Subordinating the Humanities’ Scholarly Enterprise to Political Goals

“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 yUniversity. 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…