The Vanderbilt Report’s critique of humanistic scholarship is itself bad scholarship and should be corrected or retracted

Abstract

Vanderbilt University’s “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” (Boghossian et al., June 25, 2026) argued that humanistic scholarship has experienced “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria”. The initial (August 2026) version of my critique emphasised that these conclusions were primarily based on unpublished, unverifiable data. Now that most of the data underlying the report (largely from unvalidated Large Language Model [LLM] categorisations) have been belatedly published, I show that these data do not support the report’s main claims. I briefly review the main data from each published disciplinary sub-report (music studies, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies). Overall, there is an utterly indefensible mismatch between the actual empirical data (e.g., decreases in the ratio of Western classical music vs. all other music studied) and Boghossian et al.’s conclusions of an overall “deterioration in scholarly standards”. While I agree with the authors that critical evaluation of the quality of academic scholarship is urgently needed in today’s global political climate, the report’s main conclusions are not remotely justified by their data and are likely to hinder rather than facilitate informed debate. I recommend Boghossian et al.’s report be corrected or retracted to resolve these issues.