A Crisis in the Humanities: When Scholarship Meets Politics

Editor’s note: the text that follows has been adapted, with permission of the authors, from “State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” a report submitted on 5 April, 2026 to Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University; and addressed to all “university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities.” The full list of authors appears in the credit information below.

The idea that there is something amiss in the humanities and the social sciences, and that the problem has something to do with the politicisation of research in these areas, is hardly new. American historian Richard Hofstadter traced American scepticism about the role of university professors in public life to evangelical Protestant suspicion of the “learned clergy” during the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In more recent history, the idea reached a high-water mark during the McCarthy era, and another in the 1980s with the publication of best sellers such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987) and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990).

Our report does not attempt to trace the roots of the present-day critique of the academy to these antecedents. Nor does it attempt to engage in detail with contemporary critics of the humanistic academy and its defenders, a sprawling discussion that has taken place mainly online and in the press. Much of that discussion is focused on undergraduate teaching and its social consequences, a topic we address only in passing.

Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs. The critique we take seriously is that this scholarly enterprise has been damaged in recent decades, not just by a general erosion of standards, but also by a reconceptualisation of scholarship as a form of political activity, answerable in part to extra-academic standards.

We begin from what ought to be a platitude: The humanities and the social sciences are academic disciplines aimed at understanding the human world and the larger reality of which it is a part. There is room for debate about what it means to “understand” a historical episode, or a literary text, or a social phenomenon. But it should not be controversial that, like all academic research, scholarship in these disciplines is in the business of asking questions; that these questions have answers (when they are well-posed); that these answers are not simply evident and can therefore only be arrived at indirectly, by appeal to evidence and argument; and that it is the role of academic disciplines to cultivate methods for collecting the evidence relevant to their questions and for assessing scholarly proposals on the basis of it.

It should also be uncontroversial that scholarly standards of this kind can be better or worse. The ancient practice of augury provided an intricate battery of norms for extracting information about the future from the activity of birds. These norms were widely accepted and the practice no doubt served a purpose. But they were bogus: the predictions supported by the norms of augury were not in fact warranted or well-supported. In its baldest form, the critique of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that concerns us holds that the operative norms in these areas are similarly bogus: that what passes for “good scholarship” by the standards of these disciplines is often bad scholarship, or worse, pseudo-scholarship—writing which has the formal trappings of scholarship but which is not aimed at knowledge or understanding but rather at some other outcome.

We reject this critique in this bald form. In every area we have considered, there is an abundance of serious scholarship. And yet we do find grounds for concern, not just in individual disciplines, but systematically.

As will emerge, the problems concern the quality of the scholarship and the norms and standards governing its production—norms that often serve to suppress scholarship that challenges a rigidly enforced orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues, and which substitute moral and political standards for properly academic standards in the evaluation of scholarship.

Before we say more about the real problems as we understand them, however, it will be useful to say a few words to distinguish these real problems from related issues with which they are frequently conflated.

A. The problem is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public.

This observation is of course true. But this is a general point about the professoriat, not a point specifically about the humanities or the social sciences. More importantly, it is not by itself a problem for scholarship in these areas. Academic mathematicians in the United States are more liberal than the electorate. But this has no tendency to show that scholarly standards in mathematics are somehow bogus. 

There may of course be serious problems in the vicinity. The liberal skew in the professoriat may play an indirect role in undermining public support for universities, and also in discouraging full participation in academia on the part of students who find themselves culturally and politically alienated from their professors. But these problems are not problems about the scholarship itself or the standards by which it is assessed, and are therefore beyond our remit.

More pertinently, when scholarship is distorted by politics in the ways we describe below, political homogeneity on the faculty may make this problem harder to spot and therefore harder to correct. This may be an excellent reason for taking an interest in ideological diversity on the faculty; but then the core problem is not political homogeneity as such but the fact that political commitments are distorting scholarship in the first place.

B. The problem is not that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism.

Scholars are members of the polity who rightly take an interest in social problems. Moreover, insofar as their scholarly competence provides them with relevant expertise, it is perfectly acceptable—some would say obligatory—for scholars to advocate for concrete reforms in light of their expertise.

This is clearest when the relevant expertise is technical and the political goal relatively uncontroversial. A sociologist who is an expert on the sociology of crime may legitimately have a view about how best to reduce crime and may legitimately see her research and public-facing scholarship as aimed at realising such reforms. But it is also true when the relevant expertise is partly normative and the goals controversial. A political philosopher who has concluded on the basis of normative arguments that the race-based preferences in hiring are inherently unfair may legitimately—i.e., compatibly with the highest norms of scholarly rigour and objectivity—see her scholarship as continuous with her activism in opposition to racial preferences.

There is some tendency to suppose in these discussions that serious scholarship must always be “value neutral,” and hence that a scholar who takes a political position thereby shows “bias” of a sort that undermines her scholarship. In our view, this is a mistake. Just as there are good questions about how best to reduce the crime rate that empirical sociology can attempt to answer, so there are good questions about what justice requires that political philosophy can begin to answer. A scholar with a reasoned view on this sort of question may be an advocate for a potentially controversial cause; but this sort of activism is compatible with the highest standards of scholarly conduct.

C. The problem is not that political considerations have broadened the focus of scholarship away from the Western high art canon and other historically central topics toward work by and about members of marginalised groups—women, members of racial and ethnic minorities, and so on.

This is undoubtedly true to a significant degree, but it is not by itself a problem. It is in the nature of the humanities and social sciences that nothing human is alien to them. One enduring lesson of the long post-1960s critique of the canon (and of related phenomena, like the focus on great men and momentous battles in the study of history) is that traditional scholarship ignored or denigrated large swaths of human cultural production. Having realised this, it is only to be expected that responsible scholarship should turn its attention to this neglected material.

It is a substantive question how this shift in focus should inform the undergraduate curriculum, where the aim is to introduce students not just to the unjustly neglected aspects of human culture, but also to the most significant aspects of human culture, many of which have not been neglected. But that question about undergraduate pedagogy is not in our remit. It is consistent with this shift in focus that the scholarship on these previously neglected aspects of culture is fully rigorous by any relevant standard, and also a valuable exercise in correcting the errors of the past.

D. The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional, aiming to debunk or correct the presuppositions of previous scholarship and the wider set of established cultural norms that scholarship reflects

Much contemporary writing in the humanities and social sciences is predicated on a principle derived from the great “unmaskers” of the nineteenth century—Marx, Nietzsche and Freud—according to which the prevailing worldview in any time and place inevitably incorporates factual and normative assumptions that persist, not because they are true, but for reasons unconnected to truth, e.g., because they stabilise the social order to the advantage of the powerful.

This tradition takes itself to have learnt that what passes for right-thinking common sense about the social order in any given moment is ipso facto suspect: a likely manifestation of ideology in its original sense, and hence a suitable candidate for critique. Needless to say, it is possible to overdo this sort of thing. An intellectual climate in which any sympathetic treatment of Milton’s poetry is automatically coded as reactionary on the ground that Milton is a god of the high art canon whose entrenchment can only serve the interests of the ruling class is a climate that makes it impossible to recognise real value where it exists. But it is not objectionable per se for scholars to approach their work with special sensitivity to the distorting effects of ideology and a healthy dose of skepticism about received ideas. When we read the scholarship of 100 years ago, its blind spots are obvious. It would be surprising if the scholarship of our own time were not similarly distorted in ways that are not obvious to us now; so there is value in maintaining a critical posture that is alert to this possibility.

What is the problem, then? 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 politicisation 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 goals vary from area to area, but in a contemporary context they are generally though not exclusively associated with the progressive left. Put most broadly, the goal might be characterised as turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice, or the elimination of pernicious social hierarchies. More specific goals under this heading include anti-racism (the eradication of racial hierarchy), feminism (the rejection of patriarchy), the “decolonisation” of the academy and of society more generally (undoing the legacy of imperialism), full equity for gender and sexual minorities and, to a much lesser extent, the eradication of class distinctions and the replacement of “neoliberal” capitalism with some form of socialism.

As noted above, it is not a problem that individual scholars have these goals or that they see their work as in the service of them. Many of these goals are laudable, and insofar as the scholarship is not distorted by them, the result is academic work made relevant to social life, and that can hardly be objectionable. (There is no special virtue in scholarship that, like poetry, makes nothing happen.) Problems arise when these political goals distort the scholarly enterprise, as they sometimes do.

An overtly political conception of scholarship

In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favour of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.

For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, UCLA anthropology professor Akhil Gupta declared that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (emphasis added).

In a reply published in American Anthropologist, University of Colorado Boulder population geneticist Fernando Villanea emphasised the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past. Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies”—the stock in trade of cultural anthropology—have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy”; as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.

More commonly, such remarks call for combining scholarship in the traditional sense with an activist project and incorporating this mix into the official self-conception of the discipline. When the American Sociological Association announced that its annual meeting would be devoted to “Intersectional Solidarity: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy,” the organisers clarified that “the 2024 theme emphasises sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort not only to understand structural inequalities but to intervene in sociopolitical struggles.”

This formulation is in principle consistent with treating the effort to understand the social world as governed by scholarly standards that make no reference to the uses to which the research might be put. And yet by incorporating a determinate political goal into the discipline’s official self-conception, it risks subordinating the scholarly enterprise to the political project in ways that are potentially distorting.

Disciplinary norms that demand scholarship produce pre-determined results

The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioural differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it.

For example, a widely reported 2023 study purported to undermine the broad scholarly consensus that almost all of the hunting in hunter-gatherer societies is done by men—claiming instead that in an extensive database, women hunt in 79% of “foraging” societies. A subsequent reanalysis of the data by 15 of the world’s leading experts on hunter-gatherers showed that the paper involves grave methodological errors, raising serious questions about how it could have been published in the first place.

Our internal report on the subject concludes:

The answer is the new epistemology: The paper is believed to undo harms created by gender stereotyping, rooted in male patriarchy. The paper had (1) great positionality (all the authors were female), (2) framed itself in traditional power dynamics (male vs. female) and (3) promoted the preferred ethical position, giving the illusion of fostering gender equality by showing women hunted.

Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or sub-disciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise.

This is so not simply because a preordained consensus is likely to be wrong (or at best right for the wrong reasons). The deeper problem is that an artificial consensus of this sort can only be maintained by distorting the scholarly ecosystem in ways that are profoundly damaging.

In any discipline structured in this way, research findings will inevitably sometimes conflict with the conclusions that have been sanctioned in advance. The social and historical facts relevant to social justice are complex and hard to know. Given this, genuinely open inquiry will inevitably serve up results that challenge orthodox assumptions. (This is so even if those assumptions are ultimately correct; in any area of academic interest, there is a perennial risk that good faith scholarship will turn up what is later shown to be misleading evidence.) A discipline that has subordinated scholarly rigour to its political project will need mechanisms for suppressing this sort of conflict, and indeed we find many such mechanisms in the disciplines we have studied. Recalcitrant proposals are deemed unpublishable or held to an impossibly high standard.

Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organised around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense. While this view is in fact controversial even among feminist philosophers, the field has devoted considerable energy to closing off discussion by blocking the publication of dissenting views.

For example, when Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender Critical Feminism was under contract at Oxford University Press, the press was presented with two open letters, one from hundreds of scholars expressing “profound disappointment” with OUP’s decision to publish the book, and another from OUP employees and authors urging management to reconsider publication on the ground that the book would harm trans people. (OUP initially informed Lawford-Smith that the press would not publish the book despite a signed contract and positive reports, though the book was eventually published after reconsideration.)

Alex Byrne’s 2023 book Trouble with Gender was declined by OUP under similar pressure, though later published elsewhere. In at least two cases, edited collections were successfully suppressed when the editors refused to exclude work by “gender critical” scholars: Richard Marshall’s Women Philosophers (withdrawn by OUP in 2019) and Petra Buesken’s Heterodox Feminism (cancelled by Zer0 Books in 2024).

Scholars who manage to publish results deemed unfavourable to the cause are punished in all of the ways academia makes available: by being stigmatised as reactionary (racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic) and hence beyond the pale for invitations to colloquia, conferences and published collections, by being ostracised in less dramatic ways, by being held to an impossible standard for tenure and promotion, and so on.        

As is obvious, once a structure of this sort is in place, it will often function in the background to stifle dissent on politically charged issues even when no explicit sanctions are threatened or even contemplated. Scholars who want a career in a discipline of this sort will be under enormous pressure to fall into line, to the point where the discipline selects for scholars who are happy to conform their scholarship to these preordained requirements. In the limit, this sort of discipline will produce and sustain an ideological monoculture in which research that might be deemed incompatible with the shared goal of social justice will not appear.

It is important to stress that this sort of distortion does not require a self-conscious conspiracy to suppress the inconvenient truth. A more common mechanism appears to be this: Every discipline has mechanisms for excluding cranks and fools. If Physical Review Letters gets a paper with plans for a perpetual motion machine, it will not be read there or at any other serious journal, and the author will be “punished” for his heterodox ideas. This is not a lamentable failure of open-mindedness. At any given time in any serious academic discipline, some issues are settled and it can be reasonable for scholars to treat them as such. (This can be reasonable even when the consensus later turns out to be mistaken; the standards for legitimately closing an academic question, like the standards for finding a criminal defendant guilty, are not infallible.) The mechanisms for suppressing scholarly dissent discussed above exploit this feature of academic scholarship. These disciplines in effect treat certain politically charged questions as closed. From the standpoint of a politicised discipline, heterodox claims about sex differences, or the social determinants of crime, or about the relevance of a poet’s views on slavery to the assessment of her poetry, are just bad scholarship, since they recapitulate well-known mistakes.

As a formal matter, this is not objectionable. Academic disciplines inevitably suppress bad scholarship. The problem is, rather, substantive. Politically charged questions about the social determinants of crime or the division of labor between men and women in hunter-gatherer societies or the significance of a poet’s racism for the assessment of her work have not in fact been settled.

By way of example: In 2023 the American Anthropological Association abruptly cancelled a panel discussion on the relevance of biological sex to anthropology, partly on the ground that the discussion would harm the “dignity and safety” of those in attendance, but also on the ground that

the field of anthropology, and biological anthropology in particular, tends to resist universal arguments in favor of understanding humans in all of their variation. Therefore, the overprescription of the idea of a biological binary for something like sex not only ignores the evidence but goes against the most basic empirical underpinnings of our field.

When such questions are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent. This is a serious injustice to scholars on the “wrong” side of these issues.

It is also in the long run self-defeating for anyone who shares the goal of scholarship in the service of social justice. An artificial consensus on an important issue, sustained by punishing dissent, is unlikely to be a reliable basis for social action, since the consensus will be liable to unravel under pressure from reality. The tendency of some recent work in the humanities and social sciences to close substantive questions prematurely on broadly political grounds is thus incompatible both with the internal aim of scholarship in these areas—to understand the human world—and with whatever instrumental aims one might have for such an understanding, including the aim of promoting social justice as one conceives it.

Rejecting objectivity in favor of ‘critical fabulation’

The foregoing presupposes that humanistic scholarship is distorted when political considerations are brought to bear in the assessment of scholarship. This in turn presupposes that humanistic inquiry traffics in claims that are true or false independently of their political appeal, and that such claims are to be assessed by reference to the evidence and not by their presumed utility for one or another purpose. 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 for present purposes, all we need is a minimal distinction between politically attractive accounts on the one hand, and true or well-supported accounts on the other. Anyone who accepts this distinction is in a position to recognise the phenomena described in the last section as seriously damaging to the academic enterprise.

Almost all scholarship in the humanities and social sciences at least implicitly acknowledges this distinction. Even the most politically charged scholarship typically proceeds by giving evidence for the view on offer. It is rare to find a scholar who says explicitly: You should accept my view of (say) the relation between slavery and the American founding, not because the evidence supports it by good scholarly standards, but only because it will promote the cause of (say) racial equity.

There is, however, a long-standing and deeply rooted current in contemporary humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound suspicion. One version of this skepticism is purely epistemological. A scholar of literature or history may concede that there are genuine facts about the meanings of texts or about the past which prevail independently of our representations of them, while at the same time holding that scholarship is aimed, not at an accurate reconstruction of those facts, but rather at an edifying narrative. Any such narrative is constrained to fit the data—the indisputable facts about the text or the historical record. But insofar as it goes beyond this, filling in the gaps, giving explanations, assigning meaning or significance, the aim is not to recover the real past, or the real meanings, but rather to construct a story that serves our purposes.

As historian Hayden White put the point (approvingly): What historians write are really “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found.” (This is somewhat analogous to a minority view in the philosophy of science, according to which the aim of science is not to discover the real causes of the phenomena, but rather to construct a model serviceable for the prediction and control of nature.)

This conception of the scholarly enterprise can seem liberating; the scholar is licensed to imagine how things might have been, to explore the manifold ways in which texts can be read, without pretending to know what really happened or what was meant. It can also be illuminating; one learns something about a text when one learns that it can fruitfully be read in a certain way. But it is in the nature of this sort of “critical fabulation” to blur the lines between fact and fiction in a way that is potentially distorting.

This sort of fictionalising scholarship has two distinguishable rationales. One is to convey a vivid sense of how things might have been by supplying plausible details and imposing narrative form on the material, as in Natalie Davis’s 1983 history book, The Return of Martin Guerre. The other is to advance a moral cause by “redressing the violence” that allegedly produced the gaps in the archives in the first place. Only in the latter case is this form of scholarship politicised in the sense herein discussed.

Dismissing truth, reason, and knowledge as a ‘sham’

The critique of objectivity described above is limited. The view concedes that there are facts about the human world and about what the evidence supports in which a cautious scholar might take an interest. It simply holds that there is another legitimate task for scholarship that involves freewheeling speculation to fill the gaps.

In this respect, it is to be contrasted with a more radical critique, according to which the rhetoric of truth, reason, and knowledge is ultimately a sham. This view takes many forms. Some scholars repudiate the notion of truth or accuracy altogether (ostensibly following Nietzsche: “There are no facts, only interpretations”). Others repudiate the allegedly scientistic idea that we can meaningfully speak of the evidence for a view, or what that evidence supports, independently of our political commitments.

Scholars in this tradition are impressed by the abuses of the rhetoric of objectivity in the past. The authority of science and its objective standards have been wielded to support slavery and white supremacy, the subordination of women, the sterilisation of the mentally disabled, the persecution of sexual minorities and the extermination of the Jews. In this tradition, the lesson to be drawn from these abuses (and a vast web of related considerations) is that the rhetoric of objectivity can only be a cover for the operations of power and is therefore to be repudiated by the scholar and opposed wherever it appears.

On this view, the political considerations we have described as potential distortions of the scholarly enterprise are not distortions at all. A scholar who repudiates the language of truth and evidential support will see the political standards she brings to bear in assessing scholarly proposals as no less legitimate than any other standard for this purpose—and perhaps as more legitimate, since they do not pretend to be something they are not.

To the extent that views of this sort have taken hold, they represent a catastrophe for the humanities and the social sciences understood as academic disciplines. Not only do they license the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of academic work. They call into question the rationale for supporting this sort of work in research universities dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge.

Although enormous numbers of scholars in the humanistic disciplines profess such views, in practice views of this sort are rarely applied consistently. Scholarship that speaks the language of postmodernism and officially repudiates the rhetoric of truth and objectivity almost always proceeds in practice by giving reasons and marshalling evidence. This is clearest when these views take themselves to be exposing the false claims to objectivity in previous scholarship.

A central claim of postcolonial theory is that hegemonic powers have employed the rhetoric of objective history and social science to suppress subaltern voices: a claim which is taken to be supported by abundant evidence, and which is therefore taken to undermine the false claims to truth and objectivity in colonialist discourse.

But it is also true when positive interpretations and historical construals are advanced, since such proposals are always, in practice, supported by what the author clearly takes to be good reasons. It would therefore be a mistake to see widespread endorsement of the postmodernist critique of objectivity in parts of the humanities as grounds for dismissing scholarship in these areas across the board. Much of this work is valuable scholarship of a familiar sort, perhaps despite its explicit self-conception.

And yet it does constitute a problem. Scholarship in this tradition is often confusing—marshalling reasons while denigrating reason—and often obscure, sometimes as a matter of principle. (The fetish for “clarity” and “rigour” associated with analytic philosophy and the hard sciences is widely taken to be just another rhetorical technique to be eschewed in the name of authenticity.)

Perhaps most importantly, insofar as it succeeds in repudiating traditional standards of evidence and argument, the result is a form of discourse in which observations and theoretical pronouncements are connected, not by rational relations of evidential support, but by a kind of free association. The scholarly disciplines that cultivate this sort of work have developed their own standards for assessing it. At its best, writing of this sort is praised for being “dazzling,” “destabilising,” “radical,” “playful,” pointing to “connections” and illuminating “juxtapositions,” and also as “empowering” or “liberating” insofar as it provides words that people engaged in the struggle for justice somehow find useful.

But of course the same could be said for poetry, which is not a form of scholarship (despite its important place in many universities). Scholarly writing of this sort, even if it can be evaluated by standards of this “non-objective” sort, risks becoming unrecognisable as scholarship by standards at work elsewhere in the university. And that is a potentially serious threat to the humanities and allied fields as academic disciplines.

When abstract academic jargon blurs into meaningless nonsense

We close by noting a problem that is less widespread than it once was, but whose lingering effects can still occasionally be felt. This is the tendency of academic writing in the humanities (and to a lesser extent, the social sciences) to adopt an extensive abstract jargon, often borrowed from philosophy and sometimes even from the sciences, the result of which is prose that has the superficial form of scholarship but which in fact verges on a kind of nonsense. This sort of scholarship was prominent and explicitly valorised beginning in the 1960s with deconstruction and its variants. In this context it was explicitly held that since the ideal of plain and unambiguous assertion is unattainable in principle, scholars should aim to subvert the ideal, writing in a style that is deliberately obscure, allusive, “open” and “multivalent”—an approach described by Jacques Derrida:

How will speech and writing function then? They will once more become gestures; and the logical and discursive intentions which speech ordinarily uses in order to ensure its rational transparency, and in order to purloin its body in the direction of meaning, will be reduced and subordinated. And since this theft of the body by itself is indeed that which leaves the body to be strangely concealed by the very thing that constitutes its diaphanousness, then the deconstitution of diaphanousness lays bare the flesh of the word, lays bare the word’s sonority, intonation, intensity—the shout that the articulations of language and logic have not yet entirely frozen, that is, the aspect of oppressed gesture which remains in all speech, the unique and irreplaceable movement which the generalities of concept and repetition have never finished rejecting.

Scholarship in this mould is sometimes deliberately playful, filled with puns and linguistic gimmicks, as in the 2011 journal article Nature’s Queer Performativity, by University of California, Santa Cruz scholar Karen Barad:

The quantum (dis)continuity queers the very notion of differentiating. It offers a much-needed rethinking of (ac)counting, taking account, and accountability that isn’t derivative of some fixed notion of identity or even a fixed interval or origin. (Ac)counting—a taking into account of what materializes and of what is excluded from materializing—cannot be a straightforward calculation, since it cannot be based on the assumed existence of individual entities that can be added to, or subtracted from, or equated with one another. …. Rather, accountability must not be based on anything as such, but rather, must take account of the intra-activity of worlding, of différance, of the non-mathematizable quantum discontinuity which does not exist in space or time but is the very condition of possibility of spacetimemattering, of the cut (cross) cutting itself ad infinitum, the world always already opening itself up, that is, of the entanglements of spacetimematterings.

More commonly, it is simply turgid. There must of course be room for style in academic writing. We would not expect scholars of French poetry or Roman history to write like a computer programmer instructing a machine. But this tendency to what can only be described as deliberate obscurity remains a problem in parts of the humanities. It is impossible to read this sort of prose without concluding that the aim of understanding human culture and society has been replaced by other aims at which the reader can only guess. To the extent that this sort of work persists—and as we say, the tide appears to be ebbing—it represents another ground for concern about scholarship in these areas: a departure from the norms that must govern any serious effort to give a reasoned account of the human world.

Adapted, with permission of the authors, from the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, a report submitted on 5 April 2026 to Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University; and addressed by the authors to “university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities.” The project Chair, Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, assembled the following scholars to work as an independent group in preparing the report: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University; Kit Fine, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University; Joseph Henrich, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University; Katherine E. Fleming, Professor of History at New York University; Jason Merchant, Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics at University of Chicago; Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University; Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University; Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Hawaii; and Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University.