The Vanderbilt Report’s Sub-Report on Philosophy

“Academic philosophy is generally healthy in most respects relevant to the work of the Commission.”

That commission is the group of ten scholars (including three philosophers from NYU and one from Princeton), who, at the request of the Chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, this summer produced a “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” which came to be known as the Vanderbilt Report.

Despite the generality of the report’s title, readers may recall that the commission took as its focus just one type of potential threat to the state of today’s humanistic scholarship: politicization, or, more specifically, “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 Vanderbilt Report was followed by several discipline-specific reports, and the last one, on philosophy, was released earlier this month. You can read it here.

The quote at the top of this post is the opening line of the report. In regard to their concern with politicization, academic philosophy is “generally healthy,” say the authors, Kit Fine (NYU) and Gideon Rosen (Princeton). There is mainly just one exception to this, they think: the philosophy of sex and gender. Fine and Rosen write:

For roughly a decade now, this relatively new field has been marked by what amounts to a de facto orthodoxy around a cluster of substantive ideas: that socially relevant sex and gender categories are socially constructed, that sex in human beings is not binary, and most importantly, that trans women are women and should be treated as such for every social and legal purpose. Scholarship that questions these assumptions is routinely met with the sort of opposition that is designed, not to challenge objectionable positions on substantive grounds, but to suppress discussion… [H]eterodox scholars are anathematized, excluded from conferences and other academic forums, and demonized on social media. Journals and academic presses that move to publish heterodox scholarship are met with intense pressure against publication, both from scholars and from a wider public. The chief worry is not that published scholarship in these areas amounts to the sort of advocacy that distorts the facts, much less the sort of “post-truth” repudiation of scholarly norms one sometimes sees elsewhere. It is rather that the scholarly ecosystem that normally serves to vet academic work has been distorted in these areas by a pattern of extraordinary pressure whose cumulative effect is to suppress dissent.

The authors then discuss several cases they think support their concern about this area of scholarship.

One factor that I think is missing from the analysis Fine and Rosen present is today’s communication environment. Because trans identity is currently a live, heated, political topic, it has not been uncommon for scholars working in the area to also be activists engaging in political debates and advocacy. Because of the internet, this brings together two kinds of discourse that work against each other.

The relatively mild discursive norms characteristic of truth-seeking academic work are quite different from the rough, rude, and highly aggressive discursive norms of the vicious point-scoring typical of today’s politics. While each set of norms might seem like it would function well in its respective domain, today’s communication technology erases the borders of those domains, presenting everything in “uni-context“, to use Agnes Callard’s helpful phrase. It’s not as if someone can be an activist in the streets and a scholar in the sheets (of paper). Philosophers are taking to the internet ( X.com or wherever) to post about their latest journal article one minute and their latest political screed the next. So we get everything altogether all at once. When these different forms of discourse are crowded into the same channel, there is no space for the pretense of the shared end of academic inquiry—truth—that in turn facilitates civil academic discourse and charitable engagement with those with whom you disagree.

In plainer terms, in their activist voices, some so-called “gender critical” philosophers have been shockingly horrible to trans women, including trans women philosophers. There has been malicious misgendering, mockery of appearance, various personal insults and cruelty online for anyone to see. And similarly, in their activist voices, some philosophers who are pro-trans activists have publicly said awful, aggressive, and vilifying things to and about those with “gender critical” views, including other philosophers. Even if you think such rhetoric is fine in a political or activist context, its reach is not so limited. Philosophers are people, too. They are unlikely to be able to silo the hateful rhetoric directed at them as a mere political device such that it doesn’t affect their judgments about the person saying it and the kind of thinker they are. People who have been called deluded perverts or transphobic Nazis by each other in political discourse online are unlikely to convince themselves of their opponent’s ability to engage in good faith debate elsewhere. And perhaps they shouldn’t. And if they shouldn’t, then some of the actions Fine and Rosen identify as problematic (e.g., non-co-platforming) may be rational (even if, in some ways, they are still regrettable).

By the way, the point of the foregoing is not to “both sides” the issue. I’m not claiming that those on either side of this debate have been equally bad; I’m not claiming anything about relative badness. Rather, I am just saying that Fine and Rosen overlooked one source of what they characterize as a “distorted” scholarly ecosystem which they find “surprising” and “puzzling”.

Discussion of this and other aspects of the report is welcome.

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