Academic Authoritarianism in New Attack on Humanities Scholars

Some academics bemoaning the decline of the humanities have looked around for an enemy of the people and decided to round up the usual suspects: social justice scholars.

This time, it’s a committee of esteemed conservative and centrist scholars appointed a year ago by Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, to blame left-wing professors for all the ills of the humanities.

The committee’s “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” was released last week, and it’s dreadful.

The scholarship underlying this report is terrible, the arguments are weak and the recommendations are destructive to academic freedom and shared governance.

The committee claims, “Every field we have studied shows … a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria.” If you imagine that every single academic field has the same identical ideological problem, the most logical explanation is that the ideological bias is coming from you.

There is virtually no evidence offered in the report for their sweeping conclusions about the entirety of the humanities. Instead, the report declares that it has a series of secret “internal reports” on various fields that prove what it claims.

No sound scholar publishes their conclusions and declares that all the evidence to support those claims is found in secret “internal reports.” Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, it is a bad argument when you refuse to show your evidence.

And what little evidence is presented in the report directly contradicts their claims of left-wing control over the humanities and suggests the authors have a deeply delusional view of academia that is out of touch with reality.

One of the remarkably few pieces of evidence anywhere in the report claims the “social justice” view compels scholars to believe that “there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology.” I’ll quote the report at length here:

In reality, this example is substantial proof that this committee is wrong. They admit the “scholarly consensus” conforms to traditional gender roles, and that the “world’s leading experts” all critiqued the study that diverged from these traditional norms. No one condemned these scholars for attacking this study. So where is the alleged political pressure to conform to the so-called preferred ethical position?

The committee’s declaration (without a shred of evidence offered) that the study was published only because “all the authors were female” is as stupid as it is sexist.

It appears that the committee embraces repression of left-wing views as their goal, questioning how scholarship with social justice views “could have been published.”

The committee makes a breathtakingly broad claim of left-wing bias overwhelming and totally controlling academia. It offers one anecdote as proof of this massive left-wing bias. And that anecdote directly contradicts its claims.

The report is a parade of ad hominem attacks dismissing all social justice scholarship as a mix of identity politics and postmodernist relativism. Ranting about relativism was a straw man when Allan Bloom did it in The Closing of the American Mind. Forty years later, repeating this same third-rate reductionism about evil relativists is just as unenlightening. This bogeyman of relativism is an imaginary beast invoked to depict every left-wing approach as part of a conspiracy to destroy knowledge.

But perhaps the worst parts of this report are its repressive conclusions. A committee that fears left-wing censorship of scholarship (which is a real thing to be concerned about) could have easily proposed any number of excellent recommendations, such as urging stronger protections for academic freedom and tenure and calling upon all colleges and professional associations to adopt defenses for free expression.

Instead, the committee takes a much more disturbing direction toward endorsing academic authoritarianism—the use of administrative power to seize control of academic departments and impose ideological standards on them in order to purge leftist scholars.

The committee argues that scholars in the humanities “risk forfeiting their claims to deference from concerned administrators and support from the wider public.” The belief that alleged political biases in academia justify both administrative intervention and funding cuts is an extraordinary threat to both academic freedom and shared governance. The conclusions of the committee are so dangerous that they felt compelled to limit some of them at the start.

While the committee members “urge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report,” they still call for “first steps” toward academic repression: “an intensive study of the units in question conducted by reliably broad-minded disciplinary experts (in-house and external) and by experts in adjacent disciplines who take the problems seriously and can be relied on to take a measured view. In our view, nothing in this report warrants any intervention more intrusive than such first steps.”

But even these first steps are a call for a massive onslaught of academic witch hunts against departments, ordered by administrators who select only experts who “take the problems seriously” of too many leftists and “can be relied on” to support action against these units. These might only be the “first steps” to administrative authoritarianism, but they are definitely steps in the wrong direction.

The humanities today face the worst assault on academic freedom in the history of American higher education, as Republican politicians explicitly target leftists for censorship. This committee’s report would be terrible in the best of times, with its secret evidence and embarrassingly weak arguments compounded by a call for administrative repression. The belief that every field in the humanities is secretly controlled by social justice warriors has always been a false conspiracy theory, but to make these fantastical claims during the middle of a war against the humanities is a particularly dangerous delusion.