The University as Territory
The Vanderbilt Report is another attempt to storm the gates in a war over nonsense
The Vanderbilt Report is a 30-page document commissioned by Vanderbilt University. It’s been called “politely worded McCarthyism,” “unhinged,” and “diabolically evil.” It prompted nine articles and op-eds at the Chronicle alone over the last six weeks.
On the other side is the insurgency. Like-minded organization Heterodox Academy praised the report, and hosted perhaps its only debate. At the debate and in much of the work that inspired it, ideas like evolution and intersubjective agreement are used as little as possible as if too hot to touch.
Thirty years ago, this set of facts would have been hard to follow. It would have been hard to imagine what’s in the report, what’s considered heterodox these days, and why anyone would be mad. Today, however, those familiar with higher education can guess what’s in the report, who is calling it evil and why.
Those even more familiar with higher education might be able to guess the unintuitive reality that both sides treat biology, evolution, and intersubjective agreement (replication, post-publication review and the like) as unclean, something others might do. Empiricism, or the learning-from-observation claimed in funding proposals, is almost never mentioned. On the methods used in the Vanderbilt Report, co-author Ashley Rubin said that one method would have been to “read studies and evaluate them based on scholarly standards.” But “people look at this work with great skepticism. There’s a big cost to doing that type of work.” Rubin also notes that evolution and biology are seen as “conservative and therefore bad.”
Maybe Rubin said it too strongly, but it’s true that previous work, the Vanderbilt Report, insurgency groups like Heterodox Academy, and the beliefs they generally oppose like relativism, postmodernism, constructivism all don’t want to be too closely associated with the philosophy that built the Enlightenment and the idea of the university in the first place.
After empiricism built the universities, they became a thing one can take and hold and not let others in. We know this because they were taken over by nonsense and now nonsense doesn’t want to let go. Universities are territory.
The insurgent ideas
According to the Vanderbilt Report’s lead author, the philosophies that have taken over universities, relativism and postmodernism, have almost no value whatsoever. Paul Boghossian’s 2006 book Fear of Knowledge shows that they are contradictory and can’t be accepted under any system of belief that includes contradiction, or simply reality separate from ourselves. The eminent NYU philosopher has therefore spent many years of his life becoming an expert on nothing.
The book is excellent, but its arguments are focused on contradiction, which doesn’t seem to bother his opponents. It waits until the epilogue to say what we’re all thinking, that these ideas have “come to tempt so many” partially because “they are hugely empowering.”
You could say the book is focused on being right instead of being strong. For example, reading a history of the early Scientific Revolution into the start of the Industrial Revolution, one might say, “Well. The Catholic Church is toast.” One would of course have been wrong, but there’s a strong argument that the church would fade away: Putting nature in a controlled state also means that one can put a useful object like a steam engine in a controlled state too and predict that it will trundle down the tracks. There’s something essential to human life that would need to be subverted for humans to not use science to build steam engines and so they’re going to and therefore the early opponent of the scientific revolution, the Catholic Church, is toast.
You would have been wrong, but it’s not a bad guess. Boghossian makes an argument about the similarities between postmodernism and religion too and it’s truly beautiful:
“Yes, the Cardinal consults his Bible to find out what to believe about the heavens, rather than using the telescope; but he doesn’t divine what the Bible itself contains, but rather reads it using his eyes. Nor does he check it every hour to make sure that it still says the same, but rather relies on induction to predict that it will say the same tomorrow as it does today.”
Where Boghossian lacks imagination, though, is in enumerating the set of belief systems from which relativism is drawn. This is important because it connects to the reason why scientific thought lost out to postmodernism and relativism in universities, and why the territory may be lost again, even if Boghossian and others like him win.
Postmodernism is Scientology. It’s Catholic. It’s countless fundamentalist churches. It is, as the Vanderbilt Report says, astrology. Non-empiricism is all of a piece, but it is not the same. Postmodernism is therefore chosen from an infinite number of belief systems that can’t be proven wrong. That’s all well and good. We knew that. But what are the chances that postmodernism wasn’t therefore designed to take over universities? It’s a belief system that only exists at universities.
Designed doesn’t need to be purposefully designed. It could have evolved at universities. But either way, it amounts to the same thing because true philosophies can’t be for a purpose unless a radical coincidence has occurred. What are the chances that a belief system perfectly serves the personal interests of a specific group of people measured in money and status, and also happens to be true?
To say that postmodernism is intentional is a strong argument. It’s not that sophisticated and yet these kinds of arguments are generally avoided by the insurgency as if rude.
Postmodern relativism
We have seen how a system like postmodernism works. Intellectuals who win debates deserve our respect; Postmodernists win debates by accusations severe enough to shut the debate down. It’s physical action, having the opponents hauled away, disguised as argument. Similarly, relativists choose some group of people for empiricists to squabble with while they assume the throne. Throughout Fear of Knowledge, the group relativists have sent to fight empiricists is the Azande tribe, whom Boghossian ably and politely refutes.
The system he’s responding to is well known at this point. In order to argue against a relativist or postmodernist, one needs to dance with the devil of oppression. Not unlike the preachers of old and the literal devil, postmodernists know they can accuse their opponents of unspeakable horrors. Readers of postmodernism probably detected how strong this tactic is in the 1970s and thought, “Well. Objectivity is toast.” It wouldn’t have been a bad guess.
An alternative to Vanderbilt: make predictions
What Boghossian missed out on is borrowing from the empiricist tradition to which he belongs and making a prediction. Here’s a suggestion: “Now I know that what will likely happen is that anti-empiricists get to wait until this report makes a big splash, see if it’s bad for themselves personally, and react with the shortest path between rhetoric and action to claim that I, Boghossian, coincidentally am an immediate danger to life and limb and must be expunged from society. This is, in a modern civilized world, physical action disguised as argument.”
Why make a prediction? It’s easy to say now that this prediction came almost perfectly true, with the head of the American Anthropological Association implying the opposition wants to debate Nazism, internment, and potentially kill babies who fit outside the sex binary.
Regardless, we knew already on principle that prediction was the way to go. Instead of prediction, what we got was Boghossian and co-author Kwame Anthony Appiah saying that departments should begin “internal dialogues,” and co-author Ashley Rubin’s phrasing, “faculty-led self-study.” These will fail for obvious reasons.
This is not to say that Boghossian is unaware of the real world, nor is it to say that the insurgency should use the same tactics as postmodernists. But ignoring the real physical world blocks off a whole universe of generalization about anti-empiricism. For one, the empiricist can make a fairly useful generalization about anti-empiricists that for any living thing to survive, it needs some way to predict what’s going to happen to find food. If an organism like postmodernism has survived for this long without prediction, it’s going to need some alternative source of food. Its food, unfortunately, is Boghossian.
Again, this is not to say that Boghossian and co-authors don’t understand this. They understand it a little too well. They probably know that if they come out swinging, they’re going to be eaten, and if they don’t — they don’t go quite to the front lines — then someone is going to do their fighting for them. We have to protect our society after all. We have empirical courts and medicine and basketball games to protect. Someone has to push back.
That’s all well and good. Let’s be philosophers and not strategists. But there’s another uncomfortable truth, which is that we have to recognize the coincidence that if any strategy were to succeed in getting anti-empiricists out of academia, these specific empiricists would be first in line to benefit.
Heterodox Academy, for instance, is a member-supported organization of people who work at universities who would be first in line. In other words, the same people who folded to postmodernists in the first place. The same people who, in many cases, are the few people on Earth who don’t need to worry about being fired. They are going to benefit from the difficult truths that only the rest of us really need to face or, god forbid, write down.
Ordinary people who don’t have to worry about offending a relativist are more willing to draw the line at evolution and intersubjective agreement because they have to. They have to find their own food and survive. The fact that these basic scientific pillars would be considered too heterodox for a Heterodox Academy member or associated with conservatism is … unexpected. Thirty years ago, saying that conservatism and evolution go together would be laughable.
The university as territory
So what drives the insurgency if not empiricism? The insurgency is driven by territory, almost by default. This again is given by evolution. That which survives in academia wins.
If you don’t already have a little territory at a university, you need not apply to Heterodox Academy. Like postmodernists, Heterodox Academy seems keenly aware of the idea of territory if you read between the lines. Their principles are designed to keep the territory intact: correct, but bland. Open inquiry, viewpoint diversity. These two phrases have already been banned, but they’re hard to disagree with. In fact, if postmodernists were powerless and rare in academia, Heterodox Academy could be repurposed for their interests.
That’s the problem with not having something that you stand for. Without a definition, the insurgency may simply evolve into that which survives best in academia. With the Vanderbilt Report, the insurgency is becoming a land of undercurrents, of hints and intimation, whipping through techniques that didn’t win. Replication is so yesterday.
Heterodox Academy president John Tomasi seems to be testing out a novel tactic, saying, “Reading the report’s opening pages, I imagine myself in an old-time Western, out by a fire on the prairie, with a philosopher-sheriff assembling a posse to round up a band of disciplinary desperados and bring them to scholarly justice.”
We can’t read too far into what he means, but let’s get this out of the way. Boghossian is no sheriff, and as soon as Boghossian fails, another hero will be chosen on and on until the Chronicle runs out of hyperbole to print about them.
This will only end one way, with another philosophy emerging that is designed to take over.
The conclusion has been foregone from the beginning that there’s no way to defeat nonsense. The Catholic Church didn’t give up and neither will postmodernists. The way the church was limited was by building something that’s not a church, a place where appealing to god is just not done.
Unless universities are willing to say they’re empirical the way the church says it’s holy, or postmodernists say they’re righteous, we’re going to have to build something that’s not a university. This is not a revolution. It’s simply going to happen. Empiricism will move elsewhere, if it hasn’t already.