Special Commission Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences
This report is addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields. The charge to the committee, submitted in August 2025 and formulated by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University, reads as follows:
As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.
The complaints have been various in nature. Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.
To help us assess whether, and to what extent, there is a problem here, we charge a commission of eminent scholars from these disciplines to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective areas and to evaluate whether these allegations are justified. We are concerned that, without such an examination, the well-documented erosion of support for the humanities will continue unabated.
Chancellors Diermeier and Martin presented the charge to Paul Boghossian, who assembled the following scholars to work as an independent group to address the issues raised in the charge:
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law, New York University
Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy, New York University
Kit Fine, University Professor, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, New York University
Joseph Henrich, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Katherine E. Fleming, Professor of History, New York University, and President and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust
Jason Merchant, Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago
Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities; Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University
Gideon Rosen, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Hawaii
Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University
The committee began its work in September of 2025. In the initial phase we compiled detailed internal reports on what we take to be a representative sample of disciplines in these areas: philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies and music studies. These reports were the result of extensive research on the part of the authors in consultation with experts in fields unrepresented on the committee, with the indispensable assistance of Gavin Cook and Yu Guo, who developed tools for gathering and analyzing data relevant to the work of the committee. 1 These internal reports form the basis for the general report to follow, which is signed by all members of the committee.
1 We are also grateful to Darren Reisberg, Vice-Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Leigh Bond and Lauren Williamson for their help in advancing the committee’s work.