MY INITIAL RESPONSE TO THE 'REPORT ON THE STATE OF SCHOLARSHIP IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE HUMANISTIC SOCIAL SCIENCES: PART 2

2. The Conception of Scholarship: Truth, Objectivity, Evidence and Ideology 

The philosophical heart of the report lies not in its later disciplinary case studies but in its attempt to articulate what scholarship itself is. Everything that follows depends upon this conception. If the conception is compelling, then the later diagnoses acquire considerable force. If it is philosophically weak, historically selective or administratively overconfident, then much of what follows risks becoming an elaborate policy built upon unsettled intellectual foundations. The report therefore deserves to be read not merely as a report about universities but as a work in the philosophy of scholarship. 

Once read in this light, an interesting paradox immediately appears. Although the report repeatedly insists that universities must distinguish scholarship from politics, it simultaneously makes a series of philosophical decisions about truth, objectivity, interpretation, ideology and evidence that are themselves among the most disputed questions in contemporary philosophy. Rather than presenting these disputes as open questions within philosophy, history, literary theory or anthropology, it increasingly treats one side of these disputes as the settled framework from which university policy ought to proceed. This movement, from contested philosophical debate to institutional prescription, is the deepest tension within the document. 

The report begins admirably enough. It rejects the crudest conservative caricature of the humanities. It refuses the suggestion that entire disciplines have become nothing more than "agitprop" or "jargon-laden nonsense." It explicitly states that serious scholarship continues to flourish throughout the humanities and humanistic social sciences and that the most extreme public criticisms are exaggerated. This moderation initially reassured me. The commission appeared, at first anyway, unwilling simply to reproduce culture-war slogans. Yet almost immediately another framework emerges. The report argues that genuine scholarship presupposes what it calls a "minimal distinction" between politically attractive accounts and accounts that are true or well supported by evidence. It writes: 

"All we need is a minimal distinction between politically attractive accounts on the one hand and true or well-supported accounts on the other." 

This appears almost impossible to disagree with. The difficulty lies elsewhere. The report transforms this modest epistemic principle into something much larger. It is one thing to say that evidence matters. It is another to infer from this that those intellectual traditions which interrogate the concepts of objectivity, neutrality or evidence thereby undermine scholarship itself. Here one begins to notice the report's characteristic argumentative strategy. Rather than directly attacking contemporary critical theory, post-structuralism, feminist epistemology, standpoint theory, postcolonial theory or constructivism, it first constructs a highly general conception of scholarship centred upon truth, evidence and objectivity. Then it begins to ask which intellectual traditions appear compatible with that conception. The architecture is elegant because the philosophical work has already been completed before particular schools are discussed. Yet the concepts doing all the work - truth, evidence, objectivity, ideology - are themselves not philosophically transparent concepts. They are among the most intensively debated notions in twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. The report acknowledges this only briefly. It concedes: "There is abundant room for disagreement about the nature of this purported 'objectivity,' and in particular about whether the objectivity appropriate to the humanistic disciplines differs in some way from the objectivity at issue in the natural sciences." 

But something remarkable happens immediately afterwards. Instead of allowing this disagreement to reshape the inquiry, the report effectively brackets it away. It tells the reader that "for present purposes" only a minimal distinction is required. Woah!! What exactly counts as "minimal"? Minimal according to whom? Minimal within analytic epistemology? Minimal within phenomenology? Minimal within hermeneutics? Minimal within pragmatism? Minimal within feminist epistemology? Minimal within contemporary philosophy of history? No answer is supplied. Instead, "minimal" begins functioning as if it were both philosophically uncontroversial and transparent. 

The report substantially underestimates the sophistication of the traditions it criticises. Consider history. The report introduces Hayden White largely as representing the idea that historical writing is fundamentally narrative construction rather than objective reconstruction. It quotes White approvingly as describing historical works as "verbal fictions." For readers unfamiliar with White this can appear simple to understand. Yet historians have spent nearly half a century arguing over exactly what White meant. White was not simply arguing that history is invented. He was analysing the unavoidable literary structures through which historians organise evidence. His claim concerned emplotment, rhetoric, narrative explanation and the unavoidable mediation of historical understanding through language. One may reject White. Many historians have. But one cannot responsibly reduce the ensuing fifty years of historiography to a contrast between objective historians and fictional historians. But the report lends itself to just that! It repeatedly summarises highly developed philosophical traditions through their most politically controversial formulations. 

The same pattern appears in its treatment of postmodernism. The report distinguishes what it calls a "limited" critique of objectivity from a more "radical" critique. This distinction is sensible. Indeed philosophers themselves often distinguish epistemological constructivism from wholesale anti-realism. Yet notice how the examples accumulate. We encounter quotations from critical pedagogy. We encounter arguments concerning socially constructed knowledge. We encounter claims that science is ideological. Individually these quotations are genuine. Collectively they produce an impression that contemporary humanities scholarship increasingly repudiates truth itself. 

Again and again, complex intellectual traditions are represented through isolated formulations detached from the interpretative contexts that have occupied scholars for decades. Nietzsche's oft-repeated remark that "there are no facts, only interpretations" (itself not a straightforward quotation from a published work, but reconstructed from notebooks and subsequently transformed into a slogan) functions in contemporary culture-war rhetoric as shorthand for the supposed abandonment of truth by the humanities. The report's use of such examples risks reinforcing precisely this impression among readers who are unlikely to possess specialist knowledge of nineteenth-century continental philosophy. Yet one of the world's leading Nietzsche scholars, Brian Leiter, has spent much of his career arguing that this reading fundamentally misrepresents Nietzsche's epistemology. 

Leiter's sustained interpretation is not that Nietzsche rejected truth as such, but that he rejected particular metaphysical conceptions of truth and, more importantly, denied that truth constituted the supreme or exclusive human value. Nietzsche's question was never simply "Is it true?" but also "What is the value of truth?" and "Under what conditions does the pursuit of truth enhance or diminish life?" Those are recognisably philosophical questions rather than slogans announcing epistemic nihilism. Indeed, Leiter has repeatedly argued against precisely the popular caricature that treats Nietzsche as the patron saint of postmodern relativism. Whether or not one accepts Leiter's interpretation in every respect is beside the point. The point is that there exists a vast, sophisticated scholarly literature debating exactly how Nietzsche understood truth, objectivity, perspectivism and knowledge. 

To invoke a celebrated line stripped of these interpretative controversies is therefore not merely an act of simplification but an act of rhetorical framing. It encourages non-specialist readers to infer that major traditions within the humanities are straightforwardly hostile to truth itself when the reality is one of persistent, technically sophisticated disagreement among experts. The same pattern recurs throughout the report: isolated quotations, provocative formulations and emblematic episodes are assembled into a cumulative narrative whose persuasive force depends less upon careful engagement with the strongest versions of the positions under discussion than upon their recognisability within wider political discourse. 

From the standpoint of scholarship, this is a surprisingly fragile methodology. One ordinarily expects scholars to reconstruct opposing positions in their most intellectually defensible form before criticising them. Cherry-picking aphorisms, detached quotations or particularly vulnerable examples to create an overall impression of an entire field is normally regarded as poor interpretative practice. Ironically, then, in seeking to defend standards of scholarly integrity, the report adopts a mode of argument that many humanities scholars would immediately identify as a textbook instance of inadequate scholarship: selective quotation, insufficient contextualisation, and the construction of a politically resonant narrative from evidence presented in its weakest and least representative form. That is not merely an intellectual weakness; it is the sort of politically inflected scholarship the report professes to oppose.

So the report exhibits an interesting asymmetry. Whenever scholars discuss ideology, power or social construction, the report tends to interpret these discussions as challenges to truth. Yet many scholars working in precisely these traditions would reject that description. Take feminist epistemology. Few contemporary feminist philosophers deny that there are facts. Instead they ask who has historically counted as a knower, whose testimony has been discounted, which research questions become visible and which remain invisible. The issue is frequently not whether truth exists but how epistemic institutions succeed or fail in discovering it. Likewise postcolonial historians often argue that archives are incomplete because colonial administrations systematically excluded certain voices. Again, this is not an attack upon historical truth. It is frequently an argument for expanding the evidential base from which historical truth is reconstructed. 

The report often appears insufficiently attentive to these distinctions. Its categories become broader than the scholarship they seek to describe. This becomes even more striking when ideology enters the discussion. The report presents a picture in which traditional scholarship sought truth whereas contemporary scholarship increasingly substitutes political commitment for evidential standards. Certainly examples of overtly activist scholarship exist. No serious observer denies this. But there is a larger historical irony. The history of the humanities has never consisted of politically neutral scholarship suddenly corrupted by ideology. Classical philology emerged within European nation-building. Victorian anthropology developed alongside imperial administration. Art history frequently reflected nationalist narratives. Economics often embodied liberal assumptions. Philosophy itself has long been structured by political, religious and metaphysical commitments. The report itself notes many historical abuses of objectivity. Yet these examples arguably undermine its own historical narrative. For if supposedly objective scholarship repeatedly produced colonialism, scientific racism, eugenics and patriarchal exclusions, then examining the relationship between knowledge and power becomes not an ideological distraction but an unavoidable scholarly task. Indeed one might say that critical theory emerged precisely because scholars took truth seriously enough to investigate how institutions distort it. 

The report seems aware of this possibility but never fully integrates it into its conception of scholarship. Instead ideology increasingly functions as something external contaminating inquiry rather than as something scholars, including the report's own authors, must continuously investigate within themselves. 

This raises an uncomfortable possibility. Could the report itself possess an ideology in the philosophical sense developed by figures from Karl Marx, Karl Mannheim through Michel Foucault to Jason Stanley and beyond: a framework that determines which questions appear natural, which assumptions become invisible and which distinctions seem self-evident. The report rarely entertains this possibility. Its own conception of scholarship appears largely transparent to itself. Yet every philosophy of knowledge carries assumptions. Even choosing objectivity over situated knowledge, correspondence over pragmatism, or evidential realism over interpretive pluralism constitutes philosophical positioning. This means that the report's framework belongs within philosophical debate rather than above it. 

Perhaps the most surprising feature of this chapter is therefore not what it argues but what it leaves largely unexamined. Entire research programmes scarcely appear except as brief illustrations. The enormous literature on hermeneutics from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur receives almost no sustained treatment. The philosophy of interpretation developed by analytic philosophers such as Donald Davidson barely appears. Contemporary work on social epistemology, virtue epistemology, collective knowledge, standpoint epistemology, testimony, disagreement and epistemic injustice, all fields directly relevant to the report's concerns, is discussed only selectively or indirectly. The result is that extraordinarily complex intellectual landscapes become compressed into simplified oppositions between evidence and ideology, truth and politics, scholarship and activism. One begins to suspect that the report commits the very reductionism it criticises elsewhere. For it repeatedly warns against replacing careful scholarship with sweeping ideological narratives. Yet its own philosophical history resembles precisely such a narrative. It constructs a large cultural diagnosis from highly selective engagements with immensely diverse intellectual traditions. 

The irony becomes sharper still when one considers the report's intended audience. This is not written primarily for philosophers. Nor for historians of historiography. Nor for literary theorists. It is written for university presidents and chancellors. That institutional fact changes the meaning of every philosophical claim. Within a philosophy seminar, disagreements about objectivity remain scholarly disagreements. Within an administrative report, the same disagreements begin to influence hiring priorities, programme reviews, departmental evaluations and resource allocation. Questions that philosophers expect to remain permanently open become translated into governance. Here lies my deepest concern. Universities have traditionally protected academic inquiry and recognised that many foundational questions remain unresolved. The nature of truth, realism, interpretation, historical explanation, objectivity and ideology are not preliminary matters awaiting administrative settlement. They are themselves the substance of ongoing research in philosophy, history, literary studies, anthropology and related disciplines. To convert one side of these debates into the implicit philosophical constitution by which administrators evaluate scholarly health short-circuits the very intellectual processes universities exist to sustain. The report therefore leaves the attentive reader with a paradox. It urges universities to resist allowing politics to settle scholarly disputes, yet it simultaneously invites administrators to politically act upon a philosophical picture whose central components remain vigorously contested within the academy itself. 

That looks like political censorship. And unjustified philosophical closure.