On Proper Objects of Study

The recent “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” warned against the distortion of humanities scholarship in the service of a priori goals like “social justice,” “anti-racism” or “feminism.”

The report was jointly commissioned by Vanderbilt University and my own institution, Washington University in St. Louis. In May, shortly before the report’s release, Washington University announced the largest gift in our history—a $200 million gift to endow the Bursky School of Public Health. I was inspired and inexpressibly proud of my institution. Over the course of my almost 20-year tenure at WashU, I have had the privilege to help recruit some of our earliest faculty working in public health, and I observe that they, like the new luminaries being recruited onto the Bursky faculty, aim much of their globally renowned research at dismantling disparities, especially racial and gender disparities, in health. 

In a recent article, one of the most distinguished public health faculty members at the Bursky School wrote, “Public health has long had a goal of improving health and promoting social justice among disadvantaged and marginalized populations. In the United States from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, the emphasis was commonly on ‘excess death’ and health disparities among various population subgroups. The term ‘health disparity’ is not simply a health difference between populations (e.g., women compared with men) but is a health difference that is closely linked with economic or social advantage.

“Framing public health issues with a health equity lens moves away from a deficit mindset of what society is doing poorly (disparities) to one that is positive about what society can achieve. The imperative of a health equity approach is driven in part by a decades-long increase in income inequality, the visibility and impacts of historic structural racism, and the need to view public health as a common good rather than a commodity.” 

My esteemed colleague who wrote this is joined by many other scholars in the Bursky School, the School of Medicine and the Brown School of Social Work in focusing on research and policy interventions devoted to dissecting and ameliorating these health disparities. Relatedly, one of the endowed chairs at the Brown School is named the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity, which was, as our website explains, established in 1998 by the late E. Desmond Lee “to foster racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in St. Louis.”

I think endowing a chair to foster diversity qualifies as an a priori assumption, one of the very sort that the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities” finds so suspicious. I observe that at my institution, faculty from the Bursky School, the Brown School and our vast medical research, education and patient care complex are joined by faculty from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, which is nationally regarded for the focus of its scholars in tackling urban racial segregation and which connects students and faculty with St. Louis communities through its Office of Socially Engaged Practice. And they are joined as well by faculty from my home school, the School of Law, which hosts myriad scholarly and clinical efforts to dissect and address structural discrimination confronting racial and ethnic minorities, women and sexual minorities, disabled people, and veterans.   

Nor is Washington University in any, way, shape or form unique among global research universities. Universities tackle the great social ills and ambitions of our time—curing cancer, developing more effective food and nutritional delivery systems, sending a rover to Mars, and, at least in the recent past, we would have included in that list continuing the nation’s century-and-a-half-long project of dismantling structural racism. Even with the caveat that there are widely varying scholarly views on what that project looks like, the a priori assumption reinforced by my Bursky colleague was a widely held one.

I was then perplexed by the Vanderbilt/Washington University report. Health inequity and disparities, lack of diversity, urban racial segregation, structural racial discrimination, each of which is taken as an a priori societal ill to be addressed, are seemingly proper objects of study, research and, yes, at times advocacy, across much of my university’s vast research enterprise. And yet, for my colleagues in the humanities, the report casts the same a priori assumptions as suspect, as political goals that threaten to “distort the scholarly enterprise.”

This leads to my second contention as to why these are proper, indeed imperative, objects of study for humanists. I suppose I could say here that these are proper objects for me and not for thee. But not only do I care about my colleagues in the humanities, who I believe are being singled out because of their institutional vulnerability, even as they have some of the heaviest academic lifts in higher education, but I have deeply selfish reasons for doing so.

Professional schools draw, shamelessly, on the architectures, grammars and vocabularies developed by our colleagues in the humanities. Humanists and the humanistic social sciences offer myriad methodologies, archives and theoretical dissections of objects of mutual interest. Although the report might dismiss as “abstract jargon” the practice of developing new vocabulary to capture and communicate new ideas, a criticism not aimed at the often inaccessible academic language of the hard sciences, engineering or medicine, I would note that faculty in professional schools rely on the foundational work done by our colleagues in the humanities of excavating untrodden ground and building the rigorous scholarly scaffolding that supports our work.

I take as one example Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality, not only one of the most cited and influential ideas in legal scholarship but one that has been embraced as a definitive framework in countless fields and disciplines and has transcended the academy into the broader world of policy, corporate America and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crucially, Crenshaw’s transformative framework and new vocabulary built on decades of research by Black feminist theorists, overwhelmingly from humanists. My own research into how best to regulate legal objects from sex work to polygamy to campus sexual assault to art markets draws on generations of historians, literary theorists and, increasingly, art historians. Many of us in the professional schools simply could not do our work without this foundational scaffolding from the humanities.

Is health equity an “antecedently accepted political goal” and hence unacceptable under the terms of the report? Is tackling urban segregation in St. Louis similarly so? If so, I anticipate that most of the professional schools should anticipate a similar report chastising our core work and research enterprise. Or are these proper objects of the other schools and disciplines but improper ones for the humanities? And if so, why? I will end by asking, again: Proper object for me, but not for thee?