education | Liah Greenfeld

By Liah Greenfeld

[A shorter version of this article was published as “How the ‘Social Sciences’ Killed Our Universities,” in Academic Questions, Summer 2025.]

About forty years ago I was writing a book, the goal of which was to explain the world in which we then lived. It focused on the major political players of the post WWII period and centuries before that (at least two but in some cases five): England/Britain, France, Russia/USSR, Germany, and the United States. At that time, three of these (the USA, Britain, and France) were the leading powers of the West, which engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, while Germany was split between the Western and the Soviet spheres of influence. The West represented liberal democracy and the great moral value of individual freedom; the Soviet Union stood for socialism and communism, identified with the suppression of individual freedom and totalitarianism.

When the book was published in 1992, the Cold War was over. With the Soviet Union disintegrating, the West was triumphant, celebrating the end of the ideological strife which defined the politics (and with it much else) of the preceding forty-five years as “the end of history”; Germany reunified and became a liberal democracy in its entirety; and the world about which I wrote in the 1980s already began to transform. History did not end, but its direction definitely changed. As if being deprived of the enemy which mobilized its energies, keeping it in a battle-ready spirit and confident of its course, reduced its collective immunity, the West relaxed, turned inward, and lost its direction. No longer having its attention concentrated by the common outside threat, it let it wander from one lesser problem to another, bringing these inner and particular problems into view, disuniting liberal democratic communities, and making various publics in each of them increasingly dissatisfied both with the domestic situation of each and with the Western community, in general. Many of these problems were rather old but, previously eclipsed by exigencies of the Cold War, were now brought into focus. These were old abscesses that needed, but were never given, treatment. Others, however, were new, either created from scratch or brought about by new post-Cold War circumstances. In the past thirty – thirty-five years, they have been feeding on each other, tearing our world apart, undermining it, and destroying it from within.

American research universities – our national contribution to world science and higher education, imitated almost all over the globe – while not the only factor contributing to this moribund development, were undoubtedly the main powerful institution to do so. I noticed that something was awry with this institution a few years after coming to the United States in 1982. Twenty-eight years old and a newly-minted Israeli Ph. D., I came with my husband and an 18-months-old son, for a year’s post-doc at the University of Chicago, which due to circumstances not under my control turned into an immigration. Before arriving in Israel ten years previously, I grew up in the Soviet Union, and to my mind, the United States was what it was to all the freedom-starved Eastern Bloc’s intelligentsia: the Promised Land of the free, morally-upright people, a light onto the world. So, although this was an unanticipated development which dramatically changed all mine and my family’s plans for the future, I did not mind staying. I even thought myself lucky, since only three years later I found myself an Assistant Professor at the legendary Harvard University. And it is there where my disillusionment commenced.

A year after I started teaching at Harvard, in 1986, another female sociologist arrived at the illustrious institution. There was a lot of celebration on account of her joining of our faculty, and the reason for the celebration and for joining astonished the young idealistic me. It was not the quality of this sociologist’s work, but the fact that she was a she, a woman, female. Coming from Israel, which recently buried its long-term, very popular, and extremely consequential female prime minister, and where unmarried childless women served in the armed forces alongside men (only motherhood, not their sex as such, changing the nature of their rights and obligations), being a woman was a trivial circumstance for me. It certainly was no justification for offering someone a position in the most famous university of the free world, and it was simply peculiar to celebrate such an unjustified appointment. I did not have a crystal ball and, therefore, could not have been aware that a few decades later, such an appointment would not be possible – not because being a woman did not justify it, but because American universities would no longer know how to define a woman. In 1986 we have not as yet descended into such morass, and it was plain that my colleague (who was not a mother) was defined as a woman on the basis of, as we would say today, “ascription at birth,” that is, to call a spade a spade, the shape of her genitals. Granted, I was not able to appreciate then, in my early 30s, how simple and almost natural appointing a woman as a professor at a distinguished university because she was a woman would appear to me in the light of the academic madness with which I would be confronted in my advanced middle age. But at that time, I found genitals as the qualification for a university professorship shocking and revolting, troubled by the patent absurdity of both this appointment and the fanfare with which it was met. Because it was illogical, it was unjust, since justice reflects the logical consistency of our order. And because it was unjust, it was immoral, because morality, the ability to distinguish good from evil, or right from wrong implies the ability to separate what is just from what is unjust. Above all, I was flabbergasted by the lack of respect for logic at the university. Logic is the very foundation of science and humanistic scholarship. I began doubting that the American research university was the home of science and scholarship, which it was believed to be.

In the meantime, perestroika was underway in the Soviet Union and other people were beginning to notice that not all was right in American academia. As Mark Bauerlein reminded us very recently, the Culture Wars “broke out in the mid-1980s, on campus they took the form of the ‘Canon Wars,’ whose battlefield was the English syllabus.” The humanities as a whole were to pay the price. “At this point, English, history, philosophy, and foreign languages combined draw only four percent of the majors in the United States.”[1]

Then, already in 1987, the National Association of Scholars was founded. Its goal was to preserve “Western intellectual heritage,” but, as its original name, “The Campus Coalition for Democracy” indicated, its orientation was more civic than scholarly. The original leadership of the organization precociously perceived that the university – already then – posed a grave danger to the American way of life, no less. The motto of the NAS, “for reasoned scholarship in a free society,” professes the principle: free society needs reasoned scholarship.

In the ensuing decades this way of life was brought to near destruction. The university imposed on the society the disaster of the DEI which went against all the principles on which this country – and modern liberal democracy — was founded. It revived antisemitism in America – and all the Western world, making the “progressive,” “liberal” West the leader of all the retrograde, illiberal forces in the world, cynically, 1984-like, imposing on the free world, in the name of freedom and equality, a regime of suppression of freedom, of inequality, and of open racism. These trends – all coming from the university – appeared unstoppable. It took the unlikely victory of the candidate most detested by the university as President of the United States to restore, to those who already despaired, hope that they may be stopped. NAS President Peter Wood wrote early in March: “It is immensely encouraging to see state legislatures proposing and, in some cases, passing bills that would end “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) indoctrination in public colleges and universities.”[2]

Equally encouraged, and fully in agreement with the civic position of the NAS and with its diagnosis of the problem: the university being the main agent of the diseased state of our society, I would like here to question the implicit causal analysis of both the NAS and the government – asking what in the university has made it an agent of civic destruction, why has it played this deleterious role. I shall suggest (1) that the American research university has had, from its birth, very little to do with “Western intellectual heritage,” if by this we mean “great books” and the propagation of values of liberal democracy; (2) that the reason for its formation was status-protection for a certain elite group losing its dominance; (3) that this group used (and abused) the authority of science that was emerging as the supreme source of moral and cultural authority, replacing its earlier sources, in particular religion; (4) that the adoption of the institution’s very name, “university,” was a travesty; (5) that its main contribution to society has been the channeling of money to the sciences, while profiting from this to advance the institution’s self-interest; (6) that while making this small contribution, it has caused the society, when all is said and done, a great damage; (7) that it cannot – and should not – be re-formed, but must be abolished and replaced by a new set of institutions, from which we shall be able to expect what we have mistakenly expected from our universities: the support of science and reasoned scholarship, and education of our youth.

Paradoxically, presented and generally believed to be the home for (exact and natural) science and (humanistic) scholarship, the American research university used these recognized fields of inquiry, which developed in Europe almost completely outside of university settings, for the benefit of, and to establish, a brand-new profession, which did not correspond to any area of study but was nevertheless named “social science.” The name was chosen because after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the prestige of science skyrocketed, while that of the church simultaneously dramatically decreased. The name “science” was a claim to authority, which only a philosopher of science, i.e., someone with a deep understanding of what science was (that is, at the time, very few people in the entire world) would be able to dispute. By successfully laying this claim, “social science” was able to arrogate to itself the right to preside over the education of the youth, previously belonging to the church.

It is important to remember that traditionally, universities were neither educational institutions nor the home of humanistic scholarship; they were religious institutions, to begin with, with time and change in historical circumstances expanding to become places of professional training for positions in the clergy, medicine, and law. “Liberal Arts,” a kind of general education for future clergymen, doctors, and lawyers, were added to these much later, already in modern times, acquiring importance, specifically in the German states, with Enlightenment and Romanticism, when the concept of elite education as Bildung became popular in aristocratic circles and high bureaucracy. The future “social scientists” indeed studied in German states and were influenced by ideas current there. (Germany, however, can hardly be taken as the paradigmatic example of Western intellectual heritage.)

I have studied the history of the universities, American universities, in particular, since the end of the last century and shall refer to my conclusions from these studies.[3] As I summarized in the relatively recent, thus late among these studies, lengthy 2020 essay on the social sciences for the Encyclopedia Britannica, American research universities were the creation of the post-Civil War business magnates – the new super-rich who appreciated the enormous possibilities science (physics and biology) opened for business and were willing to invest in its cultivation — and of the East-coast gentry, the scions of old families which formed the bulk of the colonial and pre-Civil War undifferentiated, mostly professional, but by default also cultural, elite. This elite was not intellectually sophisticated, was not much interested in science as progressive accumulation of reliable knowledge about empirical reality, and had no understanding or historical knowledge of the dramatic revolution in consciousness (ways of thinking) that made such accumulation possible. Its central concern was the change in the traditional structure of American society brought by the increasing immigration and, particularly, the rise (partly from among the new immigrants and generally from the less genteel strata of American society) of a new business elite – the powerful new rich, known among the gentry as “robber barons.” The gentry felt their position in society threatened and believed that great wealth, unconnected to the style of life which legitimated social status before the Civil War, was deleterious to the society as a whole and, concentrated in the hands of the few, made the rest of it poorer and created numerous social problems.

In 1865, some of the prominent members of this traditional elite formed in Boston the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science, the goal of which was “to aid the development of social science, and to guide the public mind to the best practical means of promoting the amendment of laws, the advancement of education, the prevention and repression of crime, the reformation of criminals, and the progress of public morality, the adoption of sanitary regulations, and the diffusion of sound principles on questions of economy, trade, and finance.” The Association, declared its constitution, “will give attention to pauperism, and the topics related thereto; including the responsibility of the well-endowed and successful, the wise and educated, the honest and respectable, for the failures of others. It will aim to bring together the various societies and individuals now interested in these objects, for the purpose of obtaining by discussion the real elements of truth; by which doubts are removed, conflicting opinions harmonized, and a common ground afforded for treating wisely the great social problems of the day.”

Rhetorically, this re-established the authority of the traditional elite, which the rise of the independent business elite undermined. Wisdom and education were equated with honesty and respectability, and wise and educated members of the Association, it was implied, were already in the possession of the social science, including the sound principles on questions of economy, trade, finance, and the responsibilities of successful businessmen. In this context, “science” was not the open-ended process of accumulation of objective knowledge about empirical reality by means of logically formulated conjectures subject to refutation by contradictory evidence. It was political advocacy by those with a special insight, capable of making real elements of truth to come out in discussion, i.e. science as an art, specifically, of persuasion: an ideology.

The preoccupations of “social science” so conceived ranged from “pork as an article of food” to management of insane asylums, but from the start two areas dominated: “economy, trade and finance,” from national debt to relations between labor and capital, which reflected the economic focus of the elite’s social criticism; and education, including the “relative value of classical and scientific instruction in schools and colleges.” Here “scientific instruction” referred to instruction in physical sciences (biology having barely begun), which was relatively new, while classical instruction was the instruction members of the American cultural elite received in their schools and colleges. This education was devalued by the power of very large amounts of money that could be achieved without any education at all. The traditional elite’s insistence on the social importance of such (non-scientific) education was connected to its need to protect its status.

Within a year AAPSS merged with the American Social Science Association, a subsidiary of the Massachusetts Board of Charities, also formed in 1865. The leading patrician reformers — its officers – included three future research university presidents who played a major role in the creation of these new organizational settings for the life of the mind, which would soon control it. Social scientists capitalized on the uncultured businessmen’s interest in natural science and harnessed this interest to their specific status concerns: offering their cooperation in developing institutions for the promotion of science, they established themselves as authorities over how far the definition of science would stretch. The first research university, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, was established in 1876, when it was thoroughly in the interest of those who identified as “social scientists” – to start with, quite unthinkingly, without any consideration of what this implied – to be recognized as scientists, members, together with physicists and biologists, of the scientific profession.

Self-seeking concerns behind this interest in the name of science were evident in two developments which followed closely on the heels of the formation of the first research university: the division of the “social science” into “disciplines” and efforts to model these disciplines on physics, establishing as unquestionable the belief that what made science objective was quantification, which also was the essence of the scientific method, and that the authority of a discipline corresponded to the extent of the application of this method, that is, the volume of quantitative formulations, in it. The first “social science” to be institutionalized as an academic discipline within research universities was economic history. That this was history was probably related to the fact that many “social scientists” from patrician American families spent time in German universities, in whose liberal arts’ faculties history had already emerged as a highly respectable profession, encouraging these first American university professors without a particular interest to see themselves as historians. In its turn, the economic focus of the newly-minted historians reflected the old target of their social criticism.

Only eight years after the first research university was founded, in 1884, American historians, gathered for the first annual professional convention, formed a trade union: the American Historical Association. During its second annual meeting, in 1885, some of the historians left the AHA and formed the American Economic Association. Several years later, a group of the first American economists left the AEA and formed the American Political Science Association. And in 1905, some of these political scientists, who earlier identified as economists and before that considered themselves historians, quit APSA to form ASS – the American Sociological Society – the American Sociological Association of today. Thus, five years into the 20^th century, an association of gentry activists and social critics affiliated with a charity board spawned four academic disciplines, splitting “social science” into history, economics, political science, and sociology.

This spontaneous fission was different from specialization in physics and biology. Scientific specialization was prompted by developments in the understanding of the subject matter: anomalies in earlier theories contradicted by evidence, the raising of new questions, the discovery of previously unknown causal factors. It accompanied the advancement of objective knowledge and contributed to its further progress. The break-up of the “social science” into separate disciplines, in distinction, reflected the desire to increase career opportunities. The cart was placed before the horse. The foundation of professional associations was the first step in the formation of the professions to find them useful. The existence of professional associations justified the establishment of university departments in which the declared but undefined professions would be practiced and new generations of professionals trained. This was an effective professionalization strategy, but it mostly contributed to bureaucratization and vested interests, not to the advancement of objective knowledge and understanding of the “social sciences” presumed subject — humanity.

The separate “disciplines” of economics, political science, and sociology – were to develop within this also nascent institutional environment, like them, in a large measure, brought into being by the desire of the traditional American elite to re-establish its political and cultural authority, but in principle established to promote science in the first place. The environment attracted to the new “social sciences” people actuated by three quite independent motives, which would throughout their existence confuse the identities and agenda of these disciplines. To begin with, the conviction of the original American “social scientists” that they, better than anyone else, knew how the society should be organized, that they were the experts on questions of general good and social justice and, as such, natural advisors to policy-makers and wielded moral authority, persisted when “social science” split into economics, political science, and sociology. All three disciplines continued to attract people who were interested not in understanding reality but in changing it, to paraphrase Marx’s famous thesis. However, authority no longer could be claimed on the basis of a genteel life-style. With science successfully competing with religion as the source of certain knowledge and even ultimate meaning, the emphasis in “social science” shifted to “science” and the word meant “like physics (and biology),” rather than any kind of knowledge. For those who wanted status, a career in science offered the best odds.

The desire to establish themselves as scientists was the main reason for the rise of the discipline of economics. The discipline was explicitly modeled on the recognized sciences. Economists-to-be knew that the sciences systematically advanced reliable knowledge, but had limited understanding why and how they did so. They wished to do in regard to society what physicists did in regard to matter and biologists in regard to life, and, from the outside it appeared that what these did was dealing in numbers and algorithms. The quantitative fetish has been characteristic of all three newborn “social sciences,” but economics went farthest in developing quantitative mannerisms (substituting the outward manner of expression for method). As professionalization strategy, this, again, proved very effective: these mannerisms made economics exclusive, a kind of a secret society with an esoteric language that nobody else understood, and established it as the queen of the social sciences. The reason for the exit of future political scientists from economics was the fact that these quasi-methodological considerations appeared to push the political aspirations of the “social scientists” into the background. In fact, they greatly contributed to the political influence of economics.

On their part, both political science and sociology, were also deeply preoccupied with their status as sciences: quantitative symbols of this status, which, remarkably, placed economists far above physicists and biologists as advisors to presidents, have retained their value throughout in them too, though never allowing either to achieve the level of authority enjoyed by economics. The cultivation of status symbols of science (the manners of expression which, for “social scientists” constituted science) allowed the new disciplines to see their history as the history of science – the story of progressive accumulation of objective knowledge on their subject matter and ever more accurate understanding of causal interrelationships among its constituent elements. Just like physics and biology, it has been since believed, social sciences continued and dramatically improved upon a long tradition of unsystematic (because not scientific) thought on their subjects. This narrative has persisted despite overwhelming contrary evidence, attracting to the economics, political science, and sociology, people actuated by the third motive – the actual interest in understanding the empirical human reality. Believing the narrative, they would eagerly invest in whatever methodological training their professors suggested and shrug off the latter’s ideological views as a personal matter.

In the meantime, psychology, always insistent that, focusing on the individual, it was unlike other “social sciences,” has largely reverted to its natural science roots, content to study animal brain and leave the riddle of the human mind to philosophers. Preoccupations of the “social sciences,” whatever these may be, are quite irrelevant to it. The discipline of history, almost immediately abandoned by those of its original members primarily interested in self-promotion, early opted out of the “social sciences” and joined the ranks of humanities, on the whole practicing scholarship for its own sake, rather than to lay claim to social authority. In anthropology, too, the authority of the profession and whether it be considered science or not has mattered far less than in the three core disciplines of the “social science” family, anthropologists finding sufficient satisfaction doing fieldwork in settings that hardly could have any bearing on their own lives. Similar to natural history before biology’s take-off, history, anthropology, and exceptional sociologists, political scientists, and economists have certainly added valuable information to the common stores of knowledge about humanity, but this information, not being science, cannot on its own spur development and, therefore, does not lead to progress in our understanding. Science is essentially a collective continuous enterprise, impossible without certain institutional conditions – very specific ways of thinking and acting – fundamentally different from the ones that currently exist in research universities in-so-far as the subject of humanity is concerned. Contributions of these scholars can be likened to insights of exceptional individuals, capturing one or another aspect of material or organic reality before the emergence of physics and biology: they do not build up. Their significance is limited to cultural and historical moments of public interest in particular subjects they happen to treat.

Public interests change with the change in historical circumstances, causing “social sciences” to switch directions: fashionable subjects and “theories” suddenly fall out of favor and new ones as suddenly acquire it, preventing all cumulative development. WWII and Cold War for several decades between 1940s and 1980s made totalitarianism a major focus in political science and inspired in it the creation of the subdiscipline of Sovietology. The break-up of the Soviet Union deprived both of their relevance to policy makers and forced hundreds of political scientists to look for another field of expertise, giving rise to nationalism studies, transition studies, democratization studies, global studies, allowing the newly-minted experts to pronounce with authority on subjects of which they, by definition, knew nothing. The ground-swell of discontent with the unfulfilled promise of equality, made legitimate in the context of guilt and disorientation caused by the Holocaust, has shifted the ideology of social justice from preoccupation with economic structures (capitalism, class) to preoccupation with identity (race, gender, sexual orientation), affecting, in particular, sociology. The discreditation of Marxism with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe reinforced this ideological re-orientation: American (and then international) sociology has become the science of essentialist, because inherent in groups’ very being, inequalities, inequality, the opposite of equality and emphatically unjust, replacing the long-time staple of sociological research, stratification. As a science, the possessor of objective knowledge, it claims the authority to discern such inequalities and provide leadership in their elimination. Feminist, queer, and other subaltern narratives, regularly included in “social sciences” theory syllabi, prescribe how human reality should be interpreted.

These theories inspired the foundation of new programs and departments of African-American, Latinx, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, which have been added to the Divisions of the Social Sciences across the United States. These programs and departments broaden career opportunities for sociologists, political scientists, historians, and, to a lesser extent, other disciplines in social sciences and humanities and, for this reason, are considered interdisciplinary. They broaden career opportunities, in particular, for practitioners of these disciplines who represent groups on which the new programs and departments focus, thereby contributing to the racial and sexual “diversity” of the universities. With racial and sexual diversity (as promoting group equality) on top of the articulated political agenda outside of academia, this increased “diversity” of the social sciences makes the universities politically dependent on them. It allows them to hold their own at the time when STEM disciplines, which fail to attract women and, apart from Jews and South-East Asians, minorities in sufficient numbers, attract most outside funding, and humanities, which have neither economic nor political utility, face the possibility of attrition. The focus on essentialist inequality in “social science” naturally leads to the institutionalization of DEI throughout the university and outside it. Thus, the university changes society.

“Social sciences” actively contribute to the change of interests in the larger society. Then, claiming that their focus is not their own but shifts in accordance with the changing interests outside the university, they greatly reinforce these outside interests by creating the language in which to express them and placing behind them the authority of science – presenting them as objective and “true.” The natural correspondence between outside social interests and self-interests of social science professions allows social sciences to wield tremendous influence, directly affecting the legislative process, jurisprudence, the media, primary and secondary education, and politics in the United States (and therefore, to different extents, the rest of the world). Within the long tradition of Western social thought, “social sciences” stand out as one of the most powerful social forces all the while despite having zero intellectual significance. [4]

It is the institutionalization of a fundamentally ideological project – the very opposite of science — as science within the framework of American research (scientific!) universities that has been steadily undermining, corrupting, education, scholarship, and science itself within our society which in the last three decades it turned into an Orwellian nightmare. As the American research university was created to give a home to this ideological project, its reform would imply essentially gutting it – taking out its very heart and brain – killing it, in other words. Attacking DEI and calling the university to account for its antisemitism, while immensely encouraging, indeed, for people losing all hope in their society’s ability to reassert its values, are no more than surface measures that may be likened to attempts to cure metastasizing cancer by compresses applied to resulting skin lesions. The university cannot be reformed, it must be abolished and replaced by a set of new institutions.

This, however, is doable. Only the will to accomplish it is required. The “social sciences” are an enormous fraud perpetrated on our society. They are also the only beneficiary of our university system. Only the interests of the “social sciences” are served by the enormous ever-growing bureaucracies, in turn dependent on the “social sciences” for their self-perpetuation. Nobody but the “social sciences” and the bureaucracies needs them. For all the other constituents of the university — professional schools, sciences, and humanities – the unification in its framework, is counterproductive. All of these can exist perfectly in independent institutions, before the arrival of American research universities called “institutes” in Europe: Institutes of Medicine, Institutes of Law, Institutes of Engineering, Research Institutes in Physics, Mathematics, History, Literature, or Classics, separate Schools of Theology – all providing higher education and training for professionals in their particular fields. The universities should be disbanded and their professional schools and science and humanities departments reorganized in such independent institutes. To these should be added Pedagogical Institutes (Normal Schools), preparing school-teachers, from general elementary teachers to teachers of particular disciplines in middle and upper classes, professionals equipped with knowledge of child and adolescent psychology, familiarity with best pedagogical practices, and thorough understanding of the disciplines they are to teach. General education should be provided American children at school; they should arrive at the threshold of their adult lives and whatever continued education or training they choose to acquire as fundamentally and roundly educated people. All these specialized institutes can occupy the existing facilities and keep institutional memory using such names as Harvard Institute of Medicine, Harvard Institute of Physics or Slavic Literatures, Chicago Quad Pedagogical Institute, Chicago Quad Institute of Biology, etc., but without overarching bureaucracies, starting with presidents paid enormous salaries for raising funds to get paid even more.

The idea of “social science” emerged in Europe in the 1840s as the idea for a science focused on humanity as a reality of its own kind in which particular form of causality operated, strictly analogical to physics as the science of matter and biology as the science of life (though the latter was not yet born, but, like science of humanity, only imagined). As the understanding of the special nature of humanity was as yet lacking, the imagined science of humanity was misnamed, and the misnomer stuck, misleading the first actual practitioners of this (like physics and biology) general science, Durkheim in France and Weber in Germany. Needless to say, humanity is a fascinating and for us, humans, arguably the most important reality, and it would be wonderful to have a special science exploring and generating objective knowledge regarding it. But American “social science” was not inspired by this idea. There is no way of changing it so as to make it, as it now exists, re-oriented to this very worthy project. To develop the science of humanity, it has to be started anew – in a separate Institute of its own.

As to the existing “social sciences,” their departments, artificial to begin with, should be disbanded together with the research universities created for their institutionalization, or allowed to die naturally during the period of reorganization, without new intakes of students, hires, and promotions, and with the senior faculty encouraged to retire.

[1] Mark Bauerlein, “How Humanities Professors Got Marginalized,” Newsletter of the James D. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, March 12, 2025.

[2] Peter W. Wood, “Institutions Won’t Cure Themselves – That’s Why Anti-DEI Legislation is Necessary,” Minding the Campus, March 3, 2025.

[3] These conclusions were published, first, in my 2001 book The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, Harvard University Press, in regard to the emergence of the discipline of economics in the United States specifically; then in a paper dealing with the sources of that discipline in Europe as well, “How Economics Became a Science: A Surprising Career of a Model Discipline,” in Amanda Anderson and J. Valente (eds.), Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 87-125. They were developed to account for some counterproductive implications of the structure of American research universities in a 2012 essay, “American Universities and the Stagnation of Knowledge,” in Greenfeld (ed.), The Idea(l)s of Joseph Ben-David: The Scientist’s Role and Centers of Learning Revisited, Transaction Publishers and another one, focusing on the deleterious effects of American universities on liberal democracy, “Back to 1984: The Role of American Universities in Dismantling Liberal Democracy,” Society, 53(4), 2016, pp. 368-374. The latest in this series was my 2020 commissioned contribution of a major new section to Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on Social Science: “Social Science: History, Disciplines, and Facts” (around 20,000 words) https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science, on which I rely for the most part in the current paper.

[4] The preceding discussion (pp. 7—17) does not exactly quote but generally relies on parts of my essay for Britannica mentioned above.