This has been a terrible year for the higher education industrial complex. Among the many crises are a year and a half of assaults by the Trump administration against research grants and foreign money, discriminatory hiring and admissions policies and reliance on foreign students.
Meanwhile, higher ed is finally going over the long-awaited demographic cliff, with declining enrollments and shrinking endowments. There are growing numbers of closings and mergers of institutions; layoffs of faculty and staff; reports that college students cannot handle basic math or reading assignments; the onslaught of AI undermining critical thinking and in-depth learning; the exposure of massive administrative bloat; and acknowledgment that public trust has plummeted as to the cost and utility of higher education itself.
Academia is facing a reckoning. Can it self-correct? A new report sponsored by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis gives some hope.
A panel of eminent scholars examined the roots of academia's many self-made crises, pointing in particular to politicization that resulted from the adoption of "scholar-activism" as the reigning paradigm, embracing subjectivity to pursue "social justice" in place of an apolitical search for objective truths with a small "t."
Their survey of different fields in the humanities and social sciences found "a deterioration in scholarly standards, fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity."
In anthropology the situation was even worse; "a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity, together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished."
The authors point to relativism — the negation of clear epistemological and moral standards — as the root cause. They also point to the outsized role of left-wing foundations, such as the Mellon Foundation, which has devoted enormous resources to quietly remake all branches of academia toward "social justice" including by funding fellow-to-faculty tracks that bypass institutional oversight.
The recommendations of the new report are intellectual, not political. It pointedly states that its goal is not to be used as a bludgeon or guide to institutional reform, but as a starting point for debates. In that, it has already succeeded.
The responses from anthropology have been fierce. Philosophers have objected to the report's use of "relativism." Others have defended the academy's obvious biases on the basis of diversity and new questions being asked about race, class, and gender by scholars from previously excluded communities. Unhinged comments have called the report "diabolically evil" and "McCarthyism," and warned of "witch hunts."
The American Association of University Professors has even demanded that the two universities "rescind the report," complaining that it "undermines our ability to effectively address society's most profound problems and challenges, from the inequalities of wealth and white supremacy to the political consequences of climate change."
That is as close to a confession as we could ask for that the report's conclusions are completely accurate. As the saying goes, if you're taking flak, you're over the target.
But from the point of view of Middle Eastern studies, nothing in the report is especially new. In that field, what the report calls "tendentious biased research" and "ideological scholarship" has been the norm for decades. It casts the U.S. as the Great Satan and Israel as the Little Satan. It derides the unique evils of Western imperialism and colonialism (and the paramount evil of "settler-colonialism"), placing Palestine at the center of the contemporary Middle East, erasing Jews and Israel from the modern and increasingly the Ancient Middle East, and celebrating Islam while whitewashing its uniquely long and violent history of — wait for it — imperialism, colonialism and even "settler-colonialism."
The enduring popularity of Edward Said and "Orientalism" in syllabuses across numerous disciplines is a sign of, if nothing else, an intellectual rut. Faculty praise for Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of civilians put the worst of academia on full display. Spreading condemnations by academic organizations of Israel's mythical "genocide" against Palestinians show just how deep the rot goes.
Academia is planning to strike back at whatever improvements and reforms are instituted. A report on leaked conversations within the American Association of University Professors shows that group is looking to work with the Mellon Foundation to covertly undermine the new civics centers that have been established at the University of Florida and elsewhere.
University resistance to change is also evident in the continued stream of reports documenting that the elaborate and well-funded DEI structures with their legions of apparatchiks have not been dismantled as mandated by the Trump administration but rather renamed and hidden. They will strike back with a vengeance if given a chance, even if the institutions they seek to control again are hollowed out.
The Vanderbilt-Washington University report comes after Yale University's candid self-assessment that public trust in academia is waning because of high costs, skewed admissions, "ideological conformity," and "widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education."
One of Yale's fixes was to rein in its immodest mission statement, removing aspirations to "improving the world," educating "aspiring leaders worldwide" and "the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community," in favor of a more attainable goal: "to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching."
The Vanderbilt-Washington University report makes clear that the goal is for institutions to reform themselves. Legislatures dictating what courses or books can be taught, or heavy-handed administrators doing so out of fear of legislators, is no better than hiring a quota of Republicans in pursuit of intellectual diversity.
A better solution builds on the themes of modesty and civility. As a recent Harvard-Radcliff study put it, "Institutions of higher education should refocus on their formative mission to cultivate intellectual virtues such as humility, curiosity, courage, and respectful engagement of competing ideas among undergraduates, graduate students, and junior members of the profession."
Another word for this is "character."
Universities are not governments or non-government organizations in the business of directly solving problems. Academia cannot and should not try to "improve the world" as such, but rather it should preserve, critique and expand knowledge. The ultimate task is to cultivate civility, character and citizenship among students, making them mindful of their responsibilities towards one another and the republic. Hopefully the Vanderbilt-Washington University report will mark an important step in this direction.
Alex Joffe is director of strategic affairs for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Asaf Romirowsky is the executive director of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.