Inside the Vanderbilt Report: A Sociologist Responds

This week on the Quillette podcast, I’ll be speaking with Ashley Rubin, a professor at the University of Hawaii, and the co-author of a recently released report commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University, titled Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.

Professor Rubin and her co-authors sound the alarm over recent illiberal trends that have taken over, to varying degrees, history, philosophy, literature, and the arts more generally, including Prof. Rubin’s own discipline, sociology.

The authors are careful to note that they don’t object to the progressive political slant of the humanities more generally. Rather, they object to the distortion of their academic disciplines—as they see it—by the use of explicitly ideological standards to judge the quality of new research.   

A Crisis in the Humanities: When Scholarship Meets Politics

The norms governing scholarship now often serve to protect a rigid orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues—with ideological tests substituted for proper academic standards.

By way of example: in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, UCLA anthropology professor Akhil Gupta declared that anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.”

The authors argue that anthropology has been particularly affected by the tendencies documented in their report. But sociology isn’t far behind. In 2024, the American Sociological Association announced that its annual meeting would be devoted to “Intersectional Solidarity: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy.”

The organisers explained that the theme reflected the idea of sociology as “a form of liberatory praxis: an effort not only to understand structural inequalities but to intervene in sociopolitical struggles.”

In coming months, the report’s authors, including Professor Rubin, will be preparing specialised reports about their specific fields. But the interview you’re about to hear is based on the general report they published on April 5. 

Please enjoy my interview with Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Hawaii, and the co-author of Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.