Photo by Cole Keister
Long ago, the British Marxist Stuart Hall wrote an enduring article on the triumphs of the British conservatives during Margaret Thatcher’s rule. He did so under the marvelous title “The Great Moving Right Show.” Among the virtues of Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism was his appreciation of the extent to which the rightward movement involved more than just conservatives. As the Thatcher forces hardened in reactionary positions, much of the Labour Party scurried to occupy the ground being abandoned in the center-right of British politics. The whole political spectrum moved right. The very limits of political imagination narrowed.
US universities now have their own moving right show. In the disturbing corner of that show described below, farce outpaces tragedy. The unintentional merriment, though the results of the story are plenty sad, unfolds within the recently issued Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The cast of the farce consists mostly of liberal academics, moving right. These characters are thoroughly beholden to the Trump administration’s cowing of universities as the creator of space for their own rightward movement and their claims to be the only possible leadership for higher education in this moment.
The authors of the farcical report are multiple. Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew Martin, in the same role at Washington University in St. Louis, issued an unbeckoned call for the production of such a document in 2025. They provided a prospective committee with the following charge: “We are concerned about 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.”
On that view, the threats to universities came not from defunding of the humanities, outlawing of whole bodies of scholarship in some red states, or the censorship of textbooks. Still less was the repression of protests over Gaza considered a problem. The chancellors instead focused on the presumed fact that “many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.” Verdict preceded trial. The report’s authors, as the Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie put it, “provide[d] cover for stripping resources from the very things they claim to love rather than dealing with the larger crisis of higher ed.”
The evidence for such a popular groundswell against the politicized university underwhelms. According to Gallup, less than a quarter of those polled had little or no confidence in higher education when the Vanderbilt-Washington University report was being dreamed up. A plurality identified as having such confidence in either “great” measure or “quite a lot” of it. Beleaguered as it is, higher education gets more love than Congress, or Trump. Moreover, of the less than a quarter of respondents expressing lack of enthusiasm, far more objected on grounds of expenses and poor fit with job training than said that the politicization of academia was a problem.
A little ciphering leads to the conclusion that only about 8% of the “many different voices” in the US are exercised about alleged political tilts within the universities. An equal share, according to polls, meanwhile worry about Trump’s political attacks on the universities. Chancellors Martin and Diermeier, jointly in the vanguard of attempts by university leaders to dialogue with the Trump administration, conjured up a crisis that they wished to turn to their advantage.
The initiative chose the New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian to head up a committee to investigate, or more properly to document, the charges leveled against the humanities. The main document the committee released is often referred to as the Boghossian Report. The nine-scholar group drafting it consisted in its entirety, but one, of professors holding endowed chairs at prestigious private universities. Their emphases focused on philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and music studies, as a “representative sample” of the humanities.
Even thus limited, the task of the report-makers was daunting. Accusing many in the humanities of shoddy, tendentious scholarship, the report itself needed an apparatus that implied gravitas. If, as it seemed to advertise itself at the outset, the document was designed to circulate only among top university administration, it would have been insulated from much scrutiny. But because release of the report coincided with the aggressive turn to the right of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper of that sector, and the Boghossian initiative had its own attraction to clickbaiting, the document was certain to be widely read.
The solution, in the peak moment of fascination with AI, was to promise a cumbersome process and mountains of data. The committee members would undertake “extensive research” in consultation with more experts from fields not represented. Further assistance was to come from staff who “developed tools for gathering and analyzing data.” The individual subject area findings were to inform the work of the whole committee, all of whom would sign the broad report.
Only later would the subject area investigators’ reports be publicly released, although some committee members seem to have not understood that this was the plan or to have hesitated to part with their findings. Just four of the seven documents on individual disciplines have materialized. The total time from the initiation of research through producing the internal drafts of subject-area conclusions, consulting experts in other disciplines, and producing a final product reporting the committee’s conclusions reached just nine months.
The results, predictably thin as scholarship but successful in attracting press attention, do not stretch to even 30 pages of text. The document features not so much evidence as repeated explanations for the lack of it. Documented cases in which scholars “explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge” are “rare” as the report allows. Because offenses against objectivity are not forthrightly “admitted,” speculation can rule. “It’s possible that scholars who find it acceptable to behave in this way are tacitly reasoning along the following lines . . .” becomes acceptable as a method, indeed one necessary for a defense of evidence and truth.
The report concludes that malefactors poised to steal the “soul of the university” dwell “especially among those associated with the progressive left.” Offenders, it is said, champion anti-racism, feminism, critical race theory, and “decoloniality,” a term the report finds so exotic as to require scare quotes, as does “neoliberal.” Italics, in this case scare italics, are reserved for the especially pernicious scholarly commitment to “social justice.” Leading scholars of color are among the suspects, including Edward Said, Saidiya Hartman, and Gayatri Spivak.
The trickling out of the subject area reports from the Boghossian committee reveals how little of substance about any crisis regarding politically driven scholarship in the humanities that the committee gathered. However, those documents do reveal much about the varied ways that some center-right faculty and administrators intend to occupy spaces opened from by Trump for rightward movement. Some reports do stretch to considerable length, though with serious methodological limitations born in large measure from intense political biases.
Sociology, a focus of conservative ire in Florida and beyond, is the best example here. Boghossian’s report, in its more measured early pages, fleetingly promises even-handedness and a process driven by genuine curiosity about where the data will lead. In spots, the report insists that it admires the existing humanities and only wants to sort out the bad apples and tendencies with them. But the investigators’ treatment of sociology exemplifies a harder attack on a whole field in the interests of political pleading. By elevating Professor Ashley Rubin to a leading role as a committee member centrally responsible for drafting the report on the field, the Vanderbilt-Washington University initiative opted for an ideologue. Not much published in sociological journals, Rubin has been active instead in efforts by the Heterodox Academy to reform and police the discipline through broad critiques of what she regards as woke trends within the field. Her report expressly levels critiques not of selected shortcomings within the discipline but of “field-level norms.”
As American Journal of Sociology editor John Levi Martin observes, none of the hundred-plus pages of score-settling in Rubin’s report generates novel data at all. He writes, “Rubin claims to have done a survey of sociology that demonstrates a trend towards increasing politicization . . . . In fact, she has done nothing of the kind; she simply criticizes sociologists for their politics when they differ from hers, and cherry picks evidence to try to make incorrect assertions.” The closest thing to a coherent section in the Rubin’s report excoriates not sociological scholarship at all but a series of mild political initiatives of the American Sociological Association, including their support for a lawsuit contesting the dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
A different strategic intervention arises in the subject report on History, prepared by Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and New York University professor and J. Paul Getty Trust administrator Katherine Fleming. Their remarks depart abruptly from the original report’s plan to comprehensively survey fields, delivering instead a frankly “personal” and “impressionistic” account. About a third as long as sociology’s and infinitely less accusatory, the report by Wilentz and Fleming rejects and even ridicules any view of the field as “riven by obsessions with ethnic, racial, or gender identity, contemptuous of the search for truth as an oppressive power play.” The “great preponderance” of historical scholarship offers a healthy example of a discipline with standards, respect for evidence, and even a salutary multiculturalism. The field, the report continues, admittedly has not had an answer as “undergraduate interest in history has collapsed to an unprecedented low” but the craft and commitments of historians deserve support as just what is needed for the humanities.
However, History’s report makes a sharp turn in its second half when it turns to dissenters within History. The full claim turns out to be not only that the field embodies a vital center in the humanities but also that Wilentz and Fleming get to define what threatens that vitality. Those latter pages are devoted to intemperate and ungrounded attacks on subaltern studies, Howard Zinn, the 1619 Project, and political activists. The rant culminates with a broadside against American Studies as the bad humanities discipline—one where “overt politicization” has “become de rigueur”–representing everything History must guard against. The authors’ drawing of lessons brings into focus what is being claimed for History and who is to be placed beyond respectability to buttress those claims and to secure careers on the center-right of the field.
Wilentz and Fleming secure their cake and their ability to eat it in concluding. “Historians, it is important to re-emphasize, have been far more resistant to the kinds of inroads that postmodern anti-objectivity has made in other humanities and in the social sciences,” they hold, securing their discipline’s place in the pantheon of good disciplines. Nevertheless, they add, persistent vigilance is required against “efforts to ‘decolonize’ the archives.” Continuing care and moderate leadership are also necessary, the authors conclude, to thwart efforts to “compel learned societies to take official positions on controversial political issues.”
In fact the allegedly controversial resolutions put the American Historical Association (AHA) business meeting in January 2025 simply condemned “scholasticide” in Gazan universities and attacks on academic freedom. Voters did not find them controversial, voting almost 8 to 1 in their favor a result, causing the Great Moving Right Show to rule through coercion, denying the result of the votes and refusing to let members decide on such resolutions. The Great Moving Right Show proceeds but is also vulnerable and the worst thing we can do is to believe its well-publicized and well-funded hype.
