A Vanderbilt University report has ruffled feathers in higher education with its conclusion that social justice politics, rather than knowledge, drives much of today’s humanities scholarship.
The “State of Scholarship” report faults contemporary history, philosophy, anthropology, music, sociology and literature studies for prioritizing liberal race and gender identity agendas over the “disinterested inquiry” that traditionally guides research.
Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Andrew Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, commissioned top humanities and social-science scholars to analyze representative studies for the report.
“If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral 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,” the researchers wrote. “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.”
The authors noted that plunging enrollment in humanities degrees linked to low-paying jobs prompted the report.
“If the pursuit of disinterested inquiry is compromised, it strikes at the very foundation on which a university should be based, just as the corrupt administration of justice strikes at the foundation upon which a system of justice should be based,” they added.
Published June 5, the Vanderbilt report prompted immediate backlash from social scientists.
Outraged academics inundated the Chronicle of Higher Education with op-ed rebuttals and letters to the editor — including one respondent who labeled the report “diabolically evil.”
“Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” Carolyn Rouse, president of the American Anthropological Association, said in a June 11 statement. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.”
Corey Feinstein, senior director of strategic initiatives at the University of California, San Francisco, said the pushback hasn’t surprised him.
“Any report that questions the incentives behind scholarship is going to generate a strong response from the people being evaluated,” Mr. Feinstein said in an email.
Others interviewed by The Washington Times described the report as an overdue wake-up call for academics who care more about politics than teaching job-ready skills.
“In the humanities, it’s easier to find a professor committed to overthrowing capitalism than it is to find a professor who is a registered Republican,” said Adam Szetela, a former Harvard University visiting history fellow with a doctoral degree from Cornell University.
“The humanities have become an absolute embarrassment to the academy,” Mr. Szetela added. “And I say that as an English Ph.D. who has never voted for a Republican.”
‘A real hornet’s nest’
The Vanderbilt report is the latest research exploring the public’s dwindling trust in higher education:
• The Gallup polling firm reported in September 2025 that just 35% of adults said a college education was “very important,” down from 75% in 2010.
• The Bipartisan Policy Center estimated in March that half of all bachelor’s program graduates between 2012 and 2021 were underemployed a year later, working off their school debt in low-paying jobs that did not require their degrees.
Of that group, nearly 3 in 4 remained underemployed a decade after graduation. And just 61% of those who started four-year degrees in 2019 finished them within six years, adding to the more than 37 million Americans who dropped out of college.
Scott Beaulier, a University of Wyoming economist, said the Vanderbilt report calls on campuses to resist the political groupthink that repels career-conscious applicants.
“The challenge is maintaining environments where competing ideas can be examined rigorously and where scholars are rewarded for pursuing truth, even when it conflicts with prevailing assumptions,” Mr. Beaulier said.
Scholars have offered divided explanations for Americans souring on higher education.
In April, a Yale University report on public trust in colleges dinged administrators for trying to be “all things to all people” instead of focusing on core academics.
A June report from the American Association of Colleges and Universities advocacy group theorized that a backlash against racial-justice protests has made colleges “an easy political target” for their “visible commitment to diversity initiatives.”
Historian Donald Critchlow, director of Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions, said the Vanderbilt report has “stirred up a real hornet’s nest” by suggesting that liberal bias could be scaring off students more concerned about finding a job.
“Many students simply don’t see the value of courses that send a message that the Western tradition is one of racism, genocide, imperialism, sexism and homophobia,” Mr. Critchlow said.
Enrollment crisis
Higher education leaders have braced for a “demographic cliff,” as a yearslong decline in U.S. births since 2008 drove a 15% drop in potential college applicants for the coming fall semester.
The nonprofit Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that U.S. high school graduation numbers will fall steadily from a record 3.9 million students in 2025 to under 3.4 million in 2041.
Doug Hughes, CEO of Codio, an education technology company that top colleges use to teach AI skills, said the Vanderbilt report dares humanities faculty to “demonstrate relevance” in a rapidly changing economy.
“Students are graduating into a workforce being reshaped by AI, automation, and rapidly changing technology,” Mr. Hughes said. “They want to know that their education is preparing them for that reality.”
Meanwhile, high school graduates have increasingly favored skilled trade credentials over pricey four-year degrees.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center counted 15.5 million undergraduate students enrolled during the recent spring semester, up 1.3% from a year earlier.
A 10.2% surge of 86,000 more students enrolled in short-term certificates led the increase in undergrad headcount. That was followed by a 1.3% jump of 59,000 more students pursuing two-year associate degrees.
At the same time, the Virginia-based nonprofit found that graduate enrollment dipped by 4,000 students to 3.1 million.
“The Vanderbilt report has unleashed a necessary and long-overdue debate about the role of politics in our scholarship,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, an education history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “If we don’t do a better job of policing ourselves, politicians will do it for us.”
