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Christian Boulanger
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![Boghossian et al.’s (2026) critique of humanistic scholarship is itself bad scholarship and should be corrected or retracted
Patrick E. Savage1,2
1School of Psychology, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, Aotearoa | New Zealand
2Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan
[This version dated August 28, 2026]
Abstract: Boghossian et al.’s (2026) “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” argues that humanistic scholarship has experienced “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria”. I argue that their report itself represents low scholarly standards. Specifically: 1) it is primarily based on unpublished, unverifiable data; 2) the limited data that have been published (largely from unvalidated LLM categorisations) do not support the main claims of a “deterioriation in scholary standards”; and 3) the report unjustifiably generalises from a narrow set of examples (e.g., the cancelation of a panel on sex and gender by the American Anthropological Association) to make sweeping conclusions about global humanities scholarship. I describe counter-examples from past and present research in the humanities and the sciences by myself and others to show that biased and low-quality scholarship is not a new or unique problem for progressive humanistic research. While I agree with the authors that critical evaluation of the quality of academic scholarship (both humanistic and scientific) is urgently needed in today’s global political climate, the report’s strongest conclusions are not justified by their data and thus are not of sufficient quality to achieve their intended goal of helping university leaders to make policy decisions. I recommend it be corrected or retracted to resolve these issues.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mm4ujzh5bqccjs7g2oerjemp/bafkreiduoolgtplrn2xadbszoticx6en5ojq4mmdyrhjvef74pw2lmzsku)
