Politicising the Humanities: Sociology as Case Study

Summary

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Quillette Podcast Episode Summary

Episode Title: Politicizing the Humanities: Sociology as Case Study

Air Date: August 4, 2026
Host: Jonathan Kay
Guest: Professor Ashley Rubin, University of Hawaii, co-author of Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences

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Overview

This episode examines the increasing politicization of research and scholarly standards in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, focusing particularly on the field of sociology. Host Jonathan Kay and guest Professor Ashley Rubin explore the findings of a new report that critiques the replacement of traditional scholarly evaluation with explicitly ideological and political criteria. The discussion covers how this shift impacts academic freedom, research diversity, and the professional ecosystem within academia.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Central Critique: Political Standards in Scholarship

• Main Argument: The report does not object to the overall liberal/progressive makeup of the humanities, but to “the diminishment of academia by the use of explicitly ideological and political standards to judge the quality of new research.” (01:10)
• Explicit examples are given, such as the American Sociological Association's recent embrace of “sociology as a form of liberatory praxis… not only to understand structural inequalities but to intervene in socio-political struggles.” (01:50–02:45)
• Rubin emphasizes that gatekeeping based on political alignment is changing what scholarship is permissible:

  "That's going to have a message on the field, and that's something that people are going to...look at and some people are going to act on that." (03:16)

2. Are Professional Associations Representative?

• Rubin discusses the importance and influence of associations like the ASA (American Sociological Association) and how their ideological priorities shape what kind of research gets presented:

  “If you do kind of politically neutral research on a topic that's not very politically salient...it's going to be really hard to get that work accepted..." (05:21)

• She notes survey data suggests the leadership's views aren't as out-of-step from the broader membership as some believe. (04:18)

3. Narrowing of Topics and Acceptable Discourse

• Recent panels and conference themes focus primarily on issues of inequality and identity, with less attention to traditional or politically neutral topics:

  "There's a lot of stuff on kind of inequality, injustice, a lot of things that are specifically about inequality and injustice, relating to specific identity groups. So race and gender come up a lot. There's less on class..." (06:03)

• This leads to challenges in even discussing variables that have long been central to sociological research (e.g., causes of crime or wage disparities), as certain hypotheses are now seen as inappropriate or politically fraught.

  “That mindset is increasingly difficult to have.” (09:52) “Even if I don't like that hypothesis, I still have to test it if I'm going to understand what's going on...” (09:53)

4. Peer Review, Scholarly Language, and Self-Censorship

• Rubin shares the need to “search and replace” terms in papers to avoid ideological offense and derailment:

  “If you're giving a talk or doing a paper, you're almost doing a search and replace on these words...because you don't want your presentation to be derailed...” (11:31)

• She recounts peer review comments and conference Q&As that focus not on methodology or evidence but on language choices or the presumed political implications of research questions.

  “This is off. This is an ignorant take.” (11:10)

5. Case Study: Prisoner Resistance and Ideological Expectations

• Rubin gives a personal example from her research on "prisoner resistance," where even critical analysis of expansive definitions (e.g., counting masturbation or suicide as resistance) was seen as potentially reactionary simply for not endorsing the dominant narrative.

  "I was pretty nervous because I thought, oh my God, people are gonna think I'm conservative...I try to not take particular sides." (14:09)

• Even describing the limits of “resistance” was met with skepticism and ideological pushback, including from senior editors.

  “He responded and said that it was kind of like I just thrown cold water on, you know, basically a bunch of scholarship. And he didn't like the paper and he was an editor of a journal.” (15:08)

6. Professional Dynamics and Splintering

• There’s discussion of the potential future for more schisms within disciplines and professional associations as splinter groups and alternative conferences form around ideological lines.

  “There already are multiple sociology associations...I think that might be the future.” (30:26)

• Rubin outlines the risks of losing shared disciplinary norms and credibility:

  “If we keep splitting off, we're not a discipline anymore.” (34:38)

7. Authoritarianism and Irony in the Progressive Left

• Kay and Rubin discuss the paradox of a movement seeking diversity that enforces a “Durkheimian totalitarian consciousness.”

  “But they don't seem to notice authoritarianism when it comes from each other, when we try to censor each other…that, to me, is a really big irony.” (35:04–35:58)

8. The Yale Report on Distrust in Higher Education: A Contrast

• Brief comparison with another recent report (from Yale) that downplays ideology and instead focuses on administrative and structural drivers of distrust in higher education.

  "It wasn't at all what I expected. It didn't talk about ideology." (19:43)

• Rubin agrees that debates like grade inflation are widely acknowledged but difficult to address practically.

9. How Widespread Is the Ideological Turn?

• Rubin rejects the idea that only a handful of activists are responsible for radical trends:

  “It's no longer clear to me that 90% of academics really do just want to do their research. I think that's increasingly not true.” (24:27)

• She describes a committed, albeit still a minority, cohort of activist-scholars whose collective influence shapes institutional life disproportionately—e.g., mass boycotts of conferences over issues like Israel-related policies.

  “There's a large boycott of the association...more than a thousand sociologists have agreed.” (26:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On self-censorship in academia:

  “I do see that [ideological policing] more on social media, but...there are versions of that in actual peer review comments...” (11:02)

• On expanding definitions:

  “Some examples that people have given of prisoner resistance include masturbation and suicide, whereas more classic examples are things like prison riots or protests.” (12:09)

• On discipline coherence:

  “If we keep splitting off, we're not a discipline anymore.” (34:43)

• On the progressive pursuit of diversity creating orthodoxy:

  "The progressive left is extremely focused on diversity and in the process created a Durkheimian totalitarian consciousness to enforce that." (34:44–35:04)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:10 | Introduction to the problem: political standards in academia | | 03:33–06:01| How representative are professional organizations? | | 06:03 | Narrowing of academic panels/discussion topics | | 08:21–10:57| Barriers to research on “unfashionable” topics | | 11:31 | Concerns over scholarly language and peer review feedback | | 12:06–13:43| The “prisoner resistance” research and associated challenges | | 14:09–15:18| Navigating the publication process amid ideological concerns | | 16:15–17:46| Systemic issues in labeling “conservative” scholarship | | 18:33–19:11| Structure of the report and reactions across the spectrum | | 19:43–20:25| Comparing with Yale’s “distrust in higher ed” report | | 24:27 | Is academia really mostly “just researchers”? | | 26:32–28:46| ASA conference boycott and splintering over Israel | | 30:26–31:41| Multiplicity of sociology organizations: diverging futures | | 34:38–35:58| Risks of splintering and authoritarian drift within disciplines |

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Tone & Language

The conversation is marked by Rubin’s careful, research-focused tone, emphasizing empirical evidence and disciplinary integrity, while Kay maintains a probing but ironic and occasionally sardonic approach, injecting humor and skepticism.

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Conclusion

Professor Rubin's perspective highlights the challenges facing the humanities and social sciences as they grapple with questions of ideological conformity, scholarly freedom, and the future of academic disciplines. The discussion reveals tensions between activism and traditional scholarship, the paradoxes of diversity and enforced orthodoxy, and the practical realities and risks of politicizing research criteria throughout the academic landscape.

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For further reading:

• Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences (April 5, 2026)
• Quillette excerpt: "A Crisis in the Humanities" by Paul Boghossian

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Quillette Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay. If you like what you hear, please Visit [e-mail] the site where freethought lives. For essays, news and more podcasts. Sign up for our newsletter and become

[B]

a [e-mail] that's Q U I double L E double T E dot com

[A]

this week on the Quillette Podcast, I'll be speaking with Ashley Rubin, a professor from the University of Hawaii and the co author of a recently released report commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University, titled Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. In that report, Professor Rubin and her co authors sound the alarm over recent illiberal trends that have taken over to varying degrees, history, philosophy, literature, and the arts more generally, including Professor Rubin's own discipline, sociology. The authors of the report are careful to note that they don't object to the progressive political slant that prevails in the humanities more generally, a phenomenon that has been abundantly demonstrated by survey data in recent years. Rather, they object to what they regard as the diminishment of academia by the use of explicitly ideological and political standards to judge the quality of new research. By way of example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, UCLA anthropology professor Akhil Gupta declared that the mission of anthropology is to challenge the culturally dominant common sense of capitalist consumerism. The authors report that among the humanities more generally, anthropology seems to have been particularly affected by these tendencies. But sociology isn't far behind. In 2024, when the American Sociological association announced that its annual meeting would be devoted to intersectional solidarity, building communities of Hope, justice, and joy, the organizers clarified that the 2024 theme emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis, an effort not only to understand structural inequalities but to intervene in socio political struggles. As Professor Rubin explains, this explicitly political mission now affects how scholarship is judged and and even what scholarship is permissible to be produced. In coming months, the co authors, including Professor Rubin, will be preparing specialized reports about their specific fields. But the interview you're about to hear is based on the general report that they published in early April. Please enjoy my interview with Ashley Rubin, Associate professor of Sociology at University of Hawaii and the co author of Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.

[B]

Professor Rubin, thank you for joining the Quillette Podcast.

[C]

Thank you for having me.

[B]

The examples given about how anthropology among the other humanities has been particularly radicalized, they principally come from Proceedings of conferences run by, I think it's called the American Anthropology association, which for a variety of reasons, personality ideology is not always representative of the rank and file. Is it really the case that anthropology has, and I'm picking on anthropology because, well, you guys picked on it, that it's really become that radicalized, or is it just the 17 people who run this particular organization who are self selected and highly motivated to take over acronym groups, that they are highly radicalized?

[C]

Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm going to kind of shift it to sociology because I don't want to speak out of turn about anthropology, but this is. I'll step back for a moment and say this is a general question for all of the fields. In some, the professional associations are more representative. In some cases they're not. But there's also another factor which is these professional organizations are incredibly important for the field because a lot of times they're really part of the job market process. They a lot of times issue statements about what it means to be a scholar of a particular type. People look to them for kind of legitimizing understandings. So in my field of sociology, there is kind of a series of presidential addresses that called for more activism and scholarship. That the purpose of sociology is to kind of do more social action and to kind of shift some of the criteria for doing and evaluating research. That's going to have a message on the field, and that's something that people are going to, you know, look at and some people are going to act on that. So now to the question of representativeness. This is a big issue in sociology, and this is like a huge empirical question is what happens in the American Sociological Association? Is that representative of the field? Going into this project, I thought, okay, the ASA is very visible, but it's not necessarily representative. But then I also got survey data, and that's where you see more agreement than disagreement. So that's one kind of answer to that question. The other one is, at least in my field of sociology, it's kind of a big deal to go and present at the asa. The talks themselves are peer reviewed, so you have to get your paper accepted. Usually send a paper or more recently, a short version of your paper, and that gets reviewed by a member of the program committee who decides, is this good enough? Does it fit our topics? And if not, you don't get to present. And so it's, you know, it's kind of like this cherry that you're reaching for because it's rare. But increasingly in Recent years, you'll see a lot of panels that you apply for that are on narrow topics. And so if there's, you know, nothing that your research fits. So if you do kind of politically neutral research on a topic that's not very politically salient, but it is actually pretty important and kind of foundational to sociology historically, it's going to be really hard to get that work accepted at the, at the program. In some fields there might be one out of eight panels where it's relevant and you only have four slots on that panel.

[B]

What kind of panels have been represented lately?

[C]

There's a lot of stuff on kind of inequality, injustice, a lot of things that are specifically about inequality and injustice, relating to specific identity groups. So race and gender come up a lot. There's less on class, for example, increasingly stuff on criminal justice topics, which is actually my area. There's a lot of attention to kind of policing or this kind of informal sense of social control that people kind of label cursorality, just anything that's kind of vaguely coercive.

[B]

This is a tangent, but I was at a heterodox academy meeting. There was a sociologist who presented who he was complaining that whenever a film director needs like a sort of pencil neck bad guy type who's an academic, they always make them a sociologist.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is that a thing? I was voted least friendly in high school and here I am a police captain. Do you know what Mr. Popularity, Vincent Mondale is doing these days? He's a sociologist, for God's sake.

[C]

Sociologists, yeah, that goes back a few decades. There have been a couple of movies where it's, it's. People are always making fun of sociologists. I think we've had a reputation for a while, basically going back to the beginning of sociology. We've, we've always had this tension in the field between kind of like the social progress mindset. So there are, you know, like progressive era reformers who are sociologists and they saw sociology as a tool for reforming society according to, you know, their version of what society, good society should be. And there were also the people who were trying to be scientists, some of whom also had their own versions of what society should be that, you know, were also problematic. So we've always had this reputation for being a little reformer, little activist. We also are kind of open to looking at the underdog, to taking seriously the perspective of, you know, the people below and kind of saying like, hey, we're going to go talk to criminals and try to understand them and not, you know, demonize Them like we want to understand, like what their motivation is. You, you can't really understand crime if you don't take seriously their perspective. That's kind of given us this flavor of kind of being, you know, just a little weird off. Deviant. Deviance is one of our, you know, classic topics. And so I think that's kind of contributed to this sense.

[B]

In the current ideological environment, does it make it hard to have basic discussions about determinants of criminal behavior?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, I would say so. So one example of that is even just discussing kind of what are the causes of crime. There's been a shift where some people are not comfortable discussing kind of long standing variables as potentially kind of explanations for crime. Even, even if you give it kind of like a, let's call it a liberal gloss. So structural disadvantages for, for poor people, for black people, structural racism, etc. You can make the argument that those things lead to what we call social disorganization or kind of neighborhoods that are kind of predisposed to criminality because of the, the way that they're set up. That's kind of seen as even problematic to say because you're implying that black people commit more crime or poor people commit more crime. Not every type of crime is the same, but for some categories you do see over representations. And it's kind of seen as problematic to talk about that. And so that makes even just having the conversation about, okay, so you want to reform the criminal justice system. How do you do that? Some of the things that we need to talk about to do that, well, we're not really supposed to talk about, and there's kind of pushback for doing that. So I would say that's, that's an example of something that's been difficult or a different one is just the kind of blind spots in what we're studying. So, you know, if we want to understand certain outcomes, we have to look at all the variables. We have to look at the variables we don't like to switch to a totally different topic, female, male, wage disparities. You know, like you have to look at the explanations that you might not like. Like maybe there's something that women are doing that is causing the wage disparity. That it's not just, you know, sexism or, you know, structural sexism or something. There might be choices that women are making. Even if I don't like that hypothesis, I still have to test it if I'm going to understand what's going on about this thing that maybe personally I see as A problem in society. But that mindset is increasingly difficult to have.

[B]

A couple years ago, there was a study that showed that, I think Nordic countries that had the most enlightened policies in regard to letting men and women use their time differently, those were the countries that actually had the greatest disparity in male, female wages, which suggests there's a choice issue. But you're saying that kind of thing. It's not a good subject to get yourself on a panel at a acronymed

[C]

academic conference or it will show up in peer review comments where how dare you say this? This is not appropriate to say.

[B]

People write that they write like the Greta Thunberg, how dare you? Like, it appears in the comments. Really?

[C]

I'm not sure if it would be literally how dare you? I'm paraphrasing, but something like that. Yeah, I mean, I do see that more on social media, but yeah, there are versions of that in actual peer review comments of, you know, this is off. This is an ignorant take. And, you know, things like that. So during the Q and A on conference presentations, somebody will say, this is a different example. But like, you know, why are you using the word prisoner? Why are you not using the word person who is. Incurs the phrase person who is incarcerated?

[B]

If you're giving a talk or doing a paper, you're almost doing a search and replace on these words with people who ovulate and all this stuff because you don't want your presentation to be derailed by. In a crowd of 200 people, one person gets up and rants at you because you used the wrong word. Take me into your creative process when you're writing an article. Is this front of mind?

[C]

Yeah, I would say it is. I mean, okay. One of the very first articles I wrote as a tenure track professor was on this concept of prisoner resistance. This is a topic I absolutely love. But one of the things that I was realizing is how little evidence we

[B]

had that what is prisoner resistance?

[C]

Great question. This is part of the problem. The definition itself is pretty expansive. So I would define it as reaction to power in a way that's intended to produce some sort of larger change. Other people would define resistance as basically any violation of the rules, any act of agency, meaning anytime you kind of decide something for yourself, but especially in a way that is combative with like, the prison regime or the rules or kind of expectations. So some examples that people have given of prisoner resistance include masturbation and suicide, whereas more classic examples are things like prison riots or protests.

[B]

Sorry, I got us talking there. Masturbation is a political protest against what?

[C]

Against like, Victorian norms that, you know, Victorian norms of sexuality or another example would be same sex relations behind bars. Because these are kind of challenging heteronormative ideas of society.

[B]

Is it the case that people have cited onanistic behavior as having a political dimension to it if the person is incarcerated?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Okay, but that's super weird.

[C]

Yeah. So this, this is what I'm thinking. I'm a, you know, first year professor

[B]

and I'm like, have people published articles like that?

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Disrupting the patriarchy by like. I mean, is that, is that like, is this, this is in the literature?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. My, my very first article in the tenure track talks about this. And so this, this is me kind of sitting there.

[B]

Sorry, you invented this thesis?

[C]

No, no, not, not. Sorry. I'm not endorsing the idea that masturbation is resistance. Like, I'm open to the possibility that somebody is sitting there thinking like, I'm sticking it to the man.

[B]

Well, you know, seems unlikely. Fantasy, but hey, look, you know, yeah,

[C]

I'm open to the possibility.

[B]

It's not impossible. Right, but, but okay, but you're saying you wrote about. I wrote how expansive.

[C]

Critically about this. And in writing it, I was pretty nervous because I thought, oh my God, people are gonna think I'm conservative. They're gonna think, you know, I'm not on board with the project of supporting prisoners and their resistance. Cause a lot of the work in this area is kind of seen as this very pro prisoner, pro resistance approach of like, yeah, stick it to the prison administration. I take a more neutral view of our research where kind of everybody should be able to read our work and appreciate it and understand it. So I try to not take particular sides. This article became a series of articles and I circulated it to a senior professor who happened to be a Marxist professor, really well respected. I really, really like his research. And he responded and said that it was kind of like I just thrown cold water on, you know, basically a bunch of scholarship. And. And he didn't like the paper and he was an editor of a journal.

[B]

And last time I checked, Marx didn't have anything to say about self love. Wasn't in any. In Das Kapital or anything like that. But were you able to publish it?

[C]

Yeah, so I did get it published, but I circulated it to other friends and I discussed this, this concern and I, you know, and other people are like, yeah, people are going to think you're conservative if you write this. And so I added in some additional text in the article to kind of preempt this idea that I am coming at this from an anti prisoner perspective.

[B]

The whole idea that you're interested in the lives of prisoners, to my mind, disqualifies the idea that you're a conservative. You're telling me that within the community of scholars who are presumably self selected as, you know, bleeding hearts who care about prisoners, and I mean that in a good sense you're seen as a Trump fan if you don't see every personal act of sexual flamboyance presumably in front of other people, which is how they got caught or why they were disciplined, as a disruptive, revolutionary political gesture, that, that makes you a conservative in your world.

[C]

So not a Trump supporter. Because this was like 2014 or 2013 and 2014.

[B]

Well, that's crazier that it was then. I mean, we all assume that this happened 15 minutes ago. But you're saying that even then this was made you utre?

[C]

Yeah. So I mean it's, it's and it's not everybody. And you know, some people were open to the argument.

[B]

This guy was a journal editor. This guy wasn't some rando. You're saying he actually edited the journal of what, like prisoner reform or something

[C]

like, I don't know, a particular high level journal on this topic. And you know, I actually thought it was a pretty liberal point because I was saying, you know, we're essentially replacing our own views with what, you know, like what we think the prisoners are doing rather than listening to the prisoners themselves and letting them be the authors of their own, you know, actions. So we're, you know, if we're looking at this with this assumption that if you break the rules, that's necessarily resistance. What about prisoners who don't break the rules? And then, you know, that in itself is actually kind of countercultural. So I use the example of formerly incarcerated man who wrote just a huge number of books and he wrote kind of autobiographically about his time and, and he explained that just reading and writing was seen as a rule violation. And he didn't see this as resistance. He saw this as I'm just bettering myself. But in this kind of context, that sort of work would be seen as resistance because he got in trouble for it. And it's like, wait, this doesn't make any sense.

[B]

In this report you have these lettered headings. The problem is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public. The problem is not that many scholars are politically active. The problem is not that political considerations have broadened the focus of scholarship away from the Western high art canon. The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional, unless it's from you. Apparently, the focus of the report is replacing traditional scholarly criteria for judging new work, replacing that with overtly political considerations. And I felt kind of those first sections where it's kind of like you had a big block of marble and you chopped off this side and you chopped off this side and you chopped off this side and there was like this thing in the middle. Is that what the project was?

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Did you get critiques from conservatives who are like, well, all these things that you say aren't problems, those are problems? Yes.

[C]

A lot of people didn't like the report.

[B]

Did you please anybody?

[C]

I did see a few Twitter threads that kind of, like, seriously engaged it and kind of went one by one in our points. And I thought it was. I thought it was nice engagement, like they were, I would say, generally supportive or sympathetic, even if, you know, sometimes they would have some quibbles, you know, as people should. So I think there were a few people who did. But, yeah, there are a lot of people who didn't.

[B]

Around the same time your report came out, I guess maybe a month or two earlier, two or three months maybe. And I think, you know, this is that on this podcast I had on a Yale Law School professor who talked about a report put out by Yale about the sources of distrust in higher education. It was broader. It wasn't about the humanities, it was about higher education. I read that report. It wasn't at all what I expected. It didn't talk about ideology. It talked about the top heavy nature of administration, the high tuitions, how students are selected. There was a huge focus on grade inflation. The two reports, side by side, actually make for very interesting companions. Were you aware of the Yale mission? Because the two reports really do read, like companion pieces.

[C]

Yeah. We had no idea about the Yale report or if anyone on the commission knew about it.

[B]

Have you read it?

[C]

I have, yes.

[B]

That's good.

[C]

Yeah, no, it's great. It's very clear. It's very expansive. I've also read a bunch of commentaries on it, including criticisms of it, even though I think it's actually really good. But I think just weighing in on this topic, it doesn't even matter, like, what your research question is. It's just some people are going to be mad about it.

[B]

Do you agree with the concerns about grade inflation?

[C]

Yes, absolutely.

[B]

Do you know any academics who don't Agree with it. I get the sense they were saying out loud what a lot of people believe. And I think since the time that report came out, I think Harvard has actually mandated a top down thing, essentially a curve. Right. Where only a certain number of students can get A's. Do you agree with that approach?

[C]

I have some preferences about, I think better ways to do how to fix the great inflation, but they're I think too complicated and too difficult to. I think they're just never going to get adopted because they're just too complicated to explain that.

[B]

Spoken like a trick. I have great ideas, but you wouldn't understand them.

[C]

It's basically a Bayesian statistical analysis. Yeah, but you're never going to explain it to the average, you know, undergrad in a non statistical field. And even in a lot of statistical fields, they're still not going to understand it.

[B]

You got to be careful with that coercive stuff. You might get displays of resistance in your class. When I went down the list of the 10 people, I think it's 10 people who wrote this report. I mean, I realize you're kind of going off into breakout rooms to write your subject matter specific reports. I'm impressed that 10 academics could have cooperated so constructively. I guess it's because you're all in different places and you never actually had to meet. I thought it was interesting that they're

[C]

like not well known culture warriors within academia. Some people would disagree with your characterization and they would see some of the names on the list as not necessarily cultural warriors. But I guess by their standards they might see it that way. Like, I think a lot of people think that I'm a cultural warrior, which.

[B]

Within your field?

[C]

Yeah, within my field. And you know, that's, that's kind of annoying because it's like I really just care about, you know, I want to do research, I want to trust the research I'm reading, you know, I can't do the research I want to do if the other research in my field is bad. And you know, different, many different definitions of bad. Not all of it has to be about political. There are a lot of, you know, challenges we're dealing with. But you know, just to be fair, I think there are a lot of people who would say that about me and about a lot of some of the other people on the commission. And now just the fact that we're on the commission, I think makes us in their minds, culture warriors.

[B]

Well, they're gonna have to set up their own commission.

[C]

Yeah, go for it. Scholarly exchange. That's what we're supposed to do.

[B]

One of the most important things anyone ever told me is I was writing an article about ideological trends in academia. I think it's from Trent University here in Canada. He said, john, the thing you have to know is that 95% of universities, professors, they just want to study their thing. Like if they're studying the three eyed Newt, they just, all they want to do, they don't care about like whether there's not enough purple people studying the three eyed Newt or like the gender stuff. Like they want to be left alone. And often what we think of as ideological skewing and social panics in these fields, there's like three people leading the charge and like 100 other people who just want to be left alone and will sign onto anything and shut up about things and kind of obey all the rules. If it just this means they could spend Monday to Friday studying the three eyed Newt. Do you think that's a fair characterization? That is just some of the radicalism that you talk about is really driven by a small group of people. It isn't like a mass conscription phenomenon.

[C]

One of the big takeaways from the report is the fields are heterogeneous. Like both within and across the fields, they're heterogeneous. And this is a huge theme in my own report on sociology. So I think that's really important to remember. Like no group is a monolith. And that's true of academics. It's true of any particular discipline. One of the challenges of even answering this question is it really depends on which metric you're using. It really depends on which piece you want to talk about. So I would say it's no longer clear to me that 90% of academics really do just want to do their research. I think that's increasingly not true.

[B]

Really?

[C]

Okay, yeah, I think that's an overestimate. But I do think it, it varies and there's also, they're kind of different groups. So I do think there's the group that just wants to be left alone and that's just like, you know, I don't care. I'm not gonna vote in a presidential election for, you know, this professional association. I'm not gonna sign on to this boycott. I don't care about these things. I just want to do my work. Increasingly those, those people have just completely left our professional associations because that is what the professional associations are becoming really. And especially if you're like, you know, high status enough, you're already at a good university, you can get away with that because you can go to small little workshops on particular topics and you can exchange your work with other good people who also just want to do their research. So, you know, some people can do that, and it's great, you know, if you happen to be at a university where you don't have very much intellectual stimulation, those national conferences are really important.

[B]

So.

[C]

So anyway, so there's definitely a group of people who just want to be left alone, who don't care about politics. You know, maybe they do politics on the side, but it's not part of their research. There's also a small, very vocal, very powerful group of. Let's call them activists. Some of them do self identify as activists, either activist scholars, scholar activists. You know, people have their. Their own labels. A lot of people have problems with the word activists, including activists outside of academia, kind of think that the label for academics is kind of stupid. But, you know, that that is a small group and it's very visible. And so it can really kind of shift the perception of the field. And it can also, in my view, cause a lot of damage to the field, especially when they're incredibly organized. But I also don't think the group is as small as we think it is. There might be some, like, ringleaders. But, you know, as an example, right now the upcoming ASA meeting is going to be in Newark in just a couple of weeks, and there's a large boycott of the association. And I forget what the last count was. I think it was more than a thousand sociologists have agreed.

[B]

Because you're there.

[C]

Oh, no, no, no. This is not about me.

[B]

No, no, I know.

[C]

Oh, sorry. I guess I should explain the context. There was a petition that more than, I think 400 sociologists signed, asking the ASA to agree to boycott Israeli universities.

[B]

That thing again?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

What is it with these people? Honestly, like, there's a lot of crap going on in the world, and it's just. It's always about. Anyway, sorry.

[C]

Yeah. Why. Why is Israel special? Right. Like, there. There are other problems. Yeah.

[B]

China is okay. Anyway, go on.

[C]

And also, like, why are we boycotting academic institutions? Old AAUP policy was you don't do that. But they changed their mind lately and now it's kind of open season on places you don't like. And so you can boycott people in places.

[B]

So people aren't coming to the meeting because the meeting organizers are not sufficiently anti Israel.

[C]

Yeah. They claim that they are not democratic because they. Despite the petition, despite having more than 3% of the ASA members By their read, it should have gone on the ballot. But the ASA leadership said it's not going on the ballot because per our bylaws, this would be not eligible to go on the bile on the ballot. Not because of the 3%, but because this is actually an operational decision. If it was just, you want to do yet another statement about how Israel is terrible, that would go on the ballot. We did that a few years ago and it passed. But if you want to do that again, fine. It would go on the ballot. But this is about business decisions. This is about, for example, Israeli institutions can't advertise jobs on our job bank. That's a business decision. And so the leadership said no. And they say that they consulted with lawyers who also said, no, you can't do this. And that decision was not well received. And so for a variety of reasons, this kind of boycott emerged. And so now a lot of people are agreeing not to go to the conference or if they do go to the conference, not to stay at the conference hotel to kind of financially screw over the association.

[B]

They really know how to stick it to the man, don't they? Those prisoners got nothing on these guys.

[C]

Yeah, and then they have, like, an alternative conference that they're going to at a. At a university.

[B]

But isn't that good? Like, shouldn't they like to stay at your alternative conference? I guess this was my question is

[C]

that is one perspective.

[B]

If I went to a conference, I don't want these people pouncing around in their caffe taking photos of each other with raised fists and hashtags about resistance and whatnot. The way this kind of dispute is often settled in other industries, if the northbound zaxes and the southbound zaxes can't get along, they create two different organizations. Maybe there should be more than one sociology. One for kind of people who just want to do that crap all the time, and another for just normal people who want to do sociology stuff. And maybe another one for like, crazy conservatives who want to talk about Trumpian sociology or whatnot. Like, I mean, is part of the problem here that there's a conceit that the same umbrella group can represent all scholars in the field just because they have the same word in their professorial designation? You know, you're all professors of sociology or criminology or whatever. Things that are politicized have political parties. That's the nature of politics.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And if these people. So I say these people, I don't, you know, it's not like they're special species of human being, but if the people who overtly want to politicize the humanities, which is the subject of your report, if they're serious about their mission and they want it to be like politics, well, guess what? Politics has different parties. You're free to form a party, but that means not everyone's going to go to your conference. Some people are going to go to like conferences where we actually talk about the subject matter.

[C]

I think that might be the future. And just to clarify, there already are multiple sociology associations.

[B]

I know, but you told me like it's a big deal to be at the what, like that's a career maker to give a speech. So presumably there is one like above the rest, right?

[C]

Yeah, but there's, there's another one. And it used to be that if you, if you thought the ASA was too conservative, you would go to the other one. And that was, you know, that was still a choice, but it's like a signaling move and it's respected enough among kind of left leaning sociologists, for example, that if you go to the Society of Social Problems for, or sorry, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, that would also be seen as. Okay, can you go to both?

[B]

Like, are you, do you have to get your hand stamped?

[C]

You can go to both. They tend to be held, I don't know if this is still true, but they used to be held in like the same place.

[B]

So you had to choose.

[C]

They would be like a few days apart. But I think they kind of overlapped. Yeah. And then there are, you know, other, like their affinity groups. Like there's a woman sociologist group, there's now a Sociologist for Palestine group. So there are a lot of affinity groups that you can, you know, go to. And there's, there's now a heterodox academy sociology group.

[B]

So there's my raised fist. There's my raised fist. Yeah.

[C]

Okay, so, so there are these different groups in terms of the future. I mean, and, and there's also, there's a new group called Sociological Science. I think that is kind of the way that we're going. If, if you take a stance that sociology should be about the scientific study of society and, and that's seen as problematic and inherently political because you've just endorsed science and science itself is this inherently racist, eugenicist, you know, movement that has been used in the past for bad things. And we can't possibly use science, you know, for those reasons or for other reasons. We kind of have a problem if we don't. I mean, I kind of think about this as like this Durkheimian moment. So Durkheim has this great discussion about what he calls organic societies and mechanical societies. Societies. So mechanical societies are these very homogenous societies. They tend to be very religious and they tend to agree on a lot of things. And if you don't agree on certain things, that. That really makes you an outlier and kind of subject to punishment. The solidarity for the society is around punishing those. Those outliers, the people who violate the. The deeply held values. Whereas organic societies tend to be diverse societies. They tend to kind of have shifted their notion of the sacred from religion or from a monarch to the individual rights themselves. So human rights becomes really important. And the understanding is if this diverse society is going to exist, you have to agree to live and let live. You have to agree on things like free speech or freedom of religion or, you know, different political views, because if you don't, society is just going to collapse. If you say, I'm not going to go to that grocery store because I don't like your political views, well, you know, it's. You're going to start to have a kind of dysfunctional society where you segregate by, you know, politics or something. And if you do that, you know, that way madness lies because essentially the narcissism of small differences and you keep, you know, self isolating further and further until, you know, you're a society of one. So there's kind of this general wisdom in live and let live and saying, look, you and I can disagree about these things, but there's one fundamental thing we agree on, our right to disagree. You know, like there's certain. If we're going to have a conversation, we have to kind of agree to the terms of the debate. So there's just certain baseline things we have to agree on. And if professional associations are, you know, or disciplines more generally, if we can't agree to certain fundamental things, then it's going to be difficult to play together. Like, if I don't know the rules by which my article is going to be reviewed when it goes out for peer review, I don't know how to prepare my article if the norms are rapidly changing. And it depends on whom you ask. I mean, to some extent that's always true, but when it's really volatile and it's changing week over week or year over year, that becomes a really difficult time. I don't know how to advise my students under those circumstances. So I think that's kind of the problem that we're facing. It's not Just that we're going to kind of split off. If we keep splitting off, we're not a discipline anymore.

[B]

I know I am not the first person to point out the irony of the fact that the progressive left is extremely focused on diversity and in the process created a Durkheimian totalitarian consciousness to enforce that. That's been pointed out. Right? I'm not the first guy.

[C]

You're definitely not the first person. It's not something that goes over well when you point it out, though. Like, one of my big pet peeves is everybody wants to talk about authoritarianism, but really they mean, you know, trump authoritarianism. They mean conservative or Republican authoritarianism. They mean government authoritarianism. And, you know, to be fair, government authoritarianism is really, really bad. Sure. But they don't seem to notice authoritarianism when it comes from each other, when we try to censor each other, when we go after each other because we don't like our political views. You know, there are a couple of high profile cases where, you know, people's tenure and promotion cases have been challenged for political reasons, and people don't seem to recognize that as authoritarianism. And they'll talk all about the importance of academic freedom, but then not acknowledge it when academic freedom is being attacked from within. And so that, to me, is a really big irony. Like, if we're really going to say we're anti authoritarianism, we should probably be consistently anti authoritarian and not just when the government does it.

[B]

Yeah, the call is coming from inside the building. Ashley Rubin is associate professor of Sociology at University of Hawaii, also the only podcast guest I've ever had who used Durkheimian and Bayesian in the same episode. So if you want to read the report that Professor Rubin contributed to, it's called State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. It was published on April 5, and an excerpt of it can be read at Quilet under the headline A Crisis in the Humanities, under the byline of Paul Boghossian, one of the colleagues with whom Professor Rubin collaborated in preparing the report.

[A]

Thank you again.

[B]

It was a pleasure.

[C]

Thank you so much.

[A]

Thank you for listening to the Quillette Podcast.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[B]

[e-mail] that's Q U, I double L, E double T E dot com Sam.