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In early June, the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University released a Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences that they commissioned from the philosopher Paul Boghossian. They asked Boghossian to address “complaints” that this scholarship has been deteriorating in quality and rigor, embracing “problematic philosophical views” about “truth, evidence, and knowledge” and allowing “background ideological values” (especially progressive values) “to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge” (page 2). Boghossian assembled a group of ten scholars to make the assessment. The general Report was informed by “internal reports” on six subject areas, written by panel members, along with background data compiled by two researchers (one of whom was Boghossian’s student), and “consultation with experts in fields unrepresented on the committee,” although none of these experts are named or acknowledged (page 3).
There was a lot of discussion and debate on the Report earlier this summer, not least with respect to what it says about our discipline of anthropology. I read the Report at the time, boiled over with frustration, felt thankful to colleagues who immediately took to anthropology’s defense, and went back to reading James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (which doesn’t appear in the Report, I can tell you that). But I appreciated the invitation to contribute to this forum: a summertime of reflection is always helpful, and two of the internal reports (one by Kwame Anthony Appiah on Literary Studies and another by Ashley Rubin on Sociology) had appeared by mid-August, shedding new light. One might have hoped that all of the internal reports would have been available up front, not least given the general Report’s emphasis on evidence. That said, the internal reports I was able to consider in the process of writing this commentary were edited before they were released to the public; this makes it difficult to assess how they informed the general Report. (Two more internal reports have appeared in the meantime—one on History and a second on Literary Studies—but regretfully too late to be considered here.)
In case you had your own version of time with Totemism and Exogamy and never got to the Boghossian Report, let me sum up what I take to be a few key points. As with so much in life, it delivers good news and bad news. Since good news is rare these days, let me start with that. On page 4, the authors write, “As we will emphasize, there is serious scholarship in every field we have studied, and at their best, the humanities and social sciences are as rigorous and as fruitful today as they have ever been.” A few pages later, we get a bit more: “In every area we have considered, there is an abundance of serious scholarship” (page 10).
This is not just good news, I’d say; this is great news. An abundance of serious scholarship? A finding worthy of headlines. Curiously, however, the Report doesn’t provide a single example of what the rigorous, fruitful, or serious scholarship looks like. In any case, we know that good news doesn’t sell, and it certainly didn’t lead to headlines over the summer along the lines of: “The Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences: As Rigorous and Serious as They’ve Ever Been, Report Finds.” I might as well use that as a title here.
I want to begin to address the troubling gap at the heart of the Report, but before doing so, it is necessary to relay the bad news it delivers: “Every field we have studied shows some signs of… pathologies… [namely,] a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity” (page 4). Of all the fields they studied, anthropology sits as the “extreme” end of the spectrum (page 5). At the same time, they say this extremity is found in “rare cases” (page 12), that their “conclusions are provisional,” and that they don’t have the kind of evidence that would be expected for peer-reviewed research (page 5). What’s more, they “urge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report” (page 5).
In Appiah’s internal report on Literary Studies, which he made public in mid-July, six appendices present the results of various AI-driven data collection exercises, undertaken by Yu Guo (Boghossian’s student) and Gavin Cook. They receive very little sustained attention in Appiah’s report itself, however, and one wonders what to make of them. Appendix 6, for example, provides a word-frequency analysis of MLA job lists from 1976 to 2025. Table 5.7.6 suggests that “social-justice-oriented language,” which the general Report identifies as a key source of the pathologies infecting the scholarly corpus, had a frequency rate from 2021-25 of 4.08 per 10,000 words. Is this a pathology? There’s no real discussion by Appiah on this, and no link is made between this data and the general Report’s concerns with the risks to scholarly integrity posed by certain mobilizations of social justice activism. More notable to me, in any case, is something else Appendix 6 details: the precipitous drop in the frequency of “tenure-track” or “tenured” positions mentioned in job listings over the past several decades. From a peak of 58.02/10,000 in 1986-90, we hit 14.70/10,000 in 2021-25. Could we have a presidential commission on this, please?
Against this backdrop, one is hard pressed to call the general Report a “report” at all. It is a polemic. After some preliminary Independent Commission cosplay, peppered with caveats, qualifications, and hedging, the general Report morphs into an extended critique of the concept of relativism, informed above all by Boghossian’s dislike for it. What the Report means by relativism is tucked into footnote 22: “that there is no such thing as objective knowledge or an objective fact, and that the reasons to support a view always depend on contingent non-epistemic values and interests.” Boghossian has been making his case for thirty years. The Report even recycles a favorite block quote of his, from a 1997 article, by Kathleen Lennon, on “situated knowledge,” as a kind of Exhibit-A for the prosecution (see page 21). Boghossian has been using this quote since 2002, at least. It also appears in his book, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism—yes, that is the title—which was published twenty years ago. Other than a handful of contemporary cherry-picked quotes, stripped of much context, and some brief references to more recent battles in the culture wars (on sex and gender, on race), much of the Boghossian Report seems stuck in academic debates from the waning decades of the twentieth century, and oddly fixated on Boghossian’s bête noir. I am not saying that the other members of the committee don’t share his concern with relativism, but it’s worth noting there is not a single mention of relativism—pathological or otherwise—in Appiah or Rubin’s internal reports.
(The question of whether these internal reports provide commensurate forms of data or evidence is one I hope others might take up; there is a lot to discuss on this front. Appiah’s is 24 pages. Rubin’s is 123. Rubin also does us the courtesy of acknowledging that she received compensation for her participation on the commission, which isn’t mentioned in any of the other reports, although the source of the funding for the whole exercise is not made clear—a rare but notable breach of academic norms. Rubin also discloses that she has “previously published work expressing concerns about the relationship between activism and scholarship” in her specialist area. She is not alone, and the independence of this “independent group” is also worthy of more attention. It’s heavy on NYU faculty and analytic philosophy, for instance, and one member, Jason Merchant, was simultaneously recruited to a deanship at Vanderbilt. I always thought that independent commissions at least tried to forestall perceptions of imbalance.)
When concerns are characterized as pathologies, it certainly makes sense to address them, even if they’re rarely found. But heeding the general Report’s mantras on objectivity, evidence, and call for “reliably broad-minded experts” who “can be relied on to take a measured view,” it’s not a measured characterization (page 6). Upon its release, the Provost of Washington University even had to issue an open letter to his own faculty: don’t take this personally, was the message, and let’s talk in the fall. So much for bringing people to the table for the conversation.
What might a report that championed, or even considered, the abundance of serious scholarship have looked like? What work could that have done? If the public deficit of trust in higher education is due to the pathologies of relativism—and as has been suggested, I’m not sure that’s the case—why not showcase the good?
If the commission wanted a test case from anthropology of the charges they were presented with, I might point them first to Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Above all this is because it falls squarely in the “serious scholarship” column. Mahmood spent two years conducting fieldwork in Cairo on an urban women’s mosque movement, one socially and theologically conservative current within the larger Islamic Revival. Her book makes signal contributions to a number of longstanding anthropological interests and debates, including ritual studies, the anthropology of ethics and values, and work on gender and embodiment. The book also tackles age-old concerns with freedom, agency, and autonomy. But it’s also worthy of the commission’s attention because Mahmood had what the commissioners tag with suspicion, and which is said to stand behind the “complaints” the university chancellors wanted to assess: strong political commitments. She identifies as a “progressive leftist,” plain and simple, in the book’s preface.
I can’t do justice to the detail and range of Mahmood’s contributions. What I want to highlight here is its exemplary instantiation of what I see as the core precept of cultural anthropology, namely, that we should always question our own beliefs and ways of living, and seek to understand those of others. And that a central aspect of our work is to present, as best we can, their points of view. Of the many things it does, Politics of Piety refuses to dismiss the logics and lifeways of Mahmood’s interlocutors: women whose vision of piety and faith are incompatible with the liberal, secular, and feminist visions against which they are often measured. This engagement of self and other, or, as we often put it, the familiar and the strange, has been bedrock to the anthropological sensibility since the early twentieth century. As cliché as these formulations are, they are the operative elements of the relativism at work in Mahmood’s analyses. It is a relativism that provincializes the self, not the other. “This is not an exercise in generosity,” she writes, “but is born of the sense I have that we can no longer arrogantly assume that secular forms of life and secularism’s progressive formulations necessarily exhaust ways of living meaningfully and richly in this world. This realization has led me to parochialize my own political certitude as I write analytically about what animates parts of the Islamist movement, and has compelled me to refuse to take my political stance as the necessary lens through which the labor of analysis should proceed.”
To be fair, the general Report does not deny the possibility that one can have strong political commitments and still produce what the commissioners deem real scholarship. The problem is that where it matters, the Report opts for moral panic over substantive engagement with examples of academic work that have shaped the debates in their fields, not least in cases, such as Mahmood’s, which so thoroughly problematize the complaint that leftists in Berkeley are dispensing with the hard problems of scholarly research in the service of political agendas.
This is not to say the clickbait quotes the Report offers up of anthropological extremism actually capture the positions of the authors in question. To say that Akhil Gupta, for example, calls “for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding” is truly remarkable (page 12). He has been conducting fieldwork in India for over thirty years. He has published three books—books full of facts, figures, and ethnographic details—precisely “aimed at understanding” a range of issues: how development projects impact local-level agricultural practices; whether and to what extent state bureaucracies alleviate rural poverty; and how workers in international call centers try to make ends meet and envision a successful future. There’s no indication the commissioners even bothered to find Gupta’s CV, much less read his extensive body of work.
With the time and resources of a commission, or frankly even just more time and space, I’d happily provide further evidence of and support for the excellent work being produced in anthropology (and beyond). We all could. But at the end of the summer, this is what stays with me: the utter disregard for the actual record of anthropology, of the abundant work—across all the subfields—that pushes forward our understanding of humanity and the human condition. The “and yet” framing that follows every perfunctory gesture toward the good in the Boghossian Report cannot distract from utter dismay over the not-so-disinterested nature of the inquiry undertaken. Higher education is on fire, and basically these guys want to go on about the pernicious influence of Jacques Derrida. At one point the commissioners write: “The goal must be to promote a scholarly ecosystem in which academic work is assessed by its capacity to advance our understanding—of society, of the past and of the products of the imagination—by the application of rigorously scholarly standards, all of which are designed, inter alia, to limit the risk of ideological distortion of every sort.” (p. 7) Sure. If only we had that here.