A Response to the Report on Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences by One of Its Targets (Guest Post)

Landing Santa Barbara Airport on Jan 30, 2026   

 by Charlie Hale, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara 

Chris here: ’m posting a set of answers to a reporter’s questions from Charlie Hale, one of the authors cited for criticism in the Vanderbilt-Washington University “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.”  The reporter, Emma Whitford, wrote a good piece in Inside Higher Ed about the scholars who were cited as examples of the alleged decline of qualitative scholarship. None of the scholars she’d reached had been told that they were cited in it. 

 

It’s worth remembering that the two chancellors who commissioned the report, Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis, and Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, have been at odds with the heads of peer universities like Princeton and Wesleyan, among others.  This is a minority report even within the circle of elite private universities. The report has been endorsed here and there, and has also been subject to severe criticisms: some I’ve especially appreciated are by Zachary Levenson, Michael Bérubé, and John K. Wilson. See also tweets by David Austin Walsh, Erik Linstrum, Erik Baker, Guy McHendry, Chad Wellmon, Rita Felski, Asheesh Siddique on Bluesky, and many more—those are some of the ones I’ve seen in my 15 daily twitter-bluesky minutes. Also,  UChicago’s AAUP chapter had an interesting comment on the Chicago origins of the report commission. A solid plurality in my feeds rightly see the report as an invitation to administrations to intervene in humanities scholarship, though in language that offers plausible deniability (e.g. Bérubé).  Before I write a separate post, here’s the Q & A.

 

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Q1 : I assume the answer is no, given you were unaware of the report, but did the authors contact you at all about your scholarship?

 

A (Charlie Hale): No contact whatsoever

 

Q2. Do you feel your work/views were accurately summarized and characterized in the report?

 

A: No. The report condemns a large swath of scholars—seemingly the entire discipline of Anthropology, save perhaps biological anthropologists of the ilk of one of the co-authors—with the broad-brush term “relativist.”  I have never claimed that term to characterize my work; the authors themselves provide erudite reasoning for why no serious scholar would do so. This term is a rhetorical ploy to place a wide range of diverse positions they disagree with in a spurious derogatory category, without deeply engaging any of them. The quotation from my writing refers to the concept of “situated knowledges”—quite distinct from relativism. The underlying premise of this concept is that when we as scholars position ourselves—that is, explain and reflect explicitly on our own intellectual formation, values, life experiences, etc.—we generate deeper awareness of how we view the subject of study, and that in turn produces a higher level of objectivity and analytical rigor. By equating this concept of positioned objectivity with shoddy scholarship, the authors leave the impression that they have not done their homework.

 

Q3. How do you feel about the report's arguments overall?

 

A: I understand and sympathize with their stated intentions:  to protect the core values of the liberal university from the onslaught, by proactively engaging in self-critical reform, sheering excesses and reclaiming the “soul of the university.” However, their tack is ultimately wrongheaded and would leave us further weakened and vulnerable. Their arguments for clear and accessible language, judicious deployment of data and evidence, careful consideration of contrary views, rigorous analysis, etc. are all salutary and can be readily confirmed. Their call for a return to “disinterested scholarship” reads, quite frankly, like the authors are asking us to scamper back to the privileged bubble of the ivory tower, keep our heads down, and hope that the onslaught passes us by.  That perhaps is a viable option for well-funded professors in elite private universities—a category to which most of the authors belong—although I know of many faculty in these universities who would not agree.  In R1 public universities the social sciences have a different mandate:  to engage the critical issues of the public that funds us and the societies of which we form part.  Not only is this mandate completely compatible with rigorous and objective scholarship, but it is also a more powerful counterpoint to the attacks on the university’s core values.  We must make the case that the publicly facing impact of our teaching and scholarship contributes substantively to the common good, exposing the roots of and seeking the remedies for endemic societal inequalities, and helping students imagine the “good society” to which they aspire, albeit from different standpoints. I am glad to own the term “social justice” as a shorthand for that mandate; the authors have an aversion to that term, for reasons that they do not clearly explain.

 

Q4. What else should I know about you, your work or your thoughts on this report?

 

A: As the authors themselves point out, their argument would not stand up in the face of rigorous peer review; the evidence is scant and cherry-picked, and the characterization of entire disciplines—especially Anthropology—is embarrassingly superficial. Their call for a return to institutional neutrality and disinterested scholarship sounds distressingly aligned with what Donna Haraway famously called the “God trick,”—the assertion of universal truths that come with a disavowal of how we as scholars are positioned in the world. This leads me to a friendly suggestion: that the authors amend this report with their own exercise in situated knowledges, along the lines that Haraway proposed some 30 years ago. We know that Chancellors Diermeier, and Martin, who commissioned this report, hold strong views in contrast to other university leaders, and we find, not surprisingly, that the report espouses remarkably similar views as the Chancellors who commissioned it. They presumably chose the authors with that outcome in mind, and excluded others who might hold contrasting views of the problem and the recommended solutions. Fair enough; that is their prerogative.  However, to achieve the higher level of rigorous objectivity that Haraway’s argument prescribes, the authors would have needed to position themselves in relation to the wide field of viewpoints on this crucial topic.  As written, the report’s final recommendation reads like an attempt at the God trick—a lurch backward to a conception of the university and of social science scholarship that I thought we had long since left behind.