The Vanderbilt Report and the Manufacture of Suspicion Toward the Humanities
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
June 25, 2026
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| View Report Here. |
The controversy over the Vanderbilt/Washington University report on the humanities (Boghossian et al., 2026) should concern all of us who care about higher education, academic freedom, and the democratic purpose of universities. Presented as a sober defense of rigor, objectivity, and scholarly standards, the report has instead become a flashpoint in the larger struggle over who gets to define legitimate knowledge in the academy (luckyuston@gmail.com, 2026).
At a time when humanities departments, ethnic studies, gender studies, and other justice-oriented fields are already under political attack, the report risks doing more than diagnosing a problem. It risks furnishing a vocabulary for administrative scrutiny, budgetary austerity, and ideological policing.
This is why Dwight A. McBride’s (2026) critique is so important. He asks us to consider whether the report’s anxiety about “politicized” scholarship is really anxiety about a changing academy—one in which women, scholars of color, queer scholars, Indigenous scholars, and scholars from historically excluded communities are asking questions that earlier generations either ignored or suppressed.
The irony is also evident to me in light of a face-to-face conversation I once had with Dr. Randy Diehl, a former dean of the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts. He shared that he regarded much of the work in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies as cutting-edge—a characterization that, in my view, extends equally to African American and African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. These are precisely the critical humanities fields now under attack. My, how things have changed.
In any case, McBride’s central question is clarifying: what if the academy did not become less scholarly when it became more diverse? What if it became more intellectually honest because new scholars brought new archives, new methods, new communities, and new moral urgencies into view (McBride, 2026)?
The report appears to rely on a nostalgic idea of the university as a place where knowledge once existed above politics, untouched by power. But that imagined university was never neutral. It was a university structured by exclusion—by who was admitted, who was hired, whose work was cited, whose languages counted, whose communities were studied, and whose experiences were dismissed as particular, emotional, or political. Fields such as Black studies, ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies did not emerge as departures from scholarship. They emerged because scholarship had failed to ask whole categories of questions about power, empire, race, gender, labor, sexuality, land, and inequality.
To cast these fields as inherently suspect because they engage social justice is to confuse subject matter with scholarly failure. There is poor scholarship in every field, including fields that describe themselves as neutral, empirical, classical, or objective. But serious inquiry into racism, colonialism, sexism, inequality, or state violence is not automatically activism masquerading as scholarship. Often, it is simply scholarship refusing to avert its gaze.
The danger is not merely intellectual. The report is addressed to university leaders, and it arrives in a political climate where administrators and governing boards are already being pressured to discipline faculty, reorganize departments, restrict curriculum, and eliminate programs deemed too critical or too “political.” This is especially alarming in states like Texas and Florida, where anti-DEI laws, attacks on shared governance, and efforts to narrow the curriculum have already reshaped higher education. In such a context, even a report that claims to oppose external political interference can become useful to those who seek precisely that interference.
A report on the humanities that truly centered rigor would begin with humility. It would ask whether its own evidence is sufficient for its claims. It would engage the scholars and fields it criticizes in good faith. It would distinguish between advocacy, public scholarship, community accountability, and poor method. It would recognize that the humanities have always been contested because meaning, memory, culture, language, and history are themselves contested terrains.
Instead, the Vanderbilt/Washington University report risks laundering a political anxiety through the language of standards. It treats the diversification of questions as a decline in quality. It treats scholarship attentive to power as evidence of ideological capture. It treats the old exclusions of the academy as if they were signs of intellectual purity.
The humanities do not need to be rescued from scholars who study justice. They need to be protected from those who mistake justice-oriented inquiry for intellectual corruption. The real crisis is not that the humanities have become too political. The real crisis is that, at the very moment when democracy needs deeper historical memory, ethical imagination, cultural understanding, and critical thought, powerful actors are working to narrow what can be studied, taught, funded, and known.
That is why this report matters. Not because it settles anything, but because it reveals the terms of the struggle before us. The question is not whether scholarship should be rigorous. Of course it should. The question is who gets to decide what rigor means—and whether rigor will be used to deepen democratic inquiry or to silence the very fields that have helped us understand democracy’s unfinished promises.
References
Boghossian, P., Appiah, K. A., Fine, K., Henrich, J., Fleming, K. E., Merchant, J., Morson, G. S., Rosen, G., Rubin, A., & Wilentz, S. (2026, April 5). Report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship_Report_Final.pdfMcBride, D. A. (2026, June 15). The question haunting that humanities report, Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/06/15/question-haunting-vanderbiltwash-u-report-opinion
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