Last year, Donald Trump proposed a “compact” for higher education that would have subordinated academic freedom to a conservative political agenda. Higher education leaders around the country condemned the compact as an assault on colleges and universities. WashU Chancellor Andrew Martin was one of the few university leaders who flirted with submitting to the compact. After a loud outcry from the university community, Martin announced he would not sign Trump’s compact. What he kept secret was that he simply planned to implement the compact himself.
Martin’s recently commissioned “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences” marks the first time in this university’s history that the institution has sought to impose a political agenda on academic research. The report claims, based on anecdotes wrapped in confirmation bias, that politics have overtaken rigor in several humanistic fields. That gets the problem exactly backwards. Research in the humanities has followed its own course, as research always does. The place where politics have overtaken rigor is in the report itself.
Martin and his Vanderbilt crony, Daniel Diermeier, have aggressively branded themselves as paladins of moving higher education to the political right. Indeed, Martin has recently pushed an unprecedented program of subjecting some faculty hiring to a conservative litmus test. For the report, Martin and Diermeier enlisted a group of academics who have similar histories of attacking scholars and fields for being insufficiently conservative. That handpicked cadre of biased scholars unsurprisingly produced a manifesto that reaffirms their long-standing personal animus and political agenda.
A key demand of Trump’s “compact” was to strip politically disfavored university departments and scholars of academic freedom, subjecting them to ideological oversight by conservative enforcers. Martin’s report urges what it ominously calls “first steps” toward exactly that regime. True, the report would subject politically incorrect scholars only to university control, not to government control. But the ideological agenda and the sapping of academic freedom remain the same.
The report makes its core project clear by focusing its wrath on scholarship about race, sex, gender identity, and colonialism. It reserves its sharpest condemnation for scholars who advocate an intellectual baseline of respect and dignity for people of diverse identities. (For the report, the only diversity that matters is affirmative action for conservative scholars.) Of course, academic advocates of identity bias have every right and ample opportunity to make their cases in their fields. But the report declares several fields categorically illegitimate because identity bias isn’t sufficiently prominent.
It takes a special kind of hubris to assail others’ scholarship, demanding evidence and rigor at every turn, in a document that no reputable academic journal would consider publishing. The report begins its “analysis” by positing an urgent critique of scholarship in the humanities without ever saying who, outside the authors of the report, has pressed that critique. (To be fair, the report does name-check 19th century evangelicals, Joseph McCarthy, and Allan Bloom.) It sweepingly condemns entire academic disciplines based on nothing more than isolated anecdotes and quotations. Channeling McCarthy’s “I have here a list” hustle, the report refers to “our internal report[s]” on various academic controversies without making those documents available for the kind of critical assessment the report claims to advocate.
Much of the report is internally inconsistent. It centrally calls for wide-open academic discourse, yet it rules out of academic bounds any claim that social conditions might complicate assertions of objective truth. It repeatedly demands “objectivity” in scholarship while disavowing any demand for “value neutrality.” Serious critical engagement with the meanings and difficulties of those two closely related ideas might soften the contradiction, but the report never digs that deep; its circular reasoning simply posits “a minimal distinction between politically attractive accounts on the one hand and true or well-supported accounts on the other.” The report declares: “[I]t is not a problem that individual scholars have [political] goals or that they see their work as in the service of them.” But the main evidence the report offers of political bias by scholars consists of individuals’ statements.
The arrogance of the report is sweeping and startling. It presumes to judge and dictate the proper scope, and necessary limits, of critiquing entrenched ideas (“Needless to say, it is possible to overdo this sort of thing.”) and of scholars’ efforts to bring their work to bear on political controversies (“This is [most clearly acceptable] when the relevant expertise is technical and the political goal relatively uncontroversial.”). The report – plodding, elliptical, saturated with the passive voice – even purports to set proper standards for clear academic prose.
Perhaps Martin and Diermeier sincerely hold the conservative views they seek to shove down higher education’s throat. Perhaps they are spinelessly collaborating with the Trump administration or cynically pandering to conservative donors. Maybe they’re just trolling for a book deal. Ultimately, their motives don’t matter. They have threatened their universities’ integrity, damaged their universities’ reputations, and – amid administratively imposed austerity – spent their universities’ money for the sake of pressing their political agenda. Voices across higher education, and especially at WashU, should resoundingly condemn this dangerous hackwork.
Greg Magarian is the Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law at Washington University and a leading national expert on the First Amendment.
