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A new report on the state of humanities scholarship made waves in higher ed circles when it was released Friday, and has since drawn criticism from professors across the humanities.
Commissioned by Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis chancellor Andrew Martin, the “State of Scholarship” report finds fault with disciplines including anthropology, philosophy and history—not for their content but for the quality of their scholarship, which the report’s authors argue is too often driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Critiques of the report are broad and varied.
Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Wednesday against eight pro-Palestinian activists who are accused of conspiring to run a criminal intimidation campaign against University of Michigan officials while trying to force the school to cut financial ties to Israel.
The indictment describes threats and vandalism at officials’ homes, some businesses and the Jewish Federation of Detroit. The document highlights several incidents that made headlines in the past few years, including fake bloody corpses that were placed in an elected university board member’s yard and the spray-painting of anti-Israel messages at the home of the school’s president at the time, Santa Ono.
Among the strengths of America’s higher education sector has been an uncanny ability to change and remake itself in the face of social, economic, political, artistic and intellectual changes—not just superficially and marginally, but significantly and even teleologically.
While the aspirational aesthetics of our universities—a pastiche of the ancient British and European institutions by way of pre-revolutionary New England and the mid-Atlantic—remain largely unchanged over the past century, their activities, outputs, constituencies, and funding sources have changed dramatically. This adaptive ability redounds to the benefit of universities and to the so-called higher education “system” as a whole, ensuring resilience and a (sometimes begrudging) willingness to change in response to internal and external challenges.
PHILADELPHIA, June 9, 2026 — A new survey of law school faculty paints a bleak picture of free speech and inquiry in the legal academy, with respondents reporting self-censorship, political litmus tests, and attacks on speech from the left and right alike.
Over the course of a month and a half, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression surveyed thousands of faculty members at 192 of the 197 ABA-accredited law schools, seeking their perspectives on the state of free speech and discourse within their programs.
Harvard University leaders have been soliciting wealthy donors for $10 million contributions to fund endowed professorships with the stated goal of expanding “viewpoint diversity” on campus.
Pardon me for finding this hypocritical. Over the past year, the University has systematically curtailed, suspended, or restructured every program with a serious focus on studying Palestinian rights and raising up Palestinian voices targeted by the Trump administration’s April 11 demands. It’s abundantly clear that some views are not welcome on this campus.
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.
