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Serious academics must be able to distinguish between criticism and hostility, and a serious academic culture must be conducive to that distinction. This is especially true for the academic Humanities, in which argument and honest interpretation are supposed to be virtues. Yet, one of the biggest problems in the Humanities is the tendency to treat critical inquiry and institutional criticism as aggression and disagreement as evidence of immorality.
This is not just a failure of temperament. It is a failure of rhetoric. Rhetoric, properly understood, is not the art of disguising bad arguments with attractive language. It is the art of making arguments clear and understandable within situations involving different audiences, assumptions, values, and interests. Scholarly rhetoric, therefore, requires more than stating one’s own position clearly. It requires identifying what another person is actually arguing, locating the genuine point of disagreement, and representing opposing claims in terms their advocates can recognize. Otherwise, academic debates become contests to impose the most morally charged interpretation.
The recent Report on the State of the Humanities and Humanistic Sciences (henceforth, “The Report”) has been received in precisely this way by some of its most vocal critics. The report is clear in saying it does not reflect intolerance of subjects or viewpoints. However, rather than engage the Report’s stated concerns, which are about scholarly standards and intellectual rigor, critics often interpret its existence as a coded attack on progressive scholarship. Ironically, this reaction itself reveals the deeper crisis the Report attempts to engage: the lack of good-faith critical thinking in both scholarly production and critique.
The Report’s authors are clear about what they are trying to do and, as is appropriate for such documents, repeat their thesis throughout. Their argument is made most prominently in Section 3 of the Report, titled “The Nature of the Problem.” Here, the authors insist that “[t]he problem is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public” nor is it “that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism.” Generally, the authors are not concerned with subject matter or differing perspectives. This is not an attempt to save the academy from the barbarians at the gate, as it were.
Yet, prominent scholars like Michael Bérubé and Dwight McBride insist that the document either promotes or strongly implies the promotion of all those things. Why do they seem unwilling to engage the material as it is?
Part of the answer is rhetorical framing. Once a document is placed within a narrative of conservative assault, censorship, or hostility toward marginalized scholarship, every subsequent statement is interpreted through that frame. Explicit qualifications are treated as camouflage. Calls for rigor become attacks on particular fields. Appeals to disinterested inquiry become demands for political conformity. The critic no longer asks, “What is the argument?” but “What political project must this argument secretly serve?” The latter question may sometimes be legitimate, but when it is used in lieu of the former, interpretation becomes circular, which is to say, the text is presumed hostile and that attempts by its authors to deny hostility are interpreted as further evidence of their concealment.
The answer can be found in the Report’s conclusions. What the document boils down to is a defense of critical thinking against fallacious reasoning. The late philosopher Richard Paul, who also directed the Center for Critical Thinking and served as chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction, identified different modes of critical thinking in academia. I believe the mode promoted by the Report is what Paul would call “fair-minded critical thinking.”
To paraphrase, this mode of critical thinking is defined as skilled thinking that meets consistent epistemological demands, is characterized by empathy, and demonstrates a commitment to entertain in good faith all viewpoints “regardless of the vested interests or ideological commitments of the thinker” and “without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interests, or the feelings or vested interests of one’s friends, community or nation.”
By contrast, Paul describes “sophistic critical thinking” as thinking which meets epistemological demands and is heedless of assumptions and implications only “insofar as they square with the vested interests of the thinker” or “only insofar as it is in the vested interests of the thinker to do so.” The term “insofar” is most salient here. The Report argues that many professors in the Humanities think critically insofar as it supports a particular political agenda irrespective of empirical evidence or reasoning to the contrary. Paul rounds out his definition of sophistic critical thinking by calling it “skilled thinking that is motivated by vested interests, egocentrism, or ethnocentrism rather than by the truth or objective reasonability.” If that does not remind you of the Humanities to a significant extent, you have not been paying attention.
Paul’s use of “sophistic” should not be confused with rhetoric itself. Rhetoric can be manipulated for strategic advantage, but it is also indispensable to fair-minded inquiry. Scholars cannot deliberate without language, framing, interpretation, persuasion, and judgments about audiences and circumstances. There is a difference between rhetoric governed by intellectual responsibility and rhetoric used to protect ideas from scrutiny.
Again, I do not believe the Report is about xenophobia or political animus. It is about the way certain professors and certain fields do not abide by critical thinking divorced from political goals, thus making the goals, not the truth, the primary objectives. This is not to say that the truth and one’s political goals cannot align; the Report’s authors admit as much. This is to say that the pursuit of knowledge should not be subordinated to those political goals. Hence their advice to embrace “disinterested inquiry” in the Humanities, which is basically advice to embrace “fair-minded critical thinking” and neglect “sophistic critical thinking” to the best of our collective ability.
Critics of “The Report” seem to be committing something akin to a large-scale strawman fallacy, insisting that the Report says one thing when it really says another. This is more than just an isolated logical fallacy. I think that very conclusion derives from sophistic critical thinking. How could this not be a problem? A discipline that cannot hear criticism without translating it into oppression is a discipline whose findings become harder to trust. We need a renewed commitment to fair-minded critical thinking, even when that commitment unsettles the stories scholars tell about themselves.
Actually, the humanities need more than a renewed commitment to abstract critical thinking. They need a renewed commitment to fair-minded critical thinking and responsible rhetoric, and both terms should be understood as mutually dependent. This may bring us out of the current “crisis” in the humanities and into an academic culture in which scholars identify actual points of dispute, distinguish arguments from presumed motives, describe opposing positions accurately, and regard disagreement as an invitation to inquiry rather than a form of violence rooted in corruption.
To put it plainly, critical thinking provides standards for judging claims; rhetoric allows people who differ in their assumptions and commitments to reason together.