In the Grip of Politics

If you’re in academia, you’ve probably already heard about the report. In April 2026, a panel of academics from different fields, some relatively well-known and some not, issued a Report on the State of Scholarship in Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. It is the product of an inquiry by the presidents of two large, private universities—Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis—and its intended audience is university administrators who presumably are already looking for excuses to cut humanities departments. The report argues that the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences is, as you might expect, bad.