by Anthony Picciano

Bloomberg Editorial tears apart Republicans for wrecking the economy!

Dear Commons Community,

The Republican-led Congress has been a “bitter disappointment,” the Bloomberg Editorial Board argues. It points to the body’s “lackluster effort,” its “ham-handed” cuts to medical coverage, and how it dropped much of its agenda “in favor of writing big checks.”

“After two years in charge of a unified federal government, what has the Republican Party accomplished? If current polling is any indication, not enough,” the Editorial Board writes. It points to the Senate’s $70 billion budget reconciliation bill — which passed the House of Representatives — “that will mostly add to a glut of immigration funding.”

This GOP Congress has “fattened the budgets of immigration authorities while doing little to fix the broken incentives that lure unauthorized migrants in the first place (let alone to rationalize the legal immigration system).”

The Board accuses Congress of pledging to fight inflation, while standing “aside as the president has imposed a costly global tariff regime. After coming into office promising ‘massive reform’ to the health-care system, they’ve mostly cut coverage in ham-handed ways.”

Saying Congress “has done nothing to rein in long-term liabilities,” the Board calls the trajectory of the federal government’s debt “unsustainable.”

“More egregiously, the party that flatters itself as fiscally responsible hasn’t lifted a finger to rein in budget deficits,” it writes. “Last year’s tax cuts alone increased projected deficits by $4.7 trillion over the next decade. For all the turmoil engendered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the country’s spending problem has worsened decisively.”

The Board warns that the midterms are just months away, and Congress shouldn’t “congratulate themselves prematurely” — but it could take several steps.

Among them, it could “commit to respecting the Federal Reserve’s independence under new Chairman Kevin Warsh,” and promote permitting reform “to slash red tape, reduce costs, and accelerate energy and infrastructure projects.”

Congress could work on expanding housing supply and medical transparency, or “remind the president that his tariffs are harming workers and inflating consumer prices.”

And in an apparent rebuke, Bloomberg writes, “With federal spending threatening to slow income growth and drive up interest rates — or indeed prompt a fiscal crisis — they could take the minimum step of empaneling a commission to ponder the problem.”

Tony

by Anthony Picciano

U of Florida to Name a New President – Maybe?

 

Dear Commons Community,

The University of Florida’s Board of Trustees is expected on Wednesday to appoint Stuart R. Bell as UF’s next president, moving the former University of Alabama leader toward a state-level confirmation process that has become consumed of late by political fights over diversity, equity, and inclusion.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bell’s nomination for the UF presidency amounts to a do-over for the board. About a year ago, the university’s trustees selected Santa J. Ono to lead the institution, only to see the former University of Michigan president pilloried over his past embrace of DEI. He was voted down last June by the state Board of Governors after a grueling and rancorous public interview. A university known for swagger has been walking with a limp ever since.

Given recent history, the stakes for Bell’s confirmation feel enormously high. In a telling sign of the times, the global reputation of a top-ranked public research university appears to hinge on whether a longtime administrator of limited national notoriety can convince the state’s political establishment that he is sufficiently hostile toward DEI and satisfactorily contrite about his past support of diversity programs. 

Tony

by Anthony Picciano

“Science” Editorial: Defending the Research Project Grant Process

 

Dear Commons Community,

Today’s edition of Science has a guest editorial by Pierre Azoulay, an International Programs Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that focuses on the application process of research grants. His concern is based on the views of a growing coalition of reformers who have  commented that the research project grant (RPG) approach used by many science funders in the United States and based on competitive, investigator-initiated, and peer-reviewed proposals cannot support transformative science.  

His conclusion:

‘One ought to be wary, not opposed. But the moment is hard to ignore: an administration proposing deep cuts to the NSF, the National Science Board dismissed, universities pressed by immigration restrictions and a new endowment tax—a conjunction that should sober anyone weighing a reform that risks hollowing out the institutions producing most US basic science. The RPG embodies a distinctively American policy instinct: decentralization, competition, bottom-up initiative. Its virtues are structural; its vices are accretions of practice. The first would be diluted by major reallocation toward institutional funding; the second can be addressed by deliberate reform. Yet in a tight budget, even modest experiments redirect scarce dollars from a strained system. With bipartisan legislation introduced to extend the X-Labs model to NIH, the scientific community should be asking whether the grass is truly greener on the institutional side, and what safeguards would prevent it from browning over time.”

Important commentary.

Below is the entire editorial.

Tony

——————————

Science

In (qualified) defense of the research project grant

Editorial

Pierre Azoulay

In a debate that has been building for years, a growing coalition of reformers has concluded that the research project grant (RPG) approach used by many science funders in the United States and based on competitive, investigator-initiated, and peer-reviewed proposals cannot support transformative science. Crystallizing this debate, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just committed $1.5 billion over the next decade to X-Labs, independent and milestone-driven research organizations meant to bypass not only the RPG but also the universities that have long been its principal recipients. Although the reform impulse may warrant sympathy, the X-Labs prescription merits skepticism.

Criticisms of RPGs cluster around several legitimate themes. Peer-review committees demand preliminary data so extensive that applicants must essentially complete their experiments before being funded to attempt them. Applications that were once a few pages can now be hundred-page compliance exercises. Success rates for federal research grants have fallen by half or more over the past half-century, forcing investigators into endless cycles of writing, rejection, and revision—a treadmill that crowds out contemplative thought. These are real pathologies. They diminish the attractiveness of scientific careers and skew the funded portfolio toward the incremental and the safe.

The reformers’ solution is elegant in theory. Rather than forcing scientists to write grants, give them stable institutional homes; rather than funding projects, fund people and organizations. Create a network of 10 or 20 institutes, each empowered by block funding (longterm, unrestricted institutional support) to pursue research programs the RPG cannot support. The promise is Bell Labs redux: the industrial lab that gave society the transistor, information theory, and the laser, none from a grant application.

The central confusion is that Bell Labs was not a government program, but the research arm of a regulated monopoly, AT&T, funded by captive ratepayers, accountable to no appropriations committee, free to operate on a time horizon no public agency could sustain. The true parentage of X-Labs is not Bell Labs but the continental model: Germany’s Max Planck Institutes (MPIs), France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the US Department of Energy (DOE) national labs.

MPIs operate on the Harnack principle: build an institute around a small group of exceptional scientists granted near absolute autonomy. On paper, scientific paradise; in practice, junior scientists live entirely at the director’s pleasure. CNRS researchers become civil servants for life in their early 30s—freedom from fundraising, paid for by an institution slow to adapt when priorities shift. DOE labs are block-funded, stable, and ossified by the safety and compliance apparatus that public funding inevitably brings. At $18 billion a year, they already do at scale much of what X-Labs propose to invent, a fact the X-Labs discourse has somehow overlooked. Block funding does not eliminate bureaucracy; it relocates it. The reformers compare the messy actual RPG to a platonic ideal of institutional science that has never existed under public auspices.

What the RPG gets right is easily overlooked because it is built into the mechanism, not into the wisdom of any administrator. The grant follows the investigator; a scientist treated badly can leave and take their funding with them, giving the scientist real bargaining power vis-à-vis their institution. The system also offers multiple doors—NSF, DOE, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other agencies and private foundations—so that a paradigm out of favor at one agency may find support at another. NIH alone makes roughly 40,000 RPG awards a year, a portfolio that could support randomized experimentation and rigorous self-evaluation if agencies were so inclined, and that a handful of X-Labs could not. The bundling of research with graduate education that the RPG sustains is the commons from which any new institution would draw the scientists it proposes to redeploy.

One ought to be wary, not opposed. But the moment is hard to ignore: an administration proposing deep cuts to the NSF, the National Science Board dismissed, universities pressed by immigration restrictions and a new endowment tax—a conjunction that should sober anyone weighing a reform that risks hollowing out the institutions producing most US basic science. The RPG embodies a distinctively American policy instinct: decentralization, competition, bottom-up initiative. Its virtues are structural; its vices are accretions of practice. The first would be diluted by major reallocation toward institutional funding; the second can be addressed by deliberate reform. Yet in a tight budget, even modest experiments redirect scarce dollars from a strained system. With bipartisan legislation introduced to extend the X-Labs model to NIH, the scientific community should be asking whether the grass is truly greener on the institutional side, and what safeguards would prevent it from browning over time.

by Anthony Picciano

Video: Pope Leo’s “6-7” Hand Gesture Connects with Young People!

Image credits: expensivethrift/X
Dear Commons Community,

Pope Leo XIV has gone viral after surprising crowds in Madrid with an unexpected hand gesture (see video below) that many younger people immediately recognized.

During his first official visit to Spain on June 6, the pontiff was spotted mimicking the popular “6-7” gesture while greeting people from the popemobile, drawing smiles from onlookers and quickly spreading across social media.

The moment came just weeks after the Pope was seen learning the same gesture from a group of Catholic children at the Vatican.

While some were amused by the light-hearted interaction, others were stunned to see the head of the Catholic Church embracing a trend associated with Gen Alpha internet culture.

“Exactly the vibe you want from the Pope,” one person commented.

The viral moment took place during Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Madrid, where he greeted thousands of people gathered along the streets as part of his week-long trip to Spain.

While riding through the city in the popemobile, the Pope appeared to mimic the now-famous “6-7” hand gesture, prompting cheers and laughter from many people in the crowd.

The trip marked his first visit to a European Union country outside Italy since becoming Pope.

During the visit, he attended large public events in Madrid and Barcelona, met young Catholics, and spoke about faith, technology, mental health, and the challenges facing younger generations.

The Madrid gesture did not come out of nowhere.

Just weeks earlier, on May 9, Pope Leo was filmed interacting with around 1,000 Catholic children from the Archdiocese of Genoa near St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

During the gathering, several children showed him the “6-7″ gesture, and the Pope smiled before copying it back to them.

The interaction quickly circulated online and became one of the most talked-about moments of his early papacy.

Since then, Pope Leo has repeatedly shown a willingness to engage with younger audiences in ways that feel less formal than many people might expect from a pontiff.

Tony

Pope Leo surprised crowds in Madrid by using the 6-7 hand gesture.

by Anthony Picciano

United States DOJ Investigating CUNY’s Black Male Initiative

 

 

Harmeet K. Dhillon assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images News.

Dear Commons Community,

The U. S. Justice Department is investigating a program at City University of New York that offers support for men from underrepresented backgrounds for alleged racial discrimination.  As reported by Inside Higher Education.

Trump officials said in a Tuesday news release that the Justice Department received reports that CUNY’s Black Male Initiative “provides educational benefits to minorities, particularly black males, on the basis of race.” The university says on the program’s website and in other materials that while the initiative is geared toward Black, Caribbean and Hispanic men, its activities are open to all students.

As part of the initiative, students receive “additional layers of academic and social support,” such as peer-to-peer mentoring, according to the website.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement that “race can never play a role when deciding how to distribute educational resources or opportunities.” The DOJ release noted that the Civil Rights Division hasn’t reached any conclusion about the investigation.

The Justice Department has declared a range of diversity, equity and inclusion practices unlawful and opened several investigations into allegations of racial discrimination at universities.

I searched, but as of early this morning, have not have not seen any official response from CUNY about this investigation.

Tony

 

by Anthony Picciano

New Book: “Fluke” by Brian Klaas

Dear Commons Community,

Last month, I posted  on a book entitled, Beyond Belief:  What evidence shows what really works by Helen Pearson. It was a good read which examines issues of social science research, several of which I was quite familiar.  My colleague, Chuck Dziuban, read it and suggested I read Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters  by Brian Klaas, which covers some of the same ground but takes a far more critical view of structured research especially quantitative studies. His main focus is the phenomenon of chance and the chaos it can sow. He posits that every detail matters and draws on social science, physical sciences, history, and philosophy to engage the reader. He also includes excellent examples and stories to introduce his topics. 

Both of the above books go into the weeds a bit but if you are someone who engages in social science research, I would give them especially the Klaas book, a try.

Below is a review of Fluke that appeared in the New Humanist.

Tony

—————————–

Book review: Fluke by Brian Klaas

The musings of a “disillusioned social scientist”

–   by Andrew Mueller 

Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters (John Murray) by Brian Klaas

That you are reading this is stupendously unlikely. This is no reflection on New Humanist’s circulation (expanding, I’m told), but merely an attempt to render vaguely sensible the unfathomable odds against any of us existing at all. Each human being alive now is the product of an unbroken sequence of thousands of meetings stretching back millions of years, many if not most of them entirely random. Any one of them might have been thwarted by, for example, just one party to our eventual creation missing a train (or a stagecoach, or an ox cart) because they were distracted by a squirrel.

The social scientist, journalist and broadcaster Brian Klaas has starker reasons than most of us for being preoccupied by such contemplations. As he explains in the opening pages of Fluke, he is only in a position to write the book, or indeed do anything else that one might do with their time on this Earth, because of a hideous tragedy that occurred in 1905 in Jamestown, Wisconsin. A woman named Clara Jansen killed all four of her children, and then herself. Her husband, Paul Klaas, subsequently remarried, and somehow summoned the optimism to start another family; he was the author’s great-grandfather. “My life,” writes Klaas, “was only made possible by a gruesome mass murder.”

Klaas further illuminates his thesis in the opening chapters of Fluke with examples of how caprices of fate govern not just our own lives, but the course of nations. One is a lesson from history. Nagasaki, obliterated by an American atomic bomb on 9 August 1945, was the third choice of city to be the second target of the United States’ terrible new weapon.

The first, Kyoto, had been vetoed because Henry Stimson, US Secretary of War, had visited with his wife in the 1920s and remembered it fondly. The second, Kokura, was spared on the day because the crew aboard the B-29 carrying the bomb couldn’t see their target for clouds. They diverted to Nagasaki, where the visibility was better.

Another is a finding from Klaas’s own reporting. Researching an earlier book, he looks into why an attempted coup d’état in Zambia failed. He arrives in Zambia wondering whether it was testament to the strength of the country’s institutions or perhaps neglect on the part of the plotters in arraying public opinion behind them. He discovers instead that the day was saved by the poor stitching of one general’s trousers, which fortuitously unraveled as he clambered over a fence, enabling him to evade the grasp of the usurpers. “Democracy survived,” writes Klaas, who has an admirable knack for the droll payoff, “quite literally by a thread.”

For these and other reasons, Klaas describes himself as “a disillusioned social scientist”. Having been trained to look for elegant patterns, to neatly attach effects to causes, he begins to wonder if the world he has been examining is just one vast and impenetrable knot of loose ends.

A lesser thinker and writer might lapse at this point into nihilistic ennui or at least find themselves resignedly agreeing with P. J. O’Rourke’s immortal definition of the social sciences: “Folks do lots of things, we don’t know why, test on Friday.” But Klaas manages to find in this chaos an invigorating elixir of liberation, reassurance and, above all, gratitude.

“If someone else,” he writes, “had been born instead of you – the unborn ghost whom you outcompeted in the existence sweepstakes – countless other people’s lives would be profoundly different, so our world would be different. The ripples of every life spread out, in unexpected ways, for eternity.”

We cannot, of course, always control the ultimate outcomes of our actions. If everything we do matters, chances are that some of the things we do, however benign our intentions, are going to have regrettable consequences: a New Humanist reader, absorbed by this review at a bus stop, does not notice the grand piano falling from a cargo aircraft flying overhead, etc. The great strength of Fluke is that Klaas does not offer a simple answer to existential conundrums of this sort: indeed, part of the concluding chapter is a richly entertaining dismantling of the kind of books that do.

Those who cling doggedly to any belief – whether utopian or dystopian – that it is possible to impose much order upon existence, or infer any order from it, may find their preconceptions affably upended by Fluke. Those who share Klaas’s interest in (and enjoyment of) the chaos we navigate will find a smart, funny and correctly humble manifesto for appreciating our world.

 

by Anthony Picciano

Susan Collins and Graham Platner will go head-to-head in the Maine Senate race.

Left: Senator Susan Collins . Right: Graham Platner.  Courtesy of Newsweek

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was primary day for several states.  One of the more closely races was in Maine where Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democrat Graham Platner are set to face off in a competitive election campaign for the U.S. Senate race in November after securing their parties’ nominations yesterday.  As reported by Newsweek.

The Maine race presents Democrats with perhaps their best opportunity to flip a Senate seat in the 2026 midterm elections in a state that backed former Vice President Kamala Harris by about seven points in 2024. But recent scandals involving Platner have upended the race, raising concerns among some Democrats about his electability.

Collins has managed to win reelection in challenging environments in the past due to her personal popularity and bipartisan credentials, but Democrats believe she may face her toughest reelection yet because of President Donald Trump’s declining approval rating.

Collins ran unopposed for the Republican nomination, while Platner won the Democratic nomination with 75 percent of the vote at the time the race was called. He defeated candidates David Costello and Governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot.

Mills said in a statement obtained by Newsweek that she has always been inspired to “never stop fighting” for the people of Maine and that she was “incredibly proud” of what her administration has accomplished.

“I will continue to fight with everything I have to improve the lives and livelihoods of Maine people,” Mills said.

What Do The Latest Polls Show?

Early polling points to a close race, with some recent surveys showing a dead heat between the two candidates. Platner has presented himself as a political outsider and change candidate at a time when Democrats are fired up—but Collins is likely to rely on her personal popularity to win, while also calling attention to Platner’s personal scandals.

Notably, Maine uses a ranked-choice system, where voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins an outright majority, the candidate with the lowest support is eliminated, and their voters are reallocated to their second choices. No independents have made the ballot, so either Collins or Platner is likely to win a majority, barring a major write-in campaign.

The latest poll from Tavern Research, which surveyed 1,642 adults from June 5-8, showed Platner up two points on 51 percent, compared to Collins’ 49 percent. A Fabrizio, Lee & Associates poll, which surveyed 800 likely voters from June 1-3, showed Collins and Platner tied at 46 percent.

Earlier polls gave Platner a more sizable advantage.

A Public Policy Polling survey showed Platner up four points on 49 percent, while Collins received 45 percent. It surveyed 670 registered voters from June 2-3.

A University of New Hampshire poll, which surveyed 1,250 likely voters from May 21-25, showed Platner up nine points, at 51 percent, to Collins’ 42 percent.

Meanwhile, a Pan Atlantic SMS Group poll, which surveyed 827 likely voters from May 8-18, showed Platner with 48 percent and Collins with 41 percent.

Collins’ supporters have pointed out that she trailed 2020 Democratic candidate Sara Gideon in nearly every poll in her last reelection bid but went on to win by just under 51 percent of the vote.

The Maine senate race will be one of the most closely watched contests in November.

Tony

by Anthony Picciano

Trump booed during national anthem at New York Knicks playoff game!

 

Mr Trump watched the match from behind glass Trump watched the match from behind glass – Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Trump was loudly booed by basketball fans during our national anthem as he appeared at Madison Square Garden in New York last night.

Deafening jeers greeted him as he was shown on screens inside the stadium during the pre-game singing of The Star-Spangled Banner.

In clips that quickly went viral on social media, Trump was seen smiling as boos shattered the respectful silence for the anthem, echoing around the packed arena before the screens hastily cut away.

New York Knicks fans had made it clear on social media that the president should expect a hostile atmosphere before the game against San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals.

Trump, a long-time Knicks fan, took his seat for Game 3 of the best-of-seven series after a security operation that had thrown Manhattan into chaos.

The Secret Service had swarmed the arena, erecting a 10ft fence around it and shutting down a dozen streets in the surrounding area.

The US president was always likely to be an unpopular visitor in the heavily Democratic city, but adding to New Yorkers’ anger was the logistical burden the president’s visit has placed on fans and the local community.

“During one of the best moments NYC has enjoyed in decades, [Trump] makes it all about himself. Trump should LEAVE US ALONE! He’s not wanted here,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, wrote on X.

Knicks fever has gripped New York with the team on a 14-game winning run that has put them within three victories of ending a 53-year wait for an NBA championship. This is also the first time in 27 years that Madison Square Garden has hosted a NBA Finals game.

Fans’ moods would not have improved: the Knicks’ winning streak ended in a 115-111 defeat, though they still lead the Spurs 2-1 in the series. 

The 20,000 ticket holders – many of whom had paid thousands of dollars to attend – had been encouraged to arrive at least two hours early, with no bags, to clear airport-style security screening in time for the game.

Clips shared on social media showed long queues of fans waiting to get into Madison Square Garden.

Authorities had barred fans without tickets from coming within several blocks of the venue, and banned watch parties directly outside – a break from the previous two games, which drew excited crowds.

“The message is simple: celebrate the Knicks, but avoid the MSG area tonight if you do not have tickets for the game,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told a news conference on Monday morning.

The Secret Service said it would deploy counter-drone technology as part of its operation to protect Trump.

The larger-than-usual security plan comes after multiple recent threats to Trump, including a gunman outside the White House last month and an assassination attempt at a White House correspondents’ dinner in April.

Trump, a native New Yorker, is a self-described long-time Knicks fan and is the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.

He was a guest of James Doland, the basketball team’s owner, a Trump donor widely disliked by Knicks fans.

Trump knows well that he is not welcome here in New York.

Tony

by Anthony Picciano

Report: Has the Left Ruined the Humanities?

 

Photo-based illustration of the top of a bust of Aristotle with a blue and a red flag planted in the top.

Illustration by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an opinion piece yesterday commenting on a Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.  The report focuses on the issue of whether the humanities and social sciences have been corrupted by political aims, and whether their disciplines have tossed out rigorous research standards in favor of advancing social-justice causes favored by the political left. Here is an excerpt from The Chronicle article.

Over the past several months, a group of high-profile scholars convened privately to study whether this criticism holds water across several fields within the humanities and social sciences. “The first thing to say,” they concluded in a report published Friday, “is that we reject the complaint in this bald form.”

However, the group found reason for concern — a “mixed picture” that validates portions of the criticism. “Every field we have studied,” the group wrote, exhibits warning signs pointing to “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 longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

That conclusion is sure to spur debate, not least because it comes on the heels of another prominent attempt to investigate the causes of widespread distrust in higher education. In April, Yale University released a report that struck similar self-flagellating notes, arguing that academics need to “admit where we have been wrong.”

What’s unique about this latest effort is who convened the group: Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, outspoken proponents of the view that colleges have become too political. Martin told The Chronicle that he and Diermeier have heard many faculty members and others express concern about the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. “So we thought a reasonable thing to do would be to pull together a group of scholarly experts to look at the issue,” he said, “to produce a report not meant to end conversation, but actually to begin conversations on campuses around the country.” Their findings, he said, did not surprise him.

In August, the two chancellors charged a group, selected and led by the New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian, with determining whether “the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards” within the humanities and social sciences “are justified.” For its work, the group — which included Kwame Anthony Appiah, another NYU philosophy professor, and the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, among others — wrote field-specific internal reports about philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, relying on “extensive research” in consultation with other experts. The summary report drew on those reports for its conclusions.

That report is front-loaded with caveats. The humanities are essential, for one, and contain serious scholarship. Administrators should also be cautious about taking action in response to its findings, the scholars wrote, and instead consult disciplinary experts for deeper study.

The report presents three sources of politicized distortion: when research must be constrained by an “accepted political goal,” when the disinterested pursuit of knowledge is “displaced by” the goal of serving “a pragmatic purpose,” and rejecting the very idea that one is capable of assessing evidence on a claim “independently of our political commitments.”

The scholars cite anthropology as a potent example of the first source, quoting a 2021 speech from the president of the American Anthropological Association then who said the field’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.” These sorts of definitions — and the subtler ways that they manifest — result in the sometimes-unconscious censorship of scholarship that doesn’t serve the political goal, the report says.

More broadly, the report condemns what it calls the widespread embrace of postmodernism and relativism among scholars as antithetical to their very project. And it traces postmodernism’s appeal, in part, to the permission it grants scholars to discard evidence they don’t find personally palatable.

The authors of the report are careful to distinguish themselves from those who think the primary problem with academe is political imbalance. The fact that academics “are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public” is “not by itself a problem for scholarship.” In an email, Boghossian added that “the solution is to restore a conception of scholarship in the humanities that is as free of ideological distortion as possible.”

Universities exist to support disinterested inquiry, the report concludes, and the obstacles it names in fulfilling that mission are serious. “They are not mere problems in the administration or operation of a university,” the scholars write, “but strike at the very heart and soul of what a university should be for.”

In an interview, Diermeier said he has also been concerned about universities suppressing the free speech of speakers and making public statements about political issues. “What the report has indicated is that there’s growing evidence that the problem of polarization in higher education is real, that it affects scholarship, that it affects teaching, that it affects publications and publication practices,” he said. “These are serious concerns, and they need to be addressed.”

Diermeier said Boghossian was chosen to lead the effort after he read and was “extremely impressed” by Boghossian’s 2006 book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Boghossian did not answer questions about how he in turn selected the participating scholars and the disciplines analyzed. The field-specific reports that undergird the summary report were not released Friday but may be soon, Diermeier said.

The scholars were compensated for their work, according to Martin, though he declined to comment on how much they were paid or where the funding came from.

Martin said he’d received a mix of praise and criticism in the first hours after the report went live. “I deeply value my colleagues in the humanities and in the qualitative social sciences and the great value that they bring to our students and bring to our institutions and to the country more generally,” he said. “I think at this moment of self-reflection, I’m hopeful that this document will be a catalyst to get those important conversations to take place.”

The report touches on important issues and is worth a read.

Tony

 

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