Asheesh Kapur Siddique

@asheeshks.org

9434 Followers 2660 Following

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

Screenshot of Len Gutkin piece on Chronicle Review’s Substack arguing that “No, There’s No Consensus About the Sex Binary”

Cover image of Massimo Mazzotti's "Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity"

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."

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.

Screenshot of CHE article “We Asked for It”

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."

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

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"”

Screenshot of report on collaboration between Peter Thiel and Vanderbilt

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

Screenshot of salary range from Iowa job ad

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

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.”

Screenshot from NYT oped on making elite college more affordable

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

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

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

Screenshot from latest email from AEI’s CFAU

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

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

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

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

Screenshot from recent IHE piece on the Vanderbilt report

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

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."

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

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.

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?”

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

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.’”

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.”

Screenshot from linked Substack article. The text reads: “Immediately, we have two problems. The first is that Storey and Storey’s approach would destroy the very practices of peer review that, as their AEI colleague Pielke points out, are absolutely fundamental to determining what ‘credible’ knowledge is in every discipline.”

Screenshot from my substack post on why the center-right is attacking higher ed right now. The 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?"

Screenshot from the Vanderbilt report, p. 4, stating that "Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity."

Screenshot of Jack Schlossberg's interview with the New Yorker, with the following text highlighted: "I've been representing a family legacy that is synonymous with the Democratic Party and progressive values."

Screenshot of Platner campaign fundraising email with time stamp circled to emphasize that the email was received at 6:02 pm on 6/4/2026 just hours after the New York Times exclusive report on Platner’s behavior.

Screenshot from The Atlantic article on AI

Screenshot of Instagram/ YouTube account of AI videos of philosophers

Screenshot of an AI generated video of Michel Foucault

Screenshot of first page of chapter 6 of Wendy Brown’s “Undoing the Demos,” on “Educating Human Capital”

Screenshot from article in CHE stating that the essay was originally published in Persuasion.

Screenshot of Trump NEH notice of funding opportunity on funding restrictions

Screenshot of the bio line of David Solomon's op-ed in the New York Times, which states that "in addition to running Goldman Sachs," Solomon "is an electronic dance music producer known as DJ D-Sol."

Screenshot from Chronicle article on civic school at UNC-Chapel Hill detailing how the school received $100k from Trump’s NEH

Screenshot of New York Magazine story about entrepreneur Cathy Tie discussing her decision to rent out Carnegie Hall for her birthday and perform a piano concerto for her friends.

Screenshot of latest Jay Caspian Kang article on higher Ed in the New Yorker, this time on the supposed “demographic cliff”

Screenshot of article on the UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees’ decision to decline to appoint Kiran Asher to a faculty position

Screenshot from NYT article on Andreessen Horowitz’s political spending, describing an anecdote in which Mark Andreessen decided that media outlets lites were out of touch because Condé Nast had nice offices and bathrooms for their workers

Screenshot of Jay Captain Kang’s New Yorker interview with Hollis Robbins in which Robbin’s claims that at public universities “the quality of teaching has gone way, way, way down over the past twenty years”

Screenshot from David F. Labaree's article "How Dewey Lost." The screenshotted text reads: "In part because Snedden was an extremist, the tendency in American education leaned strongly in his direction and away from Dewey. What we ended up with was a school system that reflected the main elements of the social efficiency agenda: a differentiated curriculum, de facto tracking by social class, and a school system whose purposed is viewed through a vocational lens (education for human capital development), even if vocational courses never gained more than a relatively marginal part of the curriculum."

Screenshot of a paper on Dimer models on astroidal zig-zag graphs from archivx.org

Screenshot of chart showing that jobs exposed to automation have lower degree requirements

Screenshot of Palantir manifesto article 7, Ïf a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should built it; and the same goes for software."

Screenshot from Cass Sunstein's Substack post on Viewpoint diversity, in which he mentions how much fun he had at lunches with colleagues at Chicago in the 1980s.

Screenshot from proposed rule

Screenshot from Miami Herald article: "Introductory sociology has long been a high-enrollment course that draws students from across majors, often serving as a gateway to fields such as criminology, public health, education and social work."

Screenshot of NYT article on motivations for returning to the moon

Screenshot of Atlantic article stating that campus protest encampments are unethical

Screenshot of article in "The Atlantic" arguing that "Campus Protest Encampments Are Unethical"