[Originally published on June 8th, 2026, 9:02am. Reposted by request.] “In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.” That is from a recently released “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” The report is by a group led by Paul Boghossian (NYU), who was asked to produce the report by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University. The group includes ten scholars, including three other philosophers: Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU), Kit Fine (NYU), and Gideon Rosen (Princeton). The report is in response to complaints about politicization of scholarship in the humanities. But what, exactly, is the complaint? The authors first distinguish the problem they think is worth considering from various non-problems: The problem is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public… The problem is not that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism… The problem is not that political considerations have broadened the focus of scholarship away from the Western high art canon and other historically central topics towards work by and about members of marginalized groups — women, members of racial and ethnic minorities, and so on… The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional, aiming to debunk or correct the presuppositions of previous scholarship and the wider set of established cultural norms that scholarship reflects. Rather, the problem, they say, has to do with prioritizing politics over scholarship. They write: In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise… The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be..

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