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.
In short, the authors claim that the humanities are being turned into “vehicles for social justice, or the elimination of pernicious social hierarchies,” creating a pervasive climate of “relativism” in which scholarly opinions that disagree with this goal are dismissed out of hand. This argument comes with a lot of hedging about how the authors don’t mean all scholarship, nor do they mean to unduly attack the critical tradition of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, et cetera. But the report proceeds to rehearse the stale talking points of the theory wars of the 1980s and ’90s, juiced up with some recent anecdotes that smell like they’ve been circulating in right-wing corners of social media. None of this is surprising: The lead author, Paul Boghossian, was chosen because he has been banging this particular drum for over two decades and picked committee members who would endorse his general assessment. In practice the other committee members don’t appear to have contributed much, and most have avoided publicly commenting on their own supposed work.1
Of course, the intellectual rigor of the report doesn’t matter. It paints with such a broad brush that no academic would change their practice based on its conclusions, even if the document were written entirely in good faith. The report’s targets have duly dismissed its accusations as politically motivated. Its methodological sloppiness, its ham-handed characterizations of scholarly fields with which the authors are barely familiar, its tendency to undercut its own claims with preemptive backpedaling—all this makes it easy to reject the report’s conclusions, all the more so if our salaries depend on not agreeing with it. The resulting debate has been unenlightening across the board, and the rhetorical posturing it has provoked has taken familiar forms.
In fact, the report, its reception, and the scholarship it attempts to critique all operate in the same rhetorical field of what Anton Jäger has called “hyperpolitics.” According to Jäger, the broad depoliticization of the 1990s has given way to a renewed sense of political urgency, even as party institutions and experts have lost legitimacy and political systems appear incapable of solving social problems. The result is a sense of permanent mobilization driven and sustained by performances of outrage that never seem to achieve lasting victories for any participant. Academia is political today because everything is political—even (or especially) claims that someone or something else is too political. Order some stickers online and you are giving money to a guy who is building a massive Trump theme park in upstate New York. Drink Bud Light and you are a pawn of the trans agenda. Mention Gaza in an academic context and you run the risk of an antisemitism investigation. Publish a critique of an argument about the relative proportion of female hunters in hunter-gatherer societies and you are a right-wing tool.
Unlike the epistemological relativism attacked so tediously in the report, hyperpolitics is in fact a relatively new phenomenon. The theory scholarship of the ’80s and ’90s was more often attacked for undermining “real” politics than for introducing it where it didn’t belong. Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man were only glancingly political (leaving aside de Man’s past as a Nazi collaborator); Foucault’s politics ran across the left-right divide of his day. Even Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, the intellectual ancestor of the report, claimed that its goal was to “defend [the left] from a trendy segment of itself” by attacking relativist critiques of scientific knowledge, and was blurbed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
The political turn of the last two decades has been of a different sort. All of us, from academics to fishermen, have now internalized a practice of reading the social world as a field of political or latently political signs. TV watching habits, food choices, clothing, interpretive approaches to 19th-century British literature: Everything becomes an opportunity to take a political stand, and to position yourself in relation to others taking political stands—and in a profession where discourse is everything, such opportunities abound. Social media of course plays an important role. Where scholarly gossip might in the past have been shared in booths at dark Irish bars near convention hotels, today it circulates online, in full view of every conceivable audience. In academia as everywhere else, this has produced field-specific rhetorics of competitive position-taking among individuals, constantly balanced against a reflexive avoidance of controversy among institutions. At scholarly journals, to take only one example, the anticipated reaction of social media audiences has a disciplining effect on editorial decisions. This is because academic speech is speech, and all speech is now implicitly political; there is no way for scholars to step outside this framework, because it is part of the social environment in which academic work takes place.
The report devotes an entire section to quoting putatively relativist attacks on the idea of objective knowledge. Most come from a specific context: critiques of a scientific tradition, from social Darwinism to midcentury social science, that used the apparatus of rationality and objectivity to justify racist social policies and other forms of social engineering from above. But those critiques are not chiefly motivated by a philosophical position called “relativism,” that is, by abstract questions about whether objective knowledge is possible. Such debates do exist—and are much more nuanced than the report suggests—but for most scholars what matters is something else. If a guy with a clipboard comes to your house and says you must be sterilized because science says so, the correct response is not to seek out peer-reviewed refutations of his claims. Instead, it is to understand how his claim to objectivity is functioning as a screen for the motives of power, and to resist it on that basis.
Can a similar logic be used to justify climate denialism, anti-vaxxerism, and Flat Earth theory? Absolutely! But that is the historical result of the collapse, since the end of the cold war, of an ideological project that used the image of the scientifically rational expert to justify existing power relations. The critiques quoted in the report cannot be disarmed or combatted by charges of “relativism,” or even by a ruthless purge of relativists from academia, because this kind of skepticism is not the result of a philosophical position. Its latest manifestations are instead part and parcel of hyperpoliticization. Postmodernist attacks on objectivity may have been the high-intellectual reflection of this historical process, but the vast majority of people who hold views critical of mainstream science have never read Foucault.
For the same reason, the report has rightly been received as a political intervention and not as a neutral defense of disinterested rationality. In 2017, a group of self-described dissident academics embarked on what became known as the Sokal Squared hoax, which aimed to debunk the so-called “grievance studies” disciplines—Black studies and gender studies, for instance—by exposing their supposedly weak scholarly standards. (Following Alan Sokal’s example, the hoaxers submitted a raft of jargon-ridden spoof papers to social-science journals, citing bogus research to reach nonsensical, ultra-woke conclusions.) This became a crystallizing moment for the academic antiwoke right, and one that MAGA activist Christopher Rufo drew upon to make attacks on universities a key part of GOP politics in the 2020s. Even if none of the authors of the report see themselves as allied with this mission, their claims enter a discursive space that has already become political. When universities in Florida and Texas cite arguments similar to those in the report as they implement wide-ranging policies of censorship and ideological control, why wouldn’t we read the report as a justification for such policies elsewhere?
More broadly, the academic antiwoke right has not been content with mere rhetorical interventions. Since the late 2010s, it has been trying to consolidate a right-wing counterpublic, both within and on the margins of academia, through publications like Liberties, Quillette, and UnHerd; institutions like the University of Austin; and more recently, “civic studies” centers at established universities, independent bodies which offer “patriotic” versions of classes normally taught in departments like history and sociology. The report is the latest salvo from antiwoke academia’s more legitimate mainstream wing.
From the beginning, this movement has been shaped and made possible by hyperpoliticization, leveraging social media bubbles and culture war battles in both the United States and Britain. The irony of this project is that its attempt to oppose the politicization of academia is more stridently political than the fields it aims to critique. While there are plenty of woke true believers in history, sociology, or English, there are just as many people who talk the talk because they’re expected to while really being in it for the apolitical rewards of scholarship, for the (rapidly disappearing) security of tenure, or for any number of other reasons. This was made glaringly obvious at the University of Austin, where the antiwoke but politically neutral naifs initially recruited to the school were ruthlessly driven out as it became an avowedly conservative institution. In order to offer a coherent challenge to an ideologically compliant but diffuse mainstream, an opposition group must be zealous and disciplined. It also needs funders, and the main motivation for a billionaire to care about what goes on in academia today is a political one. This dynamic pulls it into alliance with other causes (like Zionism) which may have initially seemed irrelevant.
The very forces that made it possible for antiwoke academia to emerge have also undermined it, just as politics writ large has, in the era of hyperpoliticization, failed to generate stable institutions capable of channeling popular anger in durable ways. The University of Austin is the most visible such failure of antiwoke institutionalization, but so far there is little evidence that other antiwoke projects have had any lasting appeal to publics outside their bubble. Unless right-wing billionaires are willing to pay to replace the entire infrastructure of mainstream academia, the latter’s institutional weight is unlikely to move meaningfully further rightward.
Hyperpoliticization hasn’t served the academic left very well, either. None of the furious posting and protesting of the last two decades has halted the decline of academia or resolved its structural crises. Even in red states, universities had been relatively insulated from political pressure for decades, because politicians cared more about the prestige of their home flagship than about what the eggheads in the English department were up to. When this unstable détente was consumed by politics, it turned out that academia was an easy target for culture-war outrage-mongering. No countervailing power has yet emerged to combat the right-wing capture of universities in Florida or Ohio.
If we as left-wing academics want to build one, the sole path open to us now is through the kinds of institutions that hyperpoliticization undermines, particularly unions like the AAUP. But this strategy cannot rely on continuing the outrage-cycle politics of the last decades. Organizing requires care in picking targets and staking out positions; asking questions rather than pontificating; building diverse majorities rather than solely mobilizing activists. Hyperpolitics creates a challenging environment for building these skills. The angriest posters can rarely be relied on in a union, as any organizer can tell you.
It is also vital to understand the pitfalls of hyperpoliticization as a pedagogical practice. Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times, which examines and partially reclaims Max Weber’s classic essays “Scholarship as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation,” offers a good starting point. Since reading it, I have been astonished to find myself evolving into a kind of crypto-Weberian: I feel increasingly justified in affirming the importance of the distinction between facts and values, and the separate magisteria of scholarship and politics. Yet I am still a relativist on epistemological questions: as a historian, I try to do a good job representing the sources I have, but I’m not under any illusions that I am capable of presenting an objective picture of reality (nor would I even want to). The essential thing is not one’s theory of truth but one’s willingness not to stack the deck in favor of the actors one sympathizes with. The report is not a good starting point for rethinking our teaching and research, but that doesn’t mean that the precepts imposed on us by hyperpolitics are beyond question.
Even for left-wing political purposes, questioning these premises can be useful. What I have found in the classroom is that my students need no help taking reflexive, strident political positions. Instead, they need help understanding why other people believe what they do, their political coalitions, and their theories of change. If what they learn in the classroom is unflattering to the assumptions they think are integral to left politics, then it may be the assumptions themselves that need modifying.
If students are to go out into the world and do good politics, they need to be equipped with the countervailing habits of good scholarship. You will never win a campaign if you are incapable of dispassionately assessing the field of battle. While the risk of reducing politics to bloodless, pseudo-objective debates is a real one, in the era of hyperpolitics this has become less of a concern: politics have become pervasive and unavoidable. There are many discouraging things about teaching in the 2020s, but the most reassuring is that my most politically engaged students have become the readiest to see the advantages of a more Weberian approach.
Some of the report’s authors may even agree with this view, as might some of the report’s critics. But our colleagues will never be persuaded of it by the kind of intervention that the report makes, which instead guarantees that any debate over its contents will be conscripted into a cycle of hyperpoliticization. And those colleagues have good reason for skepticism: If the report does what it was intended to do, university administrations and the political forces behind them will only be more motivated to intervene ideologically in the work of my colleagues, or at least will be given ideological cover for further tenure-slashing, budget-raiding austerity. Today as never before, you should not leave a weapon in the hands of your enemy—or deny yourself one when it’s available. If we want our intellectual world to function by different rules, we have to work behind the scenes.
