The 1996 “Sokal Hoax” attests to the longstanding decline of the humanities, and with them liberal education in America. Some 30 years later, higher education has begun to grapple with humanities professors’ propensity to abuse academic freedom – by repudiating rigor, stifling dissent, and abandoning dedication to understanding the world in favor of changing it. Yet even well-intentioned, reform-minded university administrators and faculty overlook how the academic establishment – that is, they themselves – allowed the humanities’ self-inflicted degradation to proceed unchecked for so long.
In “Science Wars,” the Spring-Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, New York University physics Professor Alan Sokal published “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” His absurdly titled article argued absurdly that “recent developments in quantum gravity” have “profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.” We know that the article was rubbish because Sokal revealed its provenance and highlighted its stupidity in “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” published in May 1996 in Lingua Franca.
In his self-exposé, Sokal explained that he had “been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities.” He tested his concerns by running “a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”
Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies published by Duke University Press, showed that the answer was yes.
In Lingua Franca, Sokal stated that his Social Text parody of postmodern-progressive pretentiousness and intellectual shoddiness employed “scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously.”
“Transgressing the Boundaries” also dismissed common-sense opinions as discredited dogma. For example, echoing postmodern bromides about the delusions of “Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics” and the Enlightenment, Sokal scoffed in Social Text at the view “that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.”
But, as Sokal pointed out in Lingua Franca, the belief that an external world exists and that human beings can obtain reliable if limited knowledge of it is not some culturally relative invention of modern science. Premodern classical philosophy and biblical faith suppose the reality of a partially knowable external world, and the belief has informed human action wherever people found it necessary to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
Sokal justified his resort to parody on the grounds that substantial numbers of humanities professors had jettisoned the basic requirements of evidence and argument. “The targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside,” he wrote in Lingua Franca. “In such a situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture’s intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the blow that can’t be brushed off is the one that’s self-inflicted.”
In contrast to Sokal, the committee of 10 eminent scholars that drafted and unanimously approved the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” takes the path of reasoned criticism. Commissioned by Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University Chancellor Andrew D. Martin, what has come to be called the Vanderbilt report since issued in April has provoked lively controversy. Notwithstanding divergent methods and tone, the report’s conclusions about the decline of the humanities converge with those Sokal reached 30 years earlier.
Chaired by Paul Boghossian, a distinguished New York University professor of philosophy, the committee proceeded from a conviction central to traditional liberal education: The humanities should furnish minds and burnish sensibilities in preparation for a life befitting a free person. Study of, among other disciplines, literature, history, philosophy, and the humanistic social sciences does this by introducing seminal ideas about the variety of ways of being human, enlivening the imagination, and refining understanding of the complexities of morality and politics.
The report rejected the charge that the humanities as a whole have betrayed their mission. While finding examples of serious scholarship in the core humanities fields and humanistic social sciences that it examined, it identified in each “pathologies” to varying degrees. In each, the committee observed professors who view scholarship as politics by other means and who reject the very idea of objectivity while touting their judgments about injustice and justice as objectively true.
The pathologies may be “significantly more serious,” the committee noted, in humanities-adjacent areas such as “schools of education, social work, communications and so forth,” and existed also in the natural sciences. While committee members extensively reviewed relevant academic work, the report stated that its “conclusions are provisional” and warranted further scholarly investigation.
Owing to the imperatives of academic freedom as well as to their circumscribed scope and provisional findings, committee members urged administrators to proceed cautiously. “In any well-functioning university, administrators are bound by what we take to be a stringent norm of deference according to which non-expert decision-makers must defer to disciplinary experts in assessing scholarship.” Yet “even this foundational principle has its limits,” the committee stated.
“When astronomy as a field morphs into astrology,” the report warns, “administrators will face a largely unprecedented situation in which disciplinary expertise itself cannot be trusted” (italics in original). The largely unprecedented situation may soon arrive: The committee’s evidence suggests a substantial risk of humanities disciplines as a field morphing into quackery.
The committee’s restrained summary of the problem describes a major threat to liberal education:
[T]here are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.
The committee clarifies the problem by specifying what it is not. The problem is not that numerous humanities professors are decidedly progressive but rather that they import progressive articles of faith into their scholarship. The problem is not that numerous humanities professors are politically active or that they use scholarly findings to defend or criticize public policy but rather that they lower or disregard intellectual standards to concoct politically useful results. The problem is not that numerous humanities professors have broadened their remit from the great books to the writings and experiences of historically marginalized groups but rather that they neglect, where they don’t demonize, classic works and conflate study of and advocacy for the marginalized. And the problem is not that humanities professors adopt a critical or debunking stance toward conventional norms, practices, and institutions but rather that they reflexively revile the great works of the West and mechanically besmirch the American political tradition.
Humanities professors protested that the report misunderstands their scholarship and distorts their disciplines. But their rebuttals, delivered in high dudgeon, tended to confirm the infirmity of thinking in their fields.
For example, the Vanderbilt report discusses a brief passage from a short 2023 article, “Defense against dark anthropology,” by University of Colorado Boulder anthropology Professor Fernando Villanea. Villanea stressed that he was offering a “message I wish the entire anthropological community to hear.” The report quoted the message:
[T]he core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests (italics in original).
According to the report – and a straightforward reading of Villanea’s sententious message to members of his discipline – the professor rejects the pursuit of truth as anthropology’s mission based on the self-refuting claim that all truth is subjective. Yet the professor contradictorily argues that anthropology should adopt a political mission because some truths – the suffering of millions, anthropology’s infliction of harm, and oppressed people’s real interests – are objective.
Villanea complained to Inside Higher Ed that the committee took his words out of context and blasted the report’s assessment as “not just incorrect, but lazy scholarship.” Perusal of Villanea’s article confirms that the self-aggrandizing muddle in his contentions exposed by the report accurately reflects the context in which they appear. In any case, what conceivable context would vindicate Villanea’s incoherent assertions?
The Vanderbilt report advances the cause of liberal education by illuminating where the humanities have gone wrong. A crucial next step involves exploring how the academic establishment went wrong, standing by silently for more than 30 years as significant swathes of the humanities increasingly risked turning their disciplines into quackery.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter. His most recent books are “Reclaiming Liberal Education in America” and “Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America.”
