Rethinking Faculty Control

Scholarly Norms, the Vanderbilt Report, and the Limits of Academic Self-Government

Aug 06, 2026

I’ve spent most of my professional life in the academy. For most of that time, I regarded faculty control of hiring and promotion as self-evidently desirable, indeed essential. I’ve now come to doubt that position, at least in some cases. Where the proper norms of academic life have collapsed, faculty control now protects the breakdown rather than repairing it. Let me explain.

Organized Skepticism

In a previous post about Robert K. Merton’s sociology of science, I described what Merton in a 1942 essay, called the ethos of science, a normative structure that undergirds the scientific enterprise. They included universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.

The norm of “universalism” holds that scientific claims should be evaluated by impersonal criteria rather than by the personal or social attributes of the claimant. In principle, the nationality, class, religion, race, gender, or institutional standing of the scientist should not determine whether a claim is accepted. What matters is the quality of evidence and argument.

“Organized skepticism” denotes an institutional structure that ensures that scientific claims are subjected to systematic critical scrutiny. Peer review, replication, methodological criticism, and standards of evidence are intended to express this norm institutionally.

“Organized skepticism” is intended to produce objectivity, both in the sense of knowledge that is valid beyond particular communities of belief, and in the sense of the subjective aspiration to produce such knowledge. The institutional requirement is that claims about one’s research are to be subjected to the judgment of others who do not necessarily share one’s religious, ideological, or methodological orientation. It’s one thing to have one’s work judged by fellow-believers; quite another to have it judged by non-believers.

In a well-functioning academic institutional structure, organized skepticism takes the form of peer review before publication and after publication. It is the role of a journal editor who receives a submission to send it to a variety of reviewers, including some from different ideological or methodological orientations. Once a book has been published, a review editor ought, ideally, to send it to a reviewer not aligned with the propensities of the author.

The same applies to decisions about faculty hiring and the granting of promotion and tenure. Such decisions should be made with input (in the form of confidential evaluations) from scholars drawn from a variety of perspectives.

The intended effect of these institutional structures is to create incentives for the researcher to strive toward objectivity: to make him ask as he is conducting his research and writing up his findings, “Will this argument and evidence be convincing to colleagues who do not share my religion, ideology, or methodological preferences?”

It is these structures of organized skepticism that distinguish scientific knowledge from propaganda, apologetics, or confessional literature. By providing knowledge whose validity was not tied to a particular community (religious, national, or ideological), organized skepticism made possible the “detribalization of knowledge.”

With some modification, Merton’s norms and the institutional procedures that embody them apply to the social sciences and the humanities. In this post, I want to explore how the structures of organized skepticism have broken down in some disciplines and in trans-disciplinary programs within the academy, producing not shared knowledge, but special pleading and propaganda. Then I want to suggest that these developments should make us rethink the principle of “faculty control” – the tenet I once believed in but have come to doubt.

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Insiders and Outsiders

The ethos of science, as Merton outlined it, was the dominant ideal upon which the modern research university was based. That was true, of course, for the natural sciences. But it was also true for the social sciences and for the humanities. Indeed, as Anthony Grafton showed in his book, The Footnote: A Curious History [1997], the footnote arose primarily so that historians and other humanists could demonstrate their sources to one another. The premise was that showing one’s sources made it possible for others to check them, thus making findings reproducible, rather than a product of ideologically skewed interpretation.

That ethos has been challenged from time to time by claims that knowledge is indeed tribal: that truth is inextricably linked to a particular community, defined by faith, nationality, or race. Indeed, it was proclamations by Nazi politicians and scientists about the existence of “German physics” that first led Merton, in 1942, to articulate the norms of science, including “universalism.” Beginning in the 1960s, the tribal conception of knowledge was revived, this time from the cultural left, with claims that there were forms of knowledge available only to “insiders” – defined by race, class, or sex – an argument Merton anatomized in a 1972 essay, “The Perspectives of Insiders and Outsiders.” He contended that there were circumstances under which the insiders to some social status might be more sensitive to some factors, and circumstances in which outsiders might see things less perceptible to insiders (his great example was Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). The upshot was the need for interaction between social insiders and outsiders to arrive at more comprehensive social scientific understandings.

One influential engine of “insider” ideology was Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) — a nearly unreadable book resting on a historically false account of how the West had studied the Muslim world. (For the correctives, see Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (2006), and Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (2009).) Said’s core claim was that “insiders” like himself were more reliable interpreters of the Islamic world than “outsiders” like Bernard Lewis. The contrast does not survive scrutiny. Said was a Jerusalem-born, Egyptian-raised Anglican, schooled in English-language colonial and American institutions whose curricula bore almost no relation to the Arab world around him, and whose classical Arabic was weak; Lewis commanded classical and modern Arabic, Ottoman and modern Turkish, and Persian, and had traveled widely across the Middle East. Even so, Orientalism established the premise that such “insiders” enjoy privileged access to the non-Western world, and it became a founding text of “postcolonial studies” — a field whose other canonical voices came from comparable backgrounds: Columbia’s Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a Calcutta-born Brahmin, and Harvard’s Homi K. Bhabha, a scion of Bombay’s elite Parsi community.

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The Challenge of — and to — the “Vanderbilt Report”

In August, 2025, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Daniel Diermeier, and the Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, Andrew D. Martin, spearheaded an initiative to bring together university faculty from a wide variety of institutions and disciplines concerned about the ideologization of academic life, the erosion of standards, and the declining faith of the public in academic institutions. They commissioned a committee of distinguished academics (who drew, in turn, on colleagues in their disciplines) to compile a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” Popularly dubbed “The Vanderbilt Report,” it was published in April, 2026. Reports covering particular disciplines are now being published as well.

The report is well worth reading (https://www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/state-of-scholarship-report/introduction/). Though it devotes rather too much space to the philosophical critique of relativism, it gives a taste of the extent to which some fields and sub-fields have abandoned the norms of objectivity and disinterestedness for ideological special pleading. Its conclusions are balanced and nuanced:

“As we will emphasize, there is serious scholarship in every field we have studied, and at their best, the humanities and the social sciences are as rigorous and as fruitful as they have ever been. Taken as a whole, however, our review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity. In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”

As the authors note, although their report deals exclusively with “core academic disciplines,” there is reason to believe that the problems of politicization they identify are more severe in “interdisciplinary units of various sorts and by scholars elsewhere in the university, e.g. in schools of education, social work, communications and so forth”—a topic I’ll turn to in a moment.

The report touched, somewhat gingerly, upon the issue of “What is to be done?,” asserting that

“[W]e must urge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report. In any well-functioning university, administrators are bound by what we take to be a stringent norm of deference according to which non-expert decision-makers must defer to disciplinary experts in assessing scholarship. 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.”

The next paragraph, however, suggests courses of action:

“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.” These issues are familiar and relatively tractable when the problems are confined to individual academic units. Administrators regularly rely on disciplinary experts elsewhere, assembled as review committees, for guidance. When astronomy as a field morphs into astrology, on the other hand, administrators will face a largely unprecedented situation in which disciplinary expertise itself cannot be trusted. In such cases, the administration will need advice from minority voices within the discipline and from adjacent disciplines with better standards, and it will be a matter of substantive judgment where such reliable expertise is to be found.

Our report provides ground for thinking that some fields may be at risk of warranting this sort of scrutiny. We have identified problems in the humanities and social sciences to which administrators should be alert. And yet we cannot say on the basis of the work we have done that individual departments have forfeited their claim to administrative deference. If administrators are concerned about these problems in their universities, an indispensable first step will be an intensive study of the units in question conducted by reliably broad-minded disciplinary experts (in-house and external) and by experts in adjacent disciplines who take the problems seriously and can be relied on to take a measured view. In our view, nothing in this report warrants any intervention more intrusive than such first steps.”

The Report was widely covered in the press (though not, God forbid, in the New York Times), and on Substack, and elicited howls of protest from the usual suspects.^[1]

The most amusing of these, in a grim way, was from Carolyn Rouse, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and the current president of the American Anthropological Association. According to her Princeton faculty page:

“Rouse has spent most of her career trying to understand the cultural forces leading to the (re)production of racial inequality and/or racial empowerment in different institutional domains (religion, medicine, economic development, media, education). Now she describes her research as focused on people’s commitment to bad ideas, which, of course, includes a commitment to racism but also includes people’s commitment to environmentally and physically destructive practices. Rouse’s focus is on 21st-century, post‐industrial disenchantment and post‐development theory.”

Interviewed about the Vanderbilt Report by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rouse complained that the committee that compiled the report had included only one anthropologist, namely Joseph Henrich. The reporter asked whether Rouse had ever heard of Henrich, to which Rouse responded “No.” Now, Henrich is a Professor of Biological Anthropology and of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, best known for his books The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2015) and The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020). He is among the most highly cited of contemporary anthropologists and one of the most influential social scientists working at the intersection of anthropology and the behavioral sciences. But Rouse had never heard of him. The Association she heads is among the most politicized: it has been condemning Israel since 1982 and maintains a boycott of Israeli institutions and scholars – the only country in the world singled out for such treatment.^[2]

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Contentions and Realities: The Example of Yale’s Department of English

Other responses to the report were less than frank about the realities of their disciplines. Thus, Jonathan Kramnick, Maynard Mack Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale, protested that the writers of the report were ill informed about his field.

“The picture the report paints — of fields that have explicitly repudiated objectivity and openly subordinated scholarship to political projects — does not capture the actual texture of literary study as I know it. …

The history of literary study includes a heterogeneous mix of approaches — formalist, historicist, philological, theoretical — each of which has generated genuine knowledge and corrected the others’ blind spots, and none of which has had, or should have, the final word.”^[3]

It is instructive to compare this characterization of his field with the appointments made in his department since his arrival at Yale in 2014. They include the following, drawn from the self-description of each scholar on the department’s website.

https://english.yale.edu/people/ladder-faculty

Erica Edwards, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of English and Black Studies, hired in 2022, “teaches courses in American literature, Black studies, and feminist theory. Her primary research is in African American literature, which she approaches with a deep interest in the intersection of literature, politics, social movements, and popular culture and the ways that Black feminism affords us particularly generative insights about connections among these formations.”

Jonathan Howard, Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies, hired in 2021, asserts that his “research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice…. his courses aim to facilitate the phenomenon of “black study.” That is, to attend, again and again, in literature and more, to black death and life, to no smaller end than the end of the antiblack world and the celebration and magnification of black life on earth.”

Cajetan Iheka, hired in 2022, is Professor of English and director of the Whitney Humanities Center. He “specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, postcolonial studies, and world literatures.”

Elleza Kelley, hired in 2022 as Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies, “works on African American literature, with an emphasis on black geographies and radical spatial practice in the United States. Her current book project, Flight Lines: A Poetics of Black Space, examines how African American literature and visual art index black spatial thought and practice through experimentations with form, genre, and media.”

Joan Lubin, hired in 2025, whose “research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary American literature, media, and culture, queer and trans theory, history of science, sociology of literature, and book history.”

Joseph Isaac Miranda, hired in 2024 as an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University and an affiliate faculty member of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is “currently completing his first book project, How to Mourn a Fiction: Latinidad and the Law of Underdevelopment, which reconsiders Latino literature’s enduring attachment to narratives of development. Rather than treating such narratives as testimony to individual projects of political recognition, belonging, or justice, the book argues that the genre’s centrality contradictorily reifies the logics that produce Latino racialization in the first place.”

Juno Jill Richards came to Yale in 2014 and is now Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Yale University. “Their research focuses on queer/trans studies and the history of sexuality in the long twentieth century. Current writing and teaching projects take up transgender archives, queer feminist science, critical disability studies, and transnational social reproduction.”

Sunny Xiang who joined in 2015 and is now Associate Professor, describes herself as studying and teaching about “race, war, and empire through wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials. I am particularly interested in the methodological questions and perceptual challenges introduced by U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century…My current project, Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics, explores how U.S. WWII military science in the Pacific theater generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air -and on the skin.”

In addition to these eight new appointments, I counted nine appointments in a variety of historical and geographical fields, from medieval English through African, Native American, African-American, and Chinese literature. Those appointments really do seem to reflect the “formalist, historicist, philological, theoretical” approaches described by Kramnick as characterizing his discipline, devoid of ideological axes to grind. But in granting promotions and making future hires, their weight will be balanced against the eight described above.

In examining the Yale Department of English in some depth, I don’t mean to suggest that it is among the more ideologically inflected departments at Yale, or more ideologically slanted than most English departments elsewhere. On the contrary: it’s probably closer to the median in this regard. A closer examination of Kramnick’s field would, I suspect, simply reinforce the conclusions of the Vanderbilt Report.

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Beyond Traditional Disciplines

A focus on the trends in established disciplines such as English or Literature fails to capture the role and influence of newer fields and centers that have an explicit ideological basis. Some grew directly out of social movements, staffed by a cohort of scholars who regarded themselves as activists; some were founded on the basis of political ideology, while others developed in that direction.

In a recent, irenic post, David A. Bell, a professor of history at Princeton and a former dean at Johns Hopkins, observes:

“[V]arious forms of political action were needed for supposedly “woke” fields like the study of gender and sexuality to win acceptance in academia. This acceptance also happened, however, because scholars in these fields made convincing cases in a traditional scholarly way, through the marshaling of empirical evidence, the construction of strong, logical arguments, and the deployment of effective rhetoric.

But many of these fields took shape, starting in the 1960’s, in tandem with the various liberation movements of the period. Most of the scholars who developed them participated in these movements and many called themselves “scholar-activists.” Nor did the pattern change once the fields had won acceptance. Today, they still have an inescapable political profile, tied to movements outside of academia, in which many of their leading scholars continue to participate. Where the fields have won status as full academic departments, it is very difficult to imagine them hiring scholars who oppose the movements’ political goals. Furthermore, these fields have had enormous influence on the humanities and social sciences in general, shaping research agendas and employment decisions well beyond their own bounds. The political commitments most visible in these fields are commonplace across academia.

The goal of increasing diversity in faculty ranks reinforced this particular form of politicization. Thanks to Supreme Court decisions going back to Bakke, while universities can “encourage applications” from underrepresented groups, jobs cannot be specifically earmarked for these groups. As a result, universities seeking, for instance, to hire more black faculty mostly created positions in African American studies, in the expectation that blacks would dominate the applicant pool. In 2020-21, following the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, US-based universities advertised 59 US-based tenure-track jobs in American History. Of these, 36 were either explicitly labeled “African American” or “slavery,” or indicated a strong preference for these subjects. Another 7 were for Hispanic or Native American History. That year was obviously an outlier, thanks both to COVID and BLM, but the numbers indicate just how strong the push for diversity could get. And it is reasonable to assume that a large proportion of the historians hired to these jobs consider themselves scholar-activists.”^[4]

In short, a great deal of hiring in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades has been on the basis of ascriptive characteristics – of race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation – on the assumption that these people are “insiders” to the status in question, and as such bring a privileged perspective to their study. To that one must add that many of these fields, founded or developed on an ideological basis, will only hire scholars who share their assumptions that the groups they study are presumptively oppressed, and that their scholarship must contribute to alleviating the grievances on which the field is based. Moreover, the original group which is the object of study is often expanded to include other groups assumed to be similarly oppressed. Two generations ago, the subject of African Americans was understudied in American academic life, as was the study of women. But when centers of African American studies were expanded to include Africa, then “race,” then “diaspora” the effect was to widen the subject matter while intensifying the ideological thrust of the field. So too with academic units devoted to the study of women, which morphed from Women’s Studies (defined by subject matter) to Feminist Studies (defined by ideology), to Gender and Sexuality Studies (defined by the premise that all such distinctions are socially constructed). In such precincts, as Robyn Wiegman, who directed such programs at UC Irvine and then Duke University, put it in a 2012 piece, “Every undergraduate and graduate student in Women’s and Gender Studies that I have known in the past twenty years takes it as a matter of fact that women is the scene of exclusion, if not a real or symbolic figure of political and epistemological violence, even as they are preparing to dedicate themselves to academic, activist, and professional careers that collate women as a central concern.”

When universities make appointments to “programs” or “studies” or “institutes,” decisions about hiring and tenure often lie partially in the votes of faculty members in actual departments. That is intended to inject a measure of disciplinary expertise into such decisions—and sometimes does. (Such is the case at most Ivy League Plus private universities.) But it also has the opposite effect, in that appointments into departments such as history, English, or sociology are made at the impetus of the ideologically-constituted programs. And once those hires have been made, they become members of hiring committees and vote on tenure, making it more likely that new hires will further reflect the propensities of the ideologized fields.

But at many elite public research (R1) institutions, there is not even the institutional firebreak of disciplinary expertise, in that there are entire departments of “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” with the authority to make their own appointments. Such is the case, for example, at UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, University of Texas-Austin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ohio State, University of Minnesota, and many more. Add to these a few departments such as that at UC Santa Barbara, whose “Department of Feminist Studies,” describes itself as “the locus of feminist, decolonial, transnational, and queer and trans research and teaching at UC Santa Barbara.” That department has 12 core faculty, and some 50 affiliates.

These new fields, sub-fields, sub-disciplines, and trans-disciplines develop journals of their own, with their distinct standards of expertise and ideological propriety, sometimes, as in the case of the journal Feminist Studies, mixing scholarly articles, critical essays, poetry, art, and movement reports oriented around feminist theory and practice. There are also journals that combine feminist ideology with a disciplinary focus, such as Feminist Economics, Feminism & Psychology, Feminist Legal Studies, International Feminist Journal of Politics, or The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.

The result of this institutional constellation is that “organized skepticism” goes by the wayside, or rather the only skepticism permitted is within the ideological confines of the field.

To be clear: I think that the study of women is among the most important topics of present scholarly inquiry. Much of my own reading for my current project is about women, and much of that comes from scholars who are women. My point is that it makes a difference whether scholarship proceeds from the premises and standards of ideologically constituted fields or through disciplinary channels. (For exemplary works, see for example, my previous posts about the work of Alison Wolf, Isabel Sawhill and Claudia Goldin; or Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Mothers Put Motherhood Before Marriage, the authors of which held appointments in Public Policy (Edin) and Sociology (Kefalas). There are many more examples of excellent scholarship, especially when one turns to historical studies.

The same holds true for studies of African Americans, and other groups – the best scholarship tends to come from academics whose primary allegiances are to established disciplines, even if their research is trans-disciplinary. (One thinks, for example, of Orlando Patterson or Thomas Sowell.)

In each of these fields there is a legitimate — indeed important — object of study. What deforms them is not the subject matter but the axioms placed off-limits. Consider “gender.” The historically and socially shifting norms and expectations attached to men and women are a rich subject. The distortion begins when the biological differences between men and women — and the average psychological differences that partly follow from them — are ruled out a priori as illegitimate concerns. In postcolonial studies, the parallel unexamined premise is that colonial influence was always and only malign. In the study of crime and incarceration, the reigning assumption in many departments is that incarceration itself is illegitimate and unnecessary, and that the higher rate of Black incarceration can only be explained by racism. In each case the topic is worthy of study; what is not defensible is treating the field’s founding conclusion as a condition of entry.

The increasing salience of ideologically-constructed fields as well as ideologically slanted disciplines has implications for faculty control of hiring.

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Increasing Politicization and the Decline of the Academic Ethos

In addition to the institutes, programs and departments devoted to one or another flavor of “social justice,” the academic landscape is dotted with centers with explicitly ideological agendas.

Take, for example, the “Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism,” at Johns Hopkins University, a successor of the “Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship” there. The center describes itself on its website as “an interdisciplinary forum focusing on the intersections of empire, migration, and racial hierarchy. To explore these issues, the Center hosts workshops and symposia, facilitates student publications, and offers research grants. The center is also home to the Critical Diaspora Studies major. The Chloe Center supports reparative freedom education among students, faculty, and staff on campus and across Baltimore.” (https://krieger.jhu.edu/chloe/)

Another example of such a center is the “Border Tech Lab,” founded at Cornell in 2018 and now located at the University of Texas in Austin.

Here is how it describes its mission and methods:

“Since its founding in 2018, the Border Tech Lab interrogates boundary-making processes at the intersection of material and symbolic sociotechnical relations. Our projects tackle the reproduction, negotiation, and contestation of unjust social and technological arrangements across time and space—from the vulnerabilities of the gig economy to the toxicity of electronics manufacturing.
Our chief concern is the study of boundaries (as conceptual, epistemological, political demarcations) through practices of encounter, difference, and signification. Boundaries are examined through a range of critical lenses such as those developed by feminist STS [Science and Technology Studies], critical race STS, digital studies, and American/ethnic studies. This has meant being attuned to practices of care, invisible labor, differential treatments of populations, the relation between identity and technological use, and more.” (https://www.bordertechlab.org/)

Bear in mind that the dynamics of university culture are such that myriad academic units devoted to one or another version of “social justice” often share faculty, students, and ideological affinities with one another, often under the rubric of “allyship” – i.e. “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” From time to time, they converge on one cause or another – most recently the cause of “Palestine,” i.e. anti-Israel activism. Indeed, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP, a highly politicized voluntary association) has increasingly focused its efforts on defending faculty members who have aided students protesting in the name of “justice for Palestine,” and of faculty who encourage such activity. Todd Wolfson, the current president of the AAUP, elected in 2024, is an active member of the Rutgers University branch of “Faculty for Justice in Palestine” and joined a human ring of faculty members formed to protect the student encampment there.^[5]

The AAUP was founded in 1915, and during its early decades upheld a distinction between academic inquiry and political activism. “Academic freedom,” as the organization defined it, meant the right to teach and research in keeping with disciplinary standards. Its mid-century statements stressed the responsibility of faculty members to refrain from indoctrination and from introducing unrelated matters into their courses. That emphasis on academic responsibilities began to seriously erode in the 1960s, and is now long gone.^[6] Today’s graduate students often develop their conception of academic norms from the ideologized faculty that set the tone in their departments, or from graduate unions, increasingly influenced by activists of the Democratic Socialists of America. (See on this Noam Scheiber’s recent journalistic study, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.) Like many academic associations, the AAUP is increasingly dominated by its most politically activist members.

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What Is To Be Done?

In the piece by David Bell cited above, the Princeton historian concludes that

“at the very least, deans and provosts should recognize that viewpoint diversity is a worthy goal. They should do what they can, without trampling on the academic freedom of the units they supervise, to ensure that candidates whose views might strike most humanists and social scientists as conservative are not penalized for these views in hiring and have a fair chance to advance in searches and promotions.”

My contention is that the dynamics I have described often make that strategy unrealistic. For the existing members of these departments and programs will insist that their “academic freedom” means the power to appoint new colleagues – and those colleagues will almost always share their ideological predilections.

The answer, I think, is conveyed in this recent statement adopted by Vanderbilt University’s Board of Trustees, The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles:

“Faculty have a corresponding duty to act in accordance with and actively maintain scholarly standards. Faculty fail to live up to this duty if they individually or collectively (e.g., in academic units or scholarly associations) subordinate scholarly standards to a political and social agenda. Standards of scholarly inquiry are compromised when ideas and contributions required by academic norms of evidence and reasoning are suppressed. The freedom to ask questions and pursue research ideas should not be inhibited or limited because the hypothesis and research ideas are at odds with political commitments or social goals. It is the shared responsibility of faculty and university leaders that such standards of open inquiry are upheld without exception.

When academic units deviate from these commitments, academic leaders need to address such dysfunctionalities through standard academic processes such as replacement of leadership; reorganization of units, including receivership and closure; the creation of new units; or focused hiring and educational initiatives.”

I’ve argued here that those “dysfunctionalities” have become ubiquitous, not only within disciplines but especially within departments, programs, or institutes constituted by political ideology. In such cases “faculty control” means the intensification of the problem. It therefore requires a force from without to recreate the institutions of organized skepticism, disinterestedness, and a modicum of objectivity.

Defenders of the politicized academic status quo will predictably argue that criticism of the university “plays into the hands of the Trumpists.” That charge may persuade those already inclined to agree, but it evades a more uncomfortable reality: without external pressure, however clumsy or ill-conceived, institutional inertia would likely prevent meaningful reform of the universities.

Though there are many faculty members who would welcome such measures, waiting for a majority of faculty to “buy in” is likely a dead end. Academic reform requires a strong president—with a supportive board of trustees—who can in turn appoint and support like-minded provosts, deans, and department chairs. Few institutions are likely to find the required leadership, which demands both vision and a thick skin. But for those institutions that do, there are likely to be great rewards, in attracting faculty, students, and public trust.

(Note: I taught for most of my academic career at the Catholic University of America, from which I retired in 2020. I was fortunate that the problems I have described in this post were not characteristic of that institution, for which I remain grateful.)

^[1] See for example, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/research/2026/06/10/professors-say-vanderbilt-report-misrepresents-their-work

^[2] https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-anthropology-hopelessly-politicized?sra=true

^[3] https://www.chronicle.com/article/who-gets-to-judge-the-humanities?sra=true

^[4]