My Initial Response to the 'Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences: Part 1

I. The Preface and the Charge to the Commission: Trust, Scholarship and the Politics of Intellectual Authority 

The opening pages of the State of Scholarship Report deserve to be read carefully. They appear at first glance to constitute a restrained institutional document: university leaders are worried about declining public confidence, they ask eminent scholars to investigate whether concerns about the humanities possess any substance, and the resulting commission promises an objective assessment. The rhetoric is judicial. Yet its underlying assumptions deserve especially close scrutiny. The most significant philosophical work of the report occurs before it reaches any evidence at all. By the time the reader arrives at the first disciplinary discussion, a conception of scholarship, authority, public trust and university governance has already been established. Whether one ultimately agrees with the report or not, these initial assumptions largely determine everything that follows. 

The report begins with an apparently uncontroversial statement. It is addressed: "to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields." 

Nothing here initially appears remarkable. Universities have always reflected upon their scholarly standards. Yet even this opening sentence quietly shifts the location of intellectual authority. The intended audience is not scholars engaged in research, nor disciplinary communities themselves, nor learned societies, nor journals, but university executives. The managers. The admin team. This is already an alarm bell issue. Throughout most of the modern history of universities, questions concerning what counts as good philosophy, convincing history, responsible literary criticism or productive anthropology have been treated as matters internal to those disciplines themselves. They are settled - provisionally, fallibly and endlessly - through peer review, conferences, scholarly disagreement, graduate training and argument. The report subtly repositions these questions and suggests that debates concerning scholarship have reached a point where they are no longer merely scholarly questions but institutional governance questions. The report therefore has transformed an epistemic problem into an administrative one. 

The official charge issued by the two chancellors makes this shift even clearer. They explain that they are concerned with: "the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines." 

One immediately notices something philosophically curious. The commission is not initially motivated by evidence that scholarship has deteriorated. It is motivated by the erosion of public support. The first object requiring explanation is not scholarship itself but trust. That distinction becomes increasingly important as one reads further. A decline in enrolments, political hostility towards universities, changing labour markets, demographic change, reductions in public funding, social media criticism, culture-war politics and genuine intellectual failures could all produce declining trust. Public confidence is itself a sociological phenomenon requiring explanation rather than functioning as evidence about the quality of scholarship. 

Yet from the opening paragraphs these two very different questions begin to converge. Why do people trust universities less? Have scholarly standards declined? These are not the same question. Indeed, one can easily imagine circumstances in which scholarship became considerably more rigorous while public trust simultaneously declined, perhaps because scholarship produced politically unpopular conclusions. Equally, public confidence might remain high despite deteriorating standards. The relationship between truth and trust is contingent rather than necessary. The report acknowledges this distinction only partially before allowing one concern gradually to become evidence for the other. 

The commission then lists the complaints motivating its investigation. Scientists, we are told, have criticised the misuse of science by some humanists. (Hmm. Well, philosophers such as, for example, philosophers of physics Timothy Maudlin and David Albert have criticised the misuse of science by some scientists, particular when it comes to the foundations of physics. So are we going to see a report into the state of science anytime soon? They've also criticised the misuse of philosophy by science, as well as the misuse of science by philosophy. The more one looks, there seems to be disputes about interdisciplinary misuse all over the place - some of it coming from the humanities itself. So why the report into the humanities and no one else? It looks dodgy to say the least, and certainly not a transparently obvious thing to do.) 

We're also told that philosophers have worried about attitudes towards truth, evidence and knowledge (But again, Maudlin et al has been pretty worried about the same thing amongst some physicists, to the point where one of them walked out of a discussion with him on a podcast!). Others have argued that ideological commitments have distorted scholarship. But notice the interesting structure here. These are not empirical findings. They are reports of complaints. Complaints themselves constitute sociological facts. They do not constitute evidence concerning the truth of the complaints. A historian would immediately distinguish between documenting accusations and demonstrating that the accusations are justified. Indeed, many historical episodes consist precisely in tracing how accusations become socially powerful despite possessing only partial evidential support - or none at all. (Think of witch trials. There has never been evidence of witchcraft ever - because evidence is factive and witches don't exist. But there were accusations and they were acted upon. Now you might disagree that evidence is necessarily factive, or/and that witches don't exist, but that just shows that even this example of a spurious complaint is open to contestation. But I'm pretty sure the chair of the report does think both that evidence is necessarily factive and that witches don't exist, so I use it to land the point against his report because, well it is his report after all!) 

You'd therefore expect the report to maintain a strict distinction between recording concerns and validating them. Initially it promises exactly this. The commission is asked "to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified." 

So far so good. But already one might ask a prior question that surprisingly remains unexplored. Why these allegations? (Like I indicated above, there are other allegations, loads and loads of them from all over the place not just philosophy of physics.) Why these particular concerns? Why now? One striking absence throughout these introductory pages is any serious sociology of the controversy itself. The report proceeds largely as though these criticisms emerged independently from the condition of scholarship. Yet historians of ideas would naturally ask different questions. Why has the language of "trust," "politicisation," "objectivity" and "ideology" become especially prominent in the political discourse surrounding universities during the past decade? How do these complaints relate to electoral politics, social media ecosystems, changes in higher education funding, demographic shifts, or the transformation of universities into increasingly managerial institutions? Is there a link between these particular complaints and the rise of an extreme right-wing authoritarianism in the USA? These are themselves legitimate humanistic questions, in fact, I'd say they're kind of the kinds of questions we'd expect to be raised in the humanities. But the report shows no inclination to ask them. Instead, the complaints largely function as neutral starting points. This already produces an irony. A report devoted to defending scholarship pays little attention to studying the historical production of the very complaints that motivate its own existence. 

The introduction sounds generous towards the humanities. It declares: "The humanities and the social sciences take as their subject matter human culture and society... Their common aim is to help us understand the human world... Our starting point is the shared conviction that scholarship of this sort has contributed immeasurably to our understanding." 

Far from dismissing the humanities, the report explicitly insists upon their civilisational importance. Literature, history, philosophy, economics, anthropology, sociology and the arts are described as essential to liberal education and to understanding ourselves. Yet this generosity creates another tension. If the humanities are genuinely characterised by helping us understand all of human culture in all its richness, then you'd kind of expect enormous methodological diversity to get hold of the whole of human culture in all its diversity. Understanding Shakespeare is not like understanding voting behaviour. Understanding Augustine is not like understanding migration. Understanding symbolism in Renaissance painting is not like reconstructing Bronze Age trade routes. Understanding the ontology of numbers is not like tracking the economics of the Crusades. Understanding responses to Macbeth in teenagers is not the same as understanding GNP. Nor are the standards of argument identical across philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, archaeology, linguistics, economics and musicology. Precisely because these disciplines investigate extraordinarily different objects, you expect their standards of evidence to vary considerably. 

The report certainly recognises this diversity. But simultaneously it repeatedly invokes singular notions of "rigour," "objectivity," "scholarly standards" and "the advancement of understanding." This raises a philosophical question : what exactly is scholarship? Metaphysically. Epistemologically. Methodologically. What kind of activity unifies textual interpretation, conceptual analysis, ethnography, historical reconstruction, aesthetic criticism and sociological explanation? This question has occupied philosophers of the humanities for well over a century, from Wilhelm Dilthey through Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty and many others. It remains deeply contested. Yet the report largely assumes that sufficiently robust answers already exist. The report explains that administrations normally trust disciplinary experts to regulate themselves. However: "When astronomy as a field morphs into astrology... disciplinary expertise itself cannot be trusted." 

This analogy is rhetorically brilliant. Astronomy and astrology constitute an unusually clear case because there exists overwhelming independent evidence distinguishing them (Although philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend didn't think so.) One field generates extraordinarily successful predictions integrated with physics, mathematics and engineering; the other does not. But because this example is so extreme, it risks importing into the humanities a level of certainty that their subject matter rarely permits. Few serious philosophers today believes debates over realism, relativism, interpretation, standpoint epistemology, social construction or objectivity resemble the astronomy/astrology distinction. Indeed, entire careers continue to be devoted to these questions. 

Consider relativism. The report repeatedly treats concern about relativism as though its intellectual status were largely settled. Yet within philosophy, sophisticated debates continue over alethic relativism, conceptual relativism, epistemic contextualism, pluralism, realism and constructivism. Scholars such as Crispin Wright, Paul Boghossian himself, Michael Lynch, Huw Price, John MacFarlane, Hartrey Field and many others continue to dispute these matters at the highest technical level. The point is not whether relativism is true. The point is that it remains contested. 

The report treats unresolved philosophical controversies as though they were already sufficiently settled to inform administrative judgment. Academic disagreement is transformed into institutional diagnosis. The report repeatedly invokes "objectivity" while giving relatively little attention to contemporary philosophy of science, philosophy of history or hermeneutics, all of which have spent decades refining precisely what objectivity might amount to after the collapse of simple positivism. One can entirely reject crude postmodern scepticism while nevertheless accepting that objectivity itself is a sophisticated philosophical achievement rather than a transparent starting point. But the report tends to write as though objectivity requires defence but relatively little analysis. Yet objectivity is itself one of the central research topics of the very disciplines under examination. Here the report begins to exhibit an anti-intellectual tendency, not because it rejects intellectual inquiry, quite the opposite, but because it is impatient with the very complexity that sustained scholarship has uncovered. Long-running debates over truth, evidence, interpretation, and ideology are flattened into administratively usable categories. Questions that remain live within philosophy, literary theory, historiography, and anthropology are treated as though they were sufficiently resolved to ground policy recommendations. 

The risk is not that the report defends objectivity; it is that it substitutes a simplified philosophical picture for the far more intricate landscape that contemporary scholarship actually inhabits. Given that the writers of the report have contributed to that intricacy I guess they've done this to "dumb down" for the audience. But this is disastrous.  

This is another deep educational irony running beneath the report, one that anyone who has spent a career in schools is likely to recognise immediately. The report repeatedly translates extraordinarily intricate intellectual landscapes into managerial summaries sufficiently digestible for non-specialist administrators to oversee. There is, of course, nothing inherently objectionable about explaining complex ideas clearly. Every discipline depends upon exposition. The difficulty arises when explanation becomes reduction, and reduction becomes the basis for governance. 

The report appears to assume that university leaders require simplified conceptual maps in order to identify intellectual health and dysfunction across disciplines whose literatures they cannot reasonably be expected to master. Yet in making scholarship administratively legible it necessarily strips away precisely those ambiguities, internal disagreements, historical developments and conceptual refinements that constitute scholarship itself. The administrator receives not philosophy but "positions"; not anthropology but "approaches"; not literary theory but "schools"; not epistemology but "stances." The living argument becomes a managerial taxonomy. What is lost is the very feature that distinguishes serious intellectual work from ideological sloganising: the endless qualification, complication and refinement by which scholars slowly discover that the apparently obvious is rarely straightforward.

For those of us who have watched educational policy evolve over several decades, this process has an uncomfortable familiarity. Throughout much of contemporary school reform, teaching itself has increasingly been reconstructed through the assumption that systems should be designed around the least experienced or least expert practitioner. Schemes of work became scripts. Curricula became delivery packages. Assessment criteria became checklists. Professional judgement was replaced by procedural compliance. The justification was almost always well intentioned: if weaker teachers could reliably deliver a simplified version of good practice, standards might become more consistent. Yet the unintended consequence was frequently the opposite. By simplifying teaching sufficiently for the weakest practitioners, the system simultaneously constrained the strongest. The expert teacher, whose effectiveness depended precisely upon deep subject knowledge, intellectual responsiveness, improvisation and sensitivity to disciplinary nuance, found increasingly little room to exercise those capacities. Complexity was treated as a problem to be managed rather than as the medium within which expertise actually operates. 

The philosopher of education Christopher Winch has argued that genuine professional judgement cannot be reduced to procedural rule-following because it depends upon forms of practical knowledge acquired only through prolonged engagement with a discipline. The report risks committing an analogous error at the level of the university. It reduces complex scholarly ecologies into categories sufficiently stable for managerial oversight, but in doing so it subtly reconstructs scholarship itself as something capable of external administration rather than internal criticism. The result is a framework designed to help those who necessarily lack disciplinary expertise govern those whose expertise consists precisely in inhabiting the complexities that the framework has had to remove. As with so much school reform, the simplification introduced to assist the least informed decision-makers threatens to disable precisely those intellectual virtues that distinguish the most accomplished practitioners. The university becomes easier to administer only because it has first been made less recognisable as a community of scholars.

The deepest irony of the introduction is therefore methodological. The report argues that scholarship should resist political simplification. Yet its own opening chapters move in the opposite direction. Rather than entering the difficult intellectual terrain in which historians, philosophers, literary critics and anthropologists etc. continue to disagree, they step over those disagreements in order to produce administratively actionable conclusions. 

The proper place for resolving such foundational disputes is not the office of the university president. It is the seminar room. It is the journal article. It is the scholarly monograph. In short, it is scholarship itself.