Midweek Notebook

Oh the inhumanities! Plus a must-see doc about Covid, a last word on Gordon Wood, and celebrating Anika Nilles

• “Has the Left Ruined the Humanities?”, the Comical of Higher Education asks this week. Answer: YES. Next question. Has Captain Obvious taken the day off or something?

The left is always indignant when this common sense observation is made about the humanities, which indignation always comes right after—or right before—proclamations that the humanities (and social sciences) need to be conscious pedagogical vehicles for a radical ideological agenda. More and more universities are cutting humanities departments because more and more students are saying “yuck” to the muck they now offer.

I have just about run out of popcorn watching the daily dégringolade of our universities, but it is worth taking in a report on “The State of Scholarship” in the humanities commissioned by Vanderbilt University. NYU philosophy professor Paul Boghossian chaired the inquiry, and assembled a team of nine centrist-to-center-left academics (including, for example, Princeton’s liberal historian Sean Wilentz and NYU’s Kwame Anthony Appiah) to assess the humanities and the sources of their decay and dysfunction.

You can take in the whole report at your leisure, but I’ll highlight here just a few key passages:

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi. However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain. . .

[S]cholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized. . .

Here it is worth taking a brief but related digression to another news story out this week: Auburn University’s board of trustees has voted to abolish the faculty senate and take full control of Auburn’s curriculum. Naturally Auburn’s faculty is in an uproar, saying this step marks the end of the faculty’s role in the “shared governance” of the university. But “shared governance” has long become a farce: the faculty inmates run the asylum in all the individual departments with little or no interference ever from administrations or boards of trustees. Hopefully Auburn’s move will be widely copied. One reason universities skew so badly is that college presidents, provosts, and trustees have been grossly negligent in performing their jobs for decades.

The Vanderbilt report indirectly takes note of this problem:

Academic disciplines exist for the purpose of producing and certifying this sort of expertise, and any well-run university relies on the expertise of its own faculty and the wider scholarly community whenever the assessment of scholarship is attempted: in the granting of degrees, in the appointment of faculty, in decisions about tenure and promotion, and so on. This norm reflects a wider policy of deference, according to which the academic affairs of individual units (including decisions about what to teach and how to allocate resources for research) are left to the faculty within those units, with administrators intervening only where trade-offs must be made and to implement larger university-level priorities.

Our commission exists only because even this foundational principle has its limits. If and when the department of astronomy morphs into the department of astrology, it will at some point make sense for the administration to object. Well before it comes to that, it will make sense for the administration to say, “You are beginning to lose our trust.” [Emphasis added.]

Even this rather mild remonstrance has seldom taken place as department after department have descended into postmodern ideological nonsense and enforced conformity over the last generation—the functional equivalent of having turned astronomy into astrology. (Geography departments are one of the most egregious examples. In many Geography departments now, nearly every course seems to be about “the geography of racism,” or, close by, “the geography of climate change.” No administration anywhere stepped in to stop this to my knowledge.)

To the contrary, the report goes out of its way to pull its punches from what it knows is the real source of the problem, and in the name of “balance” cite right-wing threats to the humanities and universities:

One troubling indication, however, comes in the official White House 1776 Commission report, released in 2021, which propounds a view of U.S. history that describes liberal political reform since the Progressive era as a challenge to American values on a par with fascism and communism.

Let’s just call this a total whiff and move on.

The situation is even more troubling at the state level, where legislative impositions have begun to impinge directly on scholarship and teaching, chiefly by intimidating public colleges and universities. The case of the Texas A&M philosopher instructed by the university to remove selections from Plato from his introductory course syllabus because they violated new rules barring Texas public universities from offering courses that “advocate race and gender ideology” may seem bizarre, but it is also extremely alarming.

As already outlined in detail here at Political Questions, this episode was a calculated hoax and provocation; see here and here for a refresher.

Other parts of the report are more “based,” as the kids like to say, such as its straight-up treatment of postmodernist nihilism:

Philosophically, postmodernism is far more radical and far more problematic than underdetermination. And yet it is postmodernist ideas that came to have the widest influence. Starting in the 1960s, and initially largely as a result of the work of French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernist views of knowledge and truth came to have the status of unquestionable orthodoxy in vast swaths of the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. As these ideas came under increasingly harsh criticism from philosophers and other critics, explicit theoretical discussions of these isms began to wane, though not their enduring influence on scholars’ conceptions of inquiry.

The footnotes to this entire 4th section of the report are worth taking in. I especially like this one:

For an exemplary expression of this odd [contradictory] combination of views, see Fernando Villanea writing in American Anthropologist:

“The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests (Villanea 2023, 184; italics in original; boldface added).”

Taken at face value, this is incoherent. Taken more charitably, it is the still bizarre claim that while there are no objective truths about the subtle descriptive matters with which anthropology is concerned, there are objective truths about values and morals — about who is adversely affected by a given position, and about what anthropologists should take as their core values.

Needless to say, the academic left is not happy about this report. I’m cataloging the faculty declaring the report to be “shockingly bad,” which suggests that it squarely hits its target, even if the arrows it shoots are felt-tipped. A report such as this from a prestige university like Vanderbilt was unthinkable even a decade ago, since its underlying premise is, “Allan Bloom was right all along.”

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• If you read nothing else about the passing of Gordon Wood (until my piece comes out tomorrow at Civitas Outlook), be sure to see Brad Thompson’s personal recollection of Wood on his fine Substack, “The Things He’ll Never Say.” Brad did his Ph.D as student of Wood at Brown, but was never reluctant to criticize him.

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• You owe it to yourself to set aside 35 minutes of your time to take in “The Lockdown Skeptics,” a mini-documentary produced by Michael Pack (one of the few conservative documentarians around) and hosted by the Wall Street Journal. I have been saying since the very start that our entire Covid policy would turn out to be possibly the largest single public policy error of the last 100 years (the New Deal begs to differ, I know), or at the very least certainly the largest public health policy blunder ever. But it was revealing of the way in which the government lies to us, suppresses honest dissent, and embraces compulsion on behalf of ancillary goals (like “anti-racism,” supposedly because “racism” is a “public health crisis”). Few things the government has ever done has so fully revealed its mendacious character. And this film reminds us why we should remain in a white hot rage about it.

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• While we’re doing video, I’m just going to go right out at declare it: Anika Nilles has done more for feminism this week than Gloria Steinem did in her entire lifetime: