The Vanderbilt Report’s Sub-Report on Philosophy

“Academic philosophy is generally healthy in most respects relevant to the work of the Commission.” That commission is the group of ten scholars (including three philosophers from NYU and one from Princeton), who, at the request of the Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, this summer produced a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” which came to be known as the Vanderbilt Report. Despite the generality of the report’s title, readers may recall that the commission took as its focus just one type of potential threat to the state of today’s humanistic scholarship: politicization, or, more specifically, “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.” The Vanderbilt Report was followed by several discipline-specific reports, and the last one, on…