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The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences is not a neutral audit; it is a tactical hit job on disciplines like anthropology. Hand-delivered to university chancellors and presidents—conspicuously bypassing the scholars, students, and research partners actually doing the work—this supposedly “fair assessment” is a political manifesto tailored to sanitize the academy of left-wing thought. Never mind the occasional performative handwringing scattered across its pages; its true utility is giving skittish administrators a ready-made pretext to shutter departments that irritate them.
Predictably, scholars were quick to dismantle the Report’s shoddy mechanics. Critics have exposed how it hypocritically weaponizes the very politicization it pretends to abhor. They have defended fields like anthropology against crude caricature, laying bare the intellectual poverty, historical amnesia, and false pretenses to “disinterested scholarship” the Report peddles as a nostalgic panacea. Our contribution, however, is to place this desperate attempt at academic central planning where it belongs: squarely within the broader, predictable arc of the culture wars.
The critique of the “liberal university” has functioned as both a primary battleground and a chief propaganda engine for the American right for over four decades. From panics over Western canons to relentless attacks on institutional governance, conservative strategists have worked tirelessly to erode public trust in academic expertise. In the 1980s, the “canonical battles” erupted as postmodernism, post-structuralism, and critical theory gained ground. Right-wing commentators decried higher education as a sanctuary for moral relativism, insisting in works like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind that campuses were trading timeless truth for radical fads. When funding conservative student rags, legal advocacy groups, and endowed chairs failed to reverse the tide, right-wing foundations simply built a ring of think tanks around the university to serve as alternative, public-facing factories for their own favored orthodoxies.
By the 1990s, the target shifted to Black, Native, ethnic, gender, and queer studies just as these programs were establishing serious academic ground. These fields dared to open lines of inquiry disregarded by a white, cisgender male status quo, transforming the humanities and humanistic social sciences and making the university somewhat hospitable to those historically locked out of it. The right’s response was to seize on new scholarship, diversity policies, and affirmative action as the most recent sources of institutional decline and intellectual impoverishment. Left scholars themselves pointed out the glaring flaws of 1990s liberal multiculturalism—namely, how its obsession with recognition neatly ignored political economy and class analysis during an era of exploding economic inequality. Others pointed to the disproportionate institutional and emotional labor borne by those chosen to showcase the liberal university’s commitment to diversity. But nuance doesn’t sell outrage: the right boiled the debate down to “political correctness,” casting university faculty and administrators as totalitarian enforcers silencing dissent and effectively reframing the university as an out-of-touch echo chamber to alienate non-college-educated voters.
The 2010s brought a fresh wave of liberal-left activism targeting racial, climate, and economic injustice. Every disinvited speaker or protested lecture was eagerly amplified online as definitive proof of a fragile, authoritarian campus culture. Skepticism spiked across the political spectrum: while the left rightly criticized universities for hyper-exploitative adjunct labor and corporate managerialism, the right stuck to its tired script of ideological indoctrination and elite bias.
By the 2020s, the culture war moved from media bellyaching to direct state intervention. “Critical Race Theory” and “DEI” became legislative boogeymen in states like Florida, Ohio, and Texas. Conservative lawmakers pushed educational gag orders, gutted diversity offices, destabilized tenure, and stacked governing boards with political appointees. After October 2023, eroding institutional autonomy and academic freedom became a bipartisan effort with the Biden administration actively intervening to suppress student and faculty opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Enter Trump’s second term. Bludgeoning higher education serves a dual purpose: it centralizes executive power while tossing red meat to a base primed to hate liberal cultural institutions. For the Trump administration, targeting universities provides a handy excuse to crush campus dissent—particularly the movement for Palestinian liberation—and threaten federal funding or accreditation for non-compliant programs. The irony, of course, is that the university remains a fundamentally conservative, bureaucratic entity, as evidenced in the speed with which administrators have moved to dismantle whole fields of study deemed too radical. Trump simply finds it convenient to use the university as a punching bag to “own the libs.” Meanwhile, framing higher education as an unaccountable “enemy” appeals directly to populist grievances over class, status, and economic stagnation.
Which brings us to the latest spectacle: university-commissioned “evaluations” like the Report on the State of Scholarship. Commissioned by leadership at the elite private institutions of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, the effort was led by philosopher Paul Boghossian, a man whose crusades against postmodernism and social constructivism have long since ceased to move the needle inside the academy.
Why launch this salvo now, precisely as the Trump administration threatens the entire sector with research cuts, federal loan sabotage, and heavy-handed regulation? The authors likely do not view themselves as Trump’s foot soldiers; the Report even pauses to pat the humanities on the head, deeming them “essential”—provided, of course, that scholars never attempt to shape society or use their findings to advance a cause. What we are witnessing is a cadre of sidelined conservative academics attempting to leverage the MAGA assault to posture as the only adults left in the room. As the liberal-left reacts to authoritarian overreach, these scholars assume—whether naively or cynically—that their call for “disinterested reason” will restore their lost status within whatever ruins remain after Trump swings his sledgehammer.
Rather than uniting to defend higher education against an existential threat, these disgruntled traditionalists chose this exact moment to settle old grievances. It is a revealing choice. We should thank them for making their priorities so transparent while the house burns around them. Some people in the academy remain resilient enough—and critical enough—to expose their conservative self-interest while continuing the far more urgent work of teaching and organizing against authoritarianism.
Yet, endlessly refuting these bad-faith reports is a trap. Defense is a losing strategy when the terrain itself is being liquidated. A productive political response cannot mean retreating into a defensive crouch to preserve the corporate university as it currently exists—a system defined by bloated administrations, hyper-precarious labor, and exorbitant tuition. Instead, scholars must respond to this crisis by helping to build a popular front. Appealing to administrators who view humanistic inquiry as a PR liability may be a distasteful requirement of the current moment, but solidarity is more important. Academics must link arms with migrants, trans people, feminists, off-campus labor unions, community organizers, voting rights proponents, pro-Palestine activists, public-sector workers, and other Trump dissenters. The fight for the humanities and social sciences must be reframed not as a defense of elite academic privilege but as a common good essential for a democratic society: an infrastructure that builds collective knowledge against authoritarian rule and corporate extraction.