State of Scholarship - Vanderbilt and WashU Report Summary and Comparison

Parent: Source Audits & Media · Topic: Leftism & Woke

The Vanderbilt–WashU commission argues that political commitments sometimes displace evidence and argument in the assessment of humanistic scholarship. It also defends the value of the humanities and recognizes strong work throughout the fields examined. Its most useful contribution is a distinction: a political motivation or research topic does not establish political distortion; the question is whether evidence can overturn a preferred conclusion.

Read alongside the AASL dissertation study. The commission examines scholarly norms and illustrative disputes; AASL measures language in dissertations. Together they suggest questions worth testing, but they do not establish the prevalence of defective scholarship or show that politicization caused the humanities to contract.

Sources and versions

• Official report website and main text online.
• Main commission report, 30 pages (file not included in this release) · Original PDF. The title page says submitted April 5, 2026. The downloaded PDF has June 15, 2026 metadata and includes the Bridges attribution amendment on p. 23. Submission date and file revision date are distinct.
• Six later supporting reports are saved below. They are separately authored documents, not chapters embedded in the 30-page main PDF. Some include later evidence and revisions; Rubin’s public version is dated August 2026. Their separate appendices remain linked from the official discipline pages.
• Boghossian's July 17 essay explains and defends the commission’s argument. It is a participant’s response to criticism, rather than independent confirmation.

Main findings of the commission and supporting reports

Overall finding and scope

The commission’s overall judgment is uneven deterioration in scholarly standards, with serious research continuing in every field examined. It rejects a wholesale dismissal of the humanities, but concludes that political criteria sometimes govern which questions scholars may ask, which answers they may publish, and whose objections receive a hearing. Its account ranges from comparatively localized problems in philosophy, through a largely resilient historical profession, to much broader concerns about anthropology. The later supporting reports develop this picture with surveys, textual analyses, hiring advertisements, professional statements, and cases of scholarly controversy. Overall findings, pp. 4–5 (file not included in this release).

Commissioned in August 2025 by Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, the inquiry began in September and covered philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies. The main report concentrates on the production and evaluation of scholarship. Some supporting reports also examine curricula, hiring, enrollment, and professional organization. Charge and process, pp. 2–4 (file not included in this release).

Political commitments sometimes become conditions for scholarly acceptance

The committee identifies several mechanisms by which politics can distort inquiry:

• A preferred answer becomes a prerequisite. A claim is treated as unacceptable because it would undermine a political objective, rather than because the evidence defeats it. The result can be premature closure of a genuinely open question.
• Professional sanctions enforce that closure. Publication pressure, disinvitation, stigmatization, and career risks can discourage dissent. The committee argues that scholars may avoid a question before any explicit sanction occurs, because they anticipate the consequences.
• Advocacy replaces the aim of understanding. Some prominent statements describe a discipline primarily as an instrument for political change. The report distinguishes this from research undertaken to help a cause while remaining open to unwelcome findings.
• A useful narrative outruns the evidence. The committee worries about interpretations that fill evidential gaps according to an edifying political purpose, without keeping conjecture distinguishable from established fact.
• Obscurity obstructs evaluation. It criticizes writing that borrows scientific or philosophical terminology without making the argument sufficiently clear to assess, while observing that the fashion for extreme theoretical obscurity has diminished.

The report does not require a coordinated conspiracy to explain these mechanisms. It argues that ordinary academic gatekeeping can become distorting when a community mistakes a politically favored position for a question already settled by scholarship. Mechanisms and examples, pp. 12–18 (file not included in this release).

Anthropology shows the broadest concerns in the commission’s account

Joseph Henrich describes a field divided over how scientific explanation, interpretation, and advocacy should relate. He brings together departmental splits, surveys, statements by professional leaders, controversies, and computational evidence. His concern is that advocacy has become a standard by which some research is judged, weakening the space for approaches that try to separate moral commitments from the assessment of evidence. He also emphasizes the field’s heterogeneity and important continuing contributions. Sources and methods, pp. 8–9 (file not included in this release) · Conclusions, pp. 62–63 (file not included in this release).

His own LLM analysis codes 212 sociocultural research abstracts in American Anthropologist from 1980–2025. It reports declining references to quantitative evidence, named systematic methods, and inferential statistics, alongside increasing advocacy, critical-theory framing, and binary power-opposition framing. He also finds that archaeology and biological anthropology occupy smaller shares of that journal than their shares of the broader field would suggest. These are findings about the selected journal and its abstracts, rather than a direct audit of the quality of every article. Computational findings, pp. 39–41 (file not included in this release).

Henrich’s synthesis of survey evidence reports that only about one-third of anthropologists agreed that advocacy and fieldwork should be kept as separate as possible to protect research objectivity. He interprets the surveys, controversies, and methodological trends together as evidence of a change in the field’s norms. Disagreement with that survey statement alone does not establish that a respondent conducts inaccurate research. Summary of evidence, pp. 62–63 (file not included in this release).

Sociology exhibits institutionalized political commitments and a narrowing agenda

Ashley Rubin identifies three connected developments: disagreement over whether sociology primarily generates knowledge or pursues political change; a concentration on inequality, identity, and power that leaves other questions underexplored; and sanctions against some politically unpopular research. She distinguishes the visible positions of professional organizations from the more heterogeneous views and practices of sociologists themselves. Executive findings, pp. 4–6 (file not included in this release).

Her examples of neglected or disfavored inquiry include cultural explanations of negative social outcomes, biological and evolutionary approaches, structural functionalism, religion, and some questions about class. She argues that a field can produce a great deal of valuable inequality research yet become intellectually narrower if alternative questions and explanations lose a fair hearing. Concentration of research topics, pp. 59–69 (file not included in this release) · Blind spots, pp. 70–88 (file not included in this release).

Rubin concludes that political commitments shape research production and reception, but explicitly says evidence of politicized norms is stronger than evidence of their downstream effects on research rigor. The scale of several effects remains unresolved. This qualification limits the leap from institutional rhetoric to a verdict on the reliability of sociology as a whole. Strength of evidence, p. 6 (file not included in this release) · Conclusions and magnitude, pp. 105–108 (file not included in this release).

History remains comparatively strong and committed to recoverable truth

Katherine E. Fleming and Sean Wilentz judge that the great preponderance of historical scholarship remains serious, diverse, and grounded in evidence. Expansion into previously neglected populations and regions has often enriched the field. They therefore resist the claim that studying race, gender, or non-Western societies inherently represents a departure from sound history. Overall judgment, pp. 1–2 (file not included in this release).

Their concerns center on presentism, interpretations organized around current political demands, and theories that blur the distinction between historical reconstruction and useful invention. They also regard externally imposed nationalist or theocratic history as a threat. Their account is a historical and interpretive assessment, expressly provisional and partly impressionistic; they could not find a simple, reliable quantitative test of their generally favorable judgment of the profession. Conclusions, pp. 32–35 (file not included in this release).

Literary studies has shifted toward social and political questions

Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that literary studies has increasingly taken up the subject matter of the social sciences, sometimes at the expense of attention to literary form, aesthetic value, and sustained interpretation of particular works. His concern is about what the discipline prioritizes and how it evaluates arguments, rather than an objection to political subject matter itself. Aesthetic value and disciplinary purpose, pp. 5–10 (file not included in this release).

One concrete finding concerns 106 tenure-line literature jobs advertised in the Chronicle of Higher Education at 69 U.S. AAU research universities between October 2020 and October 2025: 51, approximately 48%, had a primary field defined by race, ethnicity, or gender. This sample excludes writing and English-education positions. Appiah notes that advertisements do not establish who was eventually hired or how central identity was to those individuals’ work. Analyses of literary prizes also indicate greater prominence of social-justice terminology. Jobs and prize findings, pp. 19–20 (file not included in this release).

The findings also complicate a simple disappearance narrative. Shakespeare remains the leading topic in the abstract analysis, although with a declining share; the range of topics has broadened; and references to literary theory peaked in the late 1980s and subsequently declined. Appiah argues that diminished explicit theory language can coexist with continuing theoretical assumptions. Theory trends, p. 18 (file not included in this release) · Topics, p. 20 (file not included in this release).

Gary Saul Morson emphasizes a related educational concern: treating literature primarily as evidence for a political position can displace learning to read difficult works and appreciating their continuing significance. He also supplies counterexamples where political context and careful attention to literature coexist, so his account does not imply that every politically framed course abandons literary study. Argument, pp. 1–3 (file not included in this release) · Counterexamples, pp. 20–22 (file not included in this release).

Music studies supplies concrete measures of changing emphasis

Kit Fine, working with Simon Morrison, argues that music scholarship has moved away from traditional Western art-music repertoires and formal analysis toward popular music, media, identity, and social justice. Its empirical evidence includes dissertations, conference abstracts, and job advertisements. The report describes its review as less systematic than those of other fields. Scope, pp. 1–2 (file not included in this release).

• In an index of 531 music-theory dissertations from 1991–2025, the share classified outside the report’s traditional repertoire-and-methods category rises from approximately 28% in 2001–2005 to 57% in 2021–2025. The path fluctuates rather than increasing continuously. Substantial sociocultural framing rises from 1.3% in 1991–1995 to 17.1% in 2021–2025. These categories describe research emphasis, not an independent quality score. Dissertation findings, p. 8 (file not included in this release).
• In American Musicological Society conference abstracts, canonical-composer names fall from approximately 60 mentions per 10,000 words in 2001–2005 to 12 in 2021–2025. Music-analytic terminology also declines, while gender, justice, race, popular-music, and screen/media terminology increases. Conference vocabulary, pp. 8–9 (file not included in this release).
• In LLM coding of 505 AMS papers on the 2025 joint meeting’s program, 47.9% receive a central political-framing classification and 68.1% at least some political framing. These figures exclude concurrent Society for Music Theory papers. They characterize one conference program under the authors’ coding scheme. Sample and coding, pp. 6–7 (file not included in this release).

Fine and Morrison interpret these patterns, together with professional disputes, as evidence of political pressure narrowing the discipline. The descriptive shift is more directly measured than the further causal judgment about why it occurred. Interpretation, pp. 10–12 (file not included in this release).

Philosophy illustrates pressure to close disputed questions

The main report locates philosophy’s problems more narrowly, especially in debates about sex and gender. It cites efforts to prevent publication of Holly Lawford-Smith’s book and the reaction to Rebecca Tuvel’s article comparing arguments about gender and racial identity. The committee treats attempts to block discussion on grounds of political harm as examples of a failure to distinguish moral opposition from a scholarly refutation. The book was ultimately published; the objection concerns the pressure exerted, rather than a claim that every attempted suppression succeeded. Cases and argument, pp. 13–15 (file not included in this release).

The committee links some failures to theories about truth and knowledge

The main report distinguishes three routes to politicization. One is ordinary pressure to reach an approved answer, without any special philosophical theory. A second treats evidentially underdetermined accounts as narratives whose remaining choices can be guided by practical purposes. A third, stronger position denies that truth or evidential support can be assessed independently of political commitments. The committee argues that the latter views can rationalize accepting a claim for its usefulness rather than its evidential merits. Three routes and their rationale, pp. 18–20 (file not included in this release).

Its objection to strong relativism is that the view struggles to justify its own authority without appealing to the kind of reasons it questions. It also argues that discrediting past abuses of objectivity does not discredit the possibility of better, less biased inquiry. At the same time, it acknowledges that much scholarship using anti-objectivist language still offers evidence and can be valuable. These are the commission’s philosophical arguments; the disagreement with Stanley and Moran is developed in the companion essay note. Evidence in practice, p. 17 (file not included in this release) · Critique of relativism, pp. 24–26 (file not included in this release).

The proposed remedy is stronger inquiry and expert review

The commission explicitly allows rigorous activism, criticism of Western traditions, and research on marginalized groups. It argues that those commitments become problematic when they determine acceptable answers independently of evidence. It also rejects replacing left-wing distortion with right-wing distortion. Where concerns arise, it recommends careful review by qualified, broad-minded experts; it does not conclude that any particular department has forfeited scholarly self-governance. Limits and recommendations, pp. 5–7 (file not included in this release) · Legitimate political engagement, pp. 10–12 (file not included in this release).

Official supporting-report pages and separate appendices: Anthropology · History · Appiah · Morson · Music · Sociology.

Assessment of the evidence

Useful mechanisms, incomplete prevalence estimates. Individual disputes, editorial decisions, and institutional statements can illuminate how conformity pressures operate. They cannot establish a discipline-wide failure rate without a sampling frame and denominator. The main report explicitly says its examples illustrate phenomena rather than establish prevalence. Qualification, p. 5 (file not included in this release).

Political language is still a proxy. Henrich’s computational section includes LLM coding of 212 sociocultural research abstracts from one journal. It reports changes in advocacy, framing, and references to methods. Abstracts can omit methods actually used in the article; the presence of a named quantitative method does not itself establish rigor, nor its absence a lack of rigor. A change in research genre can change these measures without proving lower quality. Computational analysis, pp. 39–41 (file not included in this release).

Shared evidence is not independent replication. Both the anthropology and sociology reports discuss James Manzi’s LLM-based ideology analysis. Agreement between those chapters on that result partly reflects a shared source. They also note that political scores anchored to contemporary categories can confound historical change with the application of today’s classifications to older writing. Henrich, p. 40 (file not included in this release) · Rubin, pp. 55–57 (file not included in this release).

Norms, behavior, and quality require separate tests. An association’s activist statement establishes an official position. It does not establish that every member agrees, that editors follow it, or that published results become less accurate. Rubin explicitly says evidence for political norms is stronger than evidence for effects on research rigor and leaves the magnitude of several effects unresolved. Evidence distinction, p. 6 (file not included in this release) · Magnitude and interpretation, pp. 107–108 (file not included in this release).

Attribution needs care. The current main PDF amends its description of Khiara Bridges: reporting a theory is not necessarily endorsing it. That correction is directly relevant to reading scholarly quotations, and parallels the dissertation study’s difficulty distinguishing vocabulary from commitment. Amendment and footnote 23 (file not included in this release).

The philosophical diagnosis remains disputed. Richard Moran’s June 30 critique questions the committee’s breadth, its reliance on programmatic declarations, the explanatory role assigned to relativism, and the administrative risks of its framing. These are substantive challenges to generalization and governance; they do not by themselves refute the individual cases. The Boghossian essay note follows the subsequent exchange.

Comparison with Humanities in Crisis

What both studies find when read together

The AASL dissertation study finds a large rise in identity-related language, a late-1980s/1990s expansion of power vocabulary, less emphasis on aesthetic vocabulary, and continued prominence of truth-related language. The changes are largest in literary, interdisciplinary, and several social-science fields, while history, philosophy, and economics/political science have different profiles. Its geopolitical sentiment results also separate a robust decline for Western from an American decline that disappears and reverses under the authors’ additional controls. Vocabulary findings, pp. 27–33 (file not included in this release) · Qualified sentiment findings, p. 51 (file not included in this release).

The Vanderbilt–WashU reports identify related changes in research priorities, hiring advertisements, conference content, and professional norms. They go further in arguing that some institutions suppress serious disagreement or reward politically aligned work. Their accounts differ substantially by field: history remains comparatively resilient, while anthropology receives a much more critical assessment. Comparative judgment, pp. 4–5 (file not included in this release).

The common descriptive picture is a change in what several humanistic disciplines discuss and prioritize. The commission adds examples and proposed mechanisms through which that change can affect standards. Neither the agreement on topics nor the illustrative cases establish how much research quality has changed across the academy, and neither study demonstrates that politicization caused the contraction of humanities programs. For the fuller numerical findings and corrected period totals, see the AASL findings section.

The commission makes the inference from identity vocabulary to poor scholarship harder to justify: its own distinctions allow rigorous research about identity, inequality, and marginalized groups. Conversely, persistent truth vocabulary does not settle the commission’s concern about whether contrary findings receive fair treatment. These are different claims requiring different tests.

An additional temporal limit matters: the AASL report is dated October 2026, while the commission was submitted in April. The earlier main report cannot be described as a response to, or validation of, the later dissertation study.

Questions for deeper research

1. Can blinded expert reviewers identify measurable quality differences without knowing the authors’ politics or the commission’s favored interpretation?
2. Are politically inconvenient submissions treated differently after matching for methods, topic, and quality?
3. How often do public sanctions occur, and what evidence measures their effects on subsequent research choices?
4. Do economic conditions, funding priorities, demographic changes, or reading habits explain institutional contraction independently of politicization?

Read with Postmodern for the conceptual disputes and Grievance Studies Affair for a different kind of evidence concerning journal gatekeeping. Neither supplies a representative estimate of research quality across the humanities.