarship. But such a report is clearly warranted by the Vanderbilt Report’s stated goals. Readers will note that the charge begins with a wide-open door: 

As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines. 

Further along, however, Diermeier and Martin name a specific concern: 

many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields. 

And they charge their “commission of eminent scholars” to:

examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified.

If the authors really wish to halt the “dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials,” it will clearly be necessary to expand their lens to include more than just scholarly papers.

To reach that, the Commission would have to recognize that the “distortions” in the pursuit of knowledge that undermined public trust are at least as much about what happens in the classroom as they are about scholarship. And those distortions are even more visible when the public learns that nearly all the members of the philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies departments are registered Democrats, consider themselves on the far left of the American political spectrum, or some other indicia are recognizably at odds with American public opinion. The public is not ignorant of these matters. They are reported frequently and emphatically by polling organizations and other researchers and have filtered into the nation’s political discourse.

The Commission complained about the lack of empirical measures for the “politicization” of scholarship, but where such measures are indeed available, the Commission simply ignored them. The party registration of a scholar is by no means proof of errant epistemology in that scholar’s published work, but it surely is a factor to be considered.

This isn’t some Trump-era corruption of the concept of academic freedom. Arthur O. Lovejoy, co-founder in 1915 of the American Association of University Professors and the architect of the American version of “academic freedom,” held that the doctrine could not protect members of the Communist Party because such membership required them to subordinate the pursuit of truth to whatever “Party Line” was dictated to them.

Public trust in the integrity of the humanities still hangs by that thread. No amount of post-modern, self-exculpatory social justice word play will convince the public that a scholar who is ardently committed to a political cause can be trusted to be the judge of his own case. The public might well be willing to countenance academic departments in the humanities in which the zealous advocate of a cause must persuade others who are indifferent to it or skeptical that his work meets scholarly standards. But that is precisely what doesn’t happen today. And the Vanderbilt Report largely turns a blind eye to this situation.

Perhaps oddly, its eyes do seem to be wide open in the field of anthropology, which the Commissioners label “an extreme case,” where: 

we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished. 

How curious that the report can be simultaneously so right, and rather wrong. It is perfectly true that anthropology is in a bad state, as I am in a position to know. I was a tenured member of a research university’s anthropology department, from which I resigned in 2005 to take up a provost position at a college. I was not unhappy with my colleagues nor was I ill-treated by them, despite significant differences in our social and political views. But it was already plain at that point that the discipline as a whole was headed over a cliff.

Anthropology is a fairly young field of inquiry, stirred to life in the nineteenth century by the first systematic and would-be scientific efforts to comprehend both human diversity and human commonality. Most of these early efforts were tied up with evolutionary theory, but there emerged from this a determination to discover and record the plain facts of human existence in all places of the inhabited globe. Over the course of about 125 years, anthropology built an unparalleled record of world ethnography.

It varied in quality, of course, though not in ambition. The scholarly standard was to get the facts, which sometimes entailed heated debates as to what should count as fact. Should we define marriage so broadly as to include social arrangements in which men were mostly incidental? Is the division of labor by sex a feature of human society everywhere? How does inequality take root in seemingly egalitarian societies? A discipline is probably better defined by the questions it wrestles with than in the answers it finds, and anthropology found a great many such questions. Sometimes, of course, as in the case of Margaret Mead, the answers offered by particular anthropologists gained more purchase than they should have. Over time, anthropology morphed from a young science to a sanctuary for utopian dreamers, totalitarians, post-colonialists, champions of Third Worldism, and an ever-expanding collection of advocates of odd claims with no scientific basis.

Which brings me back to the Vanderbilt Report. Its admirable clarity in critiquing anthropology has created some healthy debate within the discipline. I left the profession of anthropology some 20 years ago, but I kept up my professional memberships, journal subscriptions, and friendships with a fair number of anthropologists. So I have had a ringside seat to the discipline’s response to the report. At the center of that report is a section on scholars who: 

explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise. 

Many people within the discipline agree with that characterization, though they don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing. In his 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, for instance, Akhil Gupta announced that anthropology indeed has a “political project,” namely: 

to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism. 

Where does that leave anthropologists, like me, who reject this idea? But Gupta was not alone in configuring anthropology for a political purpose. The report cites other anthropologists who weighed in, such as Fernando Villanea, who explained that anthropology now exists to “serve the interests” of people whom anthropologists in the old days hurt—presumably by describing them accurately. Yet another anthropologist, José Santos, is quoted as explaining that contemporary anthropology pursues “not voyeurism but advocacy,” as if the goal of objective description was a kind of pornography. Clearly the Vanderbilt Report was not off base in seeing anthropology as a politicized discipline.

Nevertheless, the officialdom of the discipline did not take it lying down. The most important response came from Carolyn Rouse, current president of the American Anthropological Association, who began with an across-the-board dismissal: “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.” 

Rouse’s response is worth reading in full. She worries that “the report risks conflating intellectual disagreement with intellectual decline.” This is a proposal for a fair battlefield, and my fellow anthropologists at Heterodox Academy are willing to meet her there, but Rouse has a poor track record of meeting the not-like-minded in honest exchange. In 2023, she stood behind the American Anthropological Association’s decision to cancel a panel on “biological sex” differences, proposed by several of my colleagues, on grounds that it was potentially dangerous to “the safety of LGBTQ+ members,” and the AAA also had “concerns over scientific integrity.” Sex differences have long been a fundamental category of analysis, certainly as pertinent to the community of LGBTQ+ activists as anyone else, but in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rouse asserted that because intersex individuals exist, in her views treating sexual binary as real and important would be illegitimate: “to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.” 

Obviously, at that time she felt quite secure in her progressive posture. Is it bad for a document like the Vanderbilt Report to force such a person to make a public defense of her discipline’s intellectual culture and scholarly norms? I take this to be a very welcome thing, which could possibly open the way to fruitful discussion and real reform. Why did the report decline to do as much for other disciplines? Anthropology clearly is not the only scholarly discipline deeply infected with political partisanship and groupthink.

It feels like a missed opportunity. Would that the Vanderbilt Report consistently showed the same vigor and depth of its critique to all disciplines in the humanities. Instead, it devotes pages to pointless distinctions, excuses, and evasions in the vain hope of mounting the narrowest possible critique of disciplines that have recklessly abandoned their core responsibilities. I suppose the members of the Commission flinched at the prospect of facing their colleagues after laying out the unvarnished truth. But perhaps they have made peace with it. In either case, Chancellors Diermeier and Martin should consider the report as mostly feathers, with a steel spine hidden in the middle. 

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