Asheesh Kapur Siddique

@asheeshks

History & political economy of culture; Associate Professor of History, UMass-Amherst. Opinions my own. Prefer email to DMs. asheeshks.org/

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jul 15

This is what the review says about the non-existence of the documents in the archive. The obvious response from the author would be to produce the documents, but if that hasn't happened yet, it does seem very damning: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Screenshot from Myra Glenn's review of Kerri Greenidge's book. The screenshotted text reads: "Greenidge also makes serious errors in citing her sources. She repeatedly quotes from letters exchanged between the Grimké sisters and Archibald and those Angelina and Sarah sent to third parties about their nephews. She states that these documents are in the Weld-Grimké Family Papers in the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. But when I was unable to find six of the letters cited, a staff member at the library informed me via email that these documents are not in the university’s archives."

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jul 15

Yes. As reported in the NYT piece. This is the review in question: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jul 15

Yes. This is what is confusing. I somewhat disagree with Alexis Coe here because while it’s true that fact-checking hundreds of references may be a lot of work, in the end, an author should be able to say that they either really did read documents and say where they read them.

Another conversation we should be having: what "fact-checking" a history book can realistically mean. Trade presses rarely send researchers back through hundreds of archival citations, and even academic peer reviewers cannot retrace years of work scattered across multiple repositories. The system rests heavily on trust, reputation, and the assumption that scholars are representing their sources honestly. That may be unavoidable. It is also a
spectacularly fragile form of quality control.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jul 2

Actually, let's not grant that. www.chronicle.com/article/soci...

Screenshotted text from CHE piece on the Vanderbilt report reads: "For the sake of argument, let’s grant that the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” was for the most part approached and executed in good faith and rigorously undertaken by scholars who genuinely care about the state and future of the humanities. I think for the most part this is true."

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 30

The political economy of historical knowledge today, in a nutshell www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/u...

Screenshotted text reads: "Mr Rees contacted Eric Nelson, a professor of government at Harvard University who specializes in early-modern European and American political thought. Mr. Nelson also happens to be a keen collector of rare books and manuscripts that he makes available to scholars. He purchased the documents after the Library of Congress failed to offer enough money, Mr. Rees said." https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/us/250-american-revolution-john-dickinson.html

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 28

What‘s the evidence that students are not 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 engaging in “meaningful, difficult conversations” without the assistance of these right-wing initiatives? The goal is to control conversations so they don’t threaten the entrenched interests, like big tech, that rely on universities as profit centers

Screenshot from Guardian article on campus civic center movement. The screenshotted text reads: “ But a number of facilitators insisted that dialogue efforts are not meant to replace protests. They noted a divide between their intentions - to push students into meaningful, difficult conversations - and university administrations that sometimes
want to just "check a box"”

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 26

More evidence that the purpose of the Vanderbilt Report is to pave the way for tech-fascism by discrediting those disciplines that are at the forefront of the critical study of AI: www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithint...

Screenshot of report on collaboration between Peter Thiel and Vanderbilt

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 26

How the interim director of this indoctrination outfit describes its purpose: www.chronicle.com/article/a-fl...

Screenshot of statement by Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom stating that students need to be told why capitalism is the best.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 26

You can make more money undermining the humanities, faculty governance, and critical thought than you can make actually doing serious, peer reviewed research and teaching

Screenshot of salary range from Iowa job ad

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 26

You can make far more money being a conservative hack at these right-wing university centers than you can doing actual teaching and research as a faculty member. Moreover, there are actually jobs for right-wing bizarros in higher ed but no jobs for credible scholars.

Screenshot from linked job posting describing position at U Colorado civic center

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 25

The biggest distortion of the Vanderbilt Report may well be its rendering of the scholarly standards it wishes to restore against ’politicization.’ open.substack.com/pub/asheeshk... 🗃️

Screenshotted text reads: “ The Vanderbilt report thus performs a very clever trick: it posits the existence of scholarly norms that it claims are pre-political in order to indict the politicization of scholarship as the source of the declining public trust in the university humanities, if not the university itself. But maintaining that position requires, among other things, a complete disregard for the actual history of scholarship across disciplines, not to mention the history of the university, histories that show that pre-political scholarship never existed until the idea of it was politically invented.”

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 25

People will do literally anything in order to avoid funding excellent public higher education

Screenshot from NYT oped on making elite college more affordable

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 25

Like extremely well-paid - this is where all that money that is supposed to be used to hire actual humanities scholars at public universities to do actual peer-reviewed research and teach courses that aren't geared toward ideological indoctrination is going careers.historians.org/jobs/rss/223...

Screenshot from AHA Career center job ad for Director of Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 25

There actually are extremely well-paying academic jobs in the humanities . . . provided you are willing to become a conservative hack who promotes "viewpoint diversity" rather than peer-reviewed scholarship.

Screenshot from ad for director of right-wing Benson Center at University of Colorado

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 24

Screenshot from Lumina Foundation report showing that the vast majority of college students feel their institution supports open dialogue

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 24

Lol - and JHU is completely unserious for participating in this bs and partnering with an evil institution like AEI. open.substack.com/pub/asheeshk...

Screenshot from latest email from AEI’s CFAU

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 23

The potential of using AI to diagnose cancer and other diseases is exciting, but I simply do not understand what value AI adds to cultural experiences like this.

Screenshot of a New York Times article on a new audiobook reading of the Odyssey by AI in Michael Caine’s voice

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 22

There are some genuinely good ideas in this report, which is better than like 99% of its competing alternatives (Yale, Vanderbilt). However, it dangerously endorses “viewpoint diversity,” which is a mistake and destructive of peer review. asheeshksi.substack.com/p/introducti...

Screenshot from the Trust Agenda report endorsing the civic thought / viewpoint diversity agenda

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 19

How can something that does not think help one find a “thoughtful gift”? 🧐

Screenshot from an email from ChatGPT suggesting that I “find thoughtful gifts with ChatGPT.”

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 19

It’s a tell: the authors are not interested in debating methods (and if they were, absolutely bring it on!). They are not talking to humanists, but rather about us because they just want to get rid of us.

Screenshot from Vanderbilt report explaining that the report is addressed to university administrators

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 15

It’s almost as if the authors have read nothing about the political origins of the epistemic values they purport to be defending. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Screenshot from recent IHE piece on the Vanderbilt report

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 12

The report simply glosses over this. Like the authors are literally like, 'there's a whole body of empirical work disproving us. But let's just move on so we can keep grinding our political ax.' WHAT?!

Screenshot from Vanderbilt report's brief mention of the scholarship on the history of objectivity.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 12

Like look at this paragraph - it's very clever. The authors of the report ignore the vast empirical evidence demonstrating that knowledge is socially constructed produced by historians of science by narrowing the source of legit humanist epistemology to a small slice of philosophy.

Screenshot from the Vanderbilt report, reading: "How did so many scholars, from so many different fields, become so thoroughly convinced of a heady view in epistemology, especially one that is stubbornly rejected by the mainstream of professional philosophers . . . We cannot say that the appeal is intellectual: We cannot point to powerful arguments that make a strong case for the view. On the contrary, and as we will see in a moment, the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming."

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 12

Vanderbilt and Wash U have significant $$ in AI companies and are making big bets on AI being the future of everything. Is it any wonder that they would commission a report to challenge the validity of the very disciplines that are at the forefront of the critical study of AI? shorturl.at/zqj8R

Screenshot from my substack: https://asheeshksi.substack.com/p/producing-epistemic-doubt-about-the

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 12

As the person who called the report "diabolically evil," let me just reiterate: the report is diabolically evil. asheeshksi.substack.com/p/producing-...

The text reads: The diabolical paradox of the Vanderbilt report is to claim that it is because the humanities actually are ‘woke,’ ‘biased,’ ‘non-objective,’ and ‘unrigorous’ that they have lost this support in the first place. In fact, it is years of the right-wing flinging versions of those false, garbage claims at the humanities as they have sought to defend their counter-majoritarian political project (and their ability to trick the public, including a significant number of otherwise politically liberal people, into believing them) that explains why the humanities have lost support.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 11

Let’s keep saying it: advocates of viewpoint diversity are the enemies of peer review. asheeshksi.substack.com/p/introducti...

Screenshotted text reads: “Advocates of viewpoint diversity are actually arguing for lower scholarly and teaching standards by insisting that illegitimate, discarded, and invalid viewpoints that have not passed peer review now be included in scholarship and teaching merely because they provide ‘balance.’ Who’s the epistemological relativist now?”

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 11

Surprise, surprise! The Vanderbilt report decrying the state of scholarship in the humanities is itself a terrible work of “scholarship“:

Screenshot of a quotation from Khiara Bridges of Berkeley discussing how the Vanderbilt Report inaccurately distorts her scholarship.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 10

You can have viewpoint diversity. Or you can have peer review. But you cannot have both. And without peer review, you cannot have credible knowledge at all. shorturl.at/2Ji1X

Screenshot from “Cultural Knowledge”
Substack essay on viewpoint diversity. The text states: “Substituting ‘viewpoint diversity’ for ‘peer review’ as the criteria for evaluating scholarship would, simply put, destroy the possibility of producing credible knowledge at all. Indeed, the destruction of such a possibility is likely the unspoken goal of ‘viewpoint diversity.’”

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 9

This is such an important point: we rightly bemoan the ‘corporatization’ of higher ed but the irony is that many of the corporate managerial practices being imposed on us were discredited and abandoned by for-profit corporations long ago.

Screenshot from Glenn O’Hara’s article, with the following text highlighted: “ Heavily metricised, buried in audit and groaning under the weight of paperwork, no one seems to have told universities that these techniques were tested and found wanting by most private sector companies in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the UK’s central government in the 2000s and 2010s.”

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks· Jun 9

Hence, the American Enterprise Institute‘s Center for the Future of the American University is pushing “viewpoint diversity“ for the humanities and humanistic social sciences while AEI scholars are decrying the politicization of STEM funding: asheeshksi.substack.com/p/introducti...