July 26, 2026 The Second Apprenticeship: What the Public Record Shows About Middle East Studies, and What it Would Take to Know More Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The Second Apprenticeship: What the Public Record Shows About Middle East Studies, and What it Would Take to Know More

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Middle East Studies gets described constantly and counted rarely. Critics say the field trains students to work on Gaza, empire, and American power. Defenders say outside pressure is making honest scholarship harder. Both sides read the field from its controversies.
The public record says something else, and it is checkable. Departments publish dissertation titles. Some publish placement records. Job boards archive what universities were willing to pay for. Syllabi show which books carry the field from one generation to the next. A pilot of 153 dissertations and one department’s placement tables now exists, assembled entirely from pages anyone can open.
Two findings come out of it. One is solid enough to publish. The other is smaller than it looks at first sight.

The finding

Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies publishes the first position and the current position of every PhD it has awarded since 2000, broken into five-year cohorts. Across the four completed cohorts, the way a graduate enters the profession has been replaced.
Of the 33 PhDs awarded from 2000 through 2006, 15 went straight into tenure-track positions and 7 took postdoctoral fellowships. Of the 20 awarded from 2007 through 2011, 6 went straight to tenure track and 8 to postdocs. Of the 23 from 2012 through 2016, 4 and 13. Of the 17 from 2017 through 2021, 1 and 12.
Direct entry fell from 45.5 percent to 5.9 percent. Postdoctoral entry rose from 21.2 percent to 70.6 percent. Both movements are monotone across every cohort. A Cochran-Armitage test gives z of -3.225 and p of 0.0013 for the decline, and z of 3.662 and p of 0.00025 for the rise. Comparing the earliest completed cohort against the latest, Fisher’s exact test gives p of 0.0045 and an odds ratio of 13.3.
A fifth cohort sits on the same table, running from 2022 through June 2026, and it moves the other way. Two of its 19 members entered tenure-track jobs, which is 10.5 percent. The cohort is open, its newest members have had months rather than years, and 2 of 19 against 1 of 17 is noise on those denominators. The trend tests above use the four completed cohorts and leave it out. Anyone checking the source table should see it there.
The doctorate qualifies the holder to begin a second apprenticeship of unknown length.

What the finding is not

Read the first-position table alone and it looks like an occupational collapse. Princeton also publishes current position, and that reading dies immediately. Of the 2000 through 2006 cohort, 25 of 33 now hold tenured or tenure-track jobs. Of 2007 through 2011, 16 of 20. Of 2012 through 2016, 16 of 23. Even of 2017 through 2021, whose members are five to nine years out, 10 of 17.
Many graduates arrive. They arrive later. First position and current position have to be reported together, because each alone tells a false story: one of a profession that has stopped hiring, one of a profession where nothing has changed.
What the tables cannot say is how long the delay runs. They are cohort aggregates. They hold no transition dates. One person may have spent a single year in a fellowship and another eight, and the published numbers cannot distinguish them. Any sentence about how many years the apprenticeship lasts is an invention until somebody builds the career histories.

The control, and what it did to the interpretation

The obvious question is whether this belongs to Near Eastern Studies or to the humanities. Princeton’s own History department supplies the nearest comparison, since it faces the same institution, the same job market, and the same access to prestigious fellowships.
History reports that among 2021 through 2025 graduates who went into education, 66.7 percent took postdocs and 7.4 percent went to tenure-track jobs. The department publishes no headcount, but the rounded percentages resolve cleanly to 54, 13, 6, 3, 3, and 2 out of 81. Among recent Near Eastern Studies graduates entering academic or educational first positions, 13 of 16 took postdocs and 2 of 16 took tenure-track jobs. Fisher’s exact test on the postdoc comparison gives p of 0.376. The intervals overlap heavily.
The comparison rules out a large difference between the two departments and is too weak to rule out a moderate one.
Two further things on the History page.
The first supports the delay reading rather than the collapse reading, from an independent department. Among History PhDs from 2008 through 2020, observed five or ten years out, 83.7 percent of those in education hold tenure-track positions and 1.1 percent remain postdocs. The apprenticeship resolves. At an elite department, it appears to resolve for most people.
The second is a warning about the comparison. History’s denominator counts only graduates who entered education, and education accounts for 78 percent of its PhDs. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies denominator counts every graduate. The two departments publish different objects. History’s numbers come from web searches and emailed self-reports with no stated headcount and a measurement window that shifts by cohort. Near Eastern Studies publishes what reads as a departmental census with first position defined the same way for twenty-six years. A test that compares a census against a reconstruction from rounded percentages should not be reported as though it settled anything.
The national picture points the same direction. Humanities Indicators, drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, reports that postdoctoral commitments among new humanities and arts PhDs rose from about 4 percent in 1990 to about 12 percent in 2020, with history above 18 percent. Princeton’s rates are far higher, and Princeton graduates have unusual access to fellowships. The comparison suggests without settling.

Why the study still belongs in this field

If postdocization runs across elite humanities, then the question it raises runs across elite humanities too. A scholar on a one-year appointment depends on recommendations, renewals, invitations, and the judgment of future search committees. A tenured professor can anger a donor or a colleague at lower cost. The formal rules permit dissent in both cases. The material structure prices it differently.
Middle East scholars report high rates of professional self-censorship. In late 2023, 82 percent of United States respondents said they self-censor when speaking professionally about Israel and Palestine, and among assistant professors the figure reached 98 percent. In the round fielded around the start of the 2026 Iran war, 77 percent reported self-censoring, and self-censorship on Iran doubled from 17 percent to 33 percent overall and 40 percent in the United States within weeks.
Those numbers are read as evidence about ideology. One camp sees fear of donors, legislators, and advocacy groups. The other sees fear of colleagues enforcing a consensus. Both may be right. Neither has been separated from a third possibility, which is that people who cannot count on employment past next June behave differently from people who can.
Most fields poll their members about nothing. Middle East Studies has a running survey of professional speech, conducted by people with the standing to add questions to it, and now the beginnings of an employment record built from public pages. The field is the natural laboratory for the question precisely because it is unusual in what it measures about itself, and the answer would apply well beyond it.
That study can embarrass everyone. It might show external pressure dominates. It might show internal peer pressure dominates. It might show the labor structure amplifies both.

The dissertation finding, and how far it reaches

Princeton and Chicago together produced 123 dissertations across the sampled years. Coded against 1948, 101 fall before, 3 after, 5 straddle, and 14 cannot be placed from the title. Among clear cases, 2.9 percent are post-1948. Anyone who believes these departments turn out scholars of contemporary Palestine has to explain the Ottoman postal service, Ugaritic pronouns, Hittite ceramics, and the marginalia of a sixteenth-century Cairene scholar.
The obvious objection is that Chicago trains philologists, archaeologists, and Egyptologists, so the sample guarantees the answer. Strip out the ancient, biblical, and Egyptological work and 69 clear cases remain, of which 3 are post-1948. The share moves from 2.9 percent to 4.3 percent. The objection fails.
Adding Columbia’s interdisciplinary department was meant to test whether interdisciplinary training produces contemporary work. Among Columbia’s recent Middle East and North Africa dissertations that classify cleanly, 4 of 14 are post-1948, or 28.6 percent. Columbia differs from the two traditional departments, and the difference is unlikely to be noise, with Fisher’s exact p of 0.0138.
Where Columbia sits remains unknown. The Wilson interval on 4 of 14 runs from 11.7 percent to 54.6 percent. It contains 50 percent. The data can say Columbia is more contemporary. The data cannot say whether the field contains two separated clocks or one gradual slope, and any draft that picked between them was overreading its own numbers.

What the sources taught, which may outlast the findings

Three departments published placement information and produced three different objects. Princeton distinguishes first position from current position and defines both. Chicago heads a column Job Placement without saying which it means. Columbia publishes current position only. Pooling them produces nonsense, and the temptation to pool them is strong because they look alike in a spreadsheet.
Columbia’s roster lists 8 graduates for 2020, 1 for 2021, 10 for 2022, 7 for 2023, and 4 for 2024, and the page’s own metadata gives a last modification date of August 14, 2024. A department producing eight to ten doctorates in neighboring years did not produce one in 2021. The roster is maintained rather than complete, which means it cannot serve as a production series, and if the missing names are the people who left the profession, the placement column reads high.
Columbia publishes no dissertation titles. Six had to be recovered from elsewhere, and three were wrong. In every case a later book or fellowship project title had displaced the deposited dissertation title. Scholars with books and fellowships leave a bigger public trace, so reconstruction from visibility oversamples the successful, and the error correlates with the outcome anyone would want to measure.

What needs doing, in order

The bottleneck has moved from analysis to collection, and further interpretation of the existing numbers will not pay.
The first job is person-level career histories, and it is the one that converts a suggestive finding into a measurable one. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department publishes the names and dissertation years of every PhD since 1927. For the 112 graduates since 2000, a CV, a faculty page, or a professional profile gives the doctorate year, each position with its dates, and the year of first tenure-line appointment. That yields median time to a permanent job by cohort, and the share still outside a tenure line at one, three, five, and eight years, with proper handling of people whose careers are still running. Roughly 112 people, perhaps twenty hours, and it answers the question everything else has been forced to leave open. Do the same for Princeton History, whose doctoral degrees awarded page supplies the names, and the control becomes a real one rather than a comparison of unlike published summaries.
The second job is the dissertation hypothesis, and department pages are the wrong tool for it. The strong version predicts the largest contemporary share inside political science, anthropology, and history departments, which do not publish Middle East title lists at all. A ProQuest or repository query returns institution, year, and title for several hundred such dissertations in one operation, without depending on any department’s willingness to maintain a page.
The third job is job advertisements, still untouched and still the only measure of demand rather than supply. Archived captures of the H-Net job guide and the MESA employment page reach back past 2016. Retrieval is the entire difficulty, and retrieval is solved.
The fourth job is the survey, and it needs a collaborator rather than a scraper. A future Barometer round that asked about tenure status, contract length, renewability, years since the doctorate, years spent in temporary appointments, visa dependence, institution type, and reliance on regional access would let anyone test whether employment vulnerability predicts silence once political position and subfield are held constant. The people who run that survey have the standing to add the questions. Nobody else can.
Syllabi come last, and possibly never. The access cost is high and the return is the lowest of the five.

What would kill each claim

The postdocization finding dies if the person-level histories show that the time from doctorate to permanent job has stayed flat, meaning the postdoc was always there and only the labeling changed. It also weakens sharply if Princeton History’s cohort-by-cohort curve, once reconstructed, turns out to be steeper than Near Eastern Studies.
The precarity hypothesis dies if self-censorship shows no relationship to contract security once beliefs and subfield are controlled. That would be a real result and would strengthen both political explanations at once.
The two-clock hypothesis dies if disciplinary departments turn out to produce pre-1948 work at rates near Princeton’s and Chicago’s. It survives in its strong form only if their contemporary share clears 50 percent with an interval that excludes the traditional departments.

Why any of this is public business

The public pays for the universities, the fellowships, the libraries, and much of the student support. Students organize six or seven years of their lives around a career, and now a further stretch of unknown length after that. Departments admit doctoral candidates without publishing, in most cases, any honest account of what happens next. Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department is unusual in publishing enough to be analyzed, and it comes out of the exercise looking honest.
Arguments about this field almost always start from a political conclusion and gather examples. The counting runs the other way. It asks what departments produce, what universities advertise, where graduates go, how long they stay temporary, and which books get assigned. The answers so far have embarrassed the loudest claim on offer, which was that traditional departments have been captured by present-day politics. They have also failed to support the tidy counter-story about area-studies funding.
The numbers are public. The methods are ordinary. The employment and production record of this field has never been assembled, and assembling it takes weeks rather than grants.

Notes

Version 0.5, posted July 26, 2026. Cite this version and date, since the files below will change as the collection grows. Every count was computed from the released files rather than typed by hand.

Corrections are welcome and will be published here with attribution. The coding of individual dissertations, the Columbia roster gaps, and the three recovered titles marked provisional are the places where somebody inside these departments can settle a question in a sentence that would take me a week.

Data

middle_east_studies_incentives_v04

mes_columbia_title_audit_v04

mes_princeton_internal_controls_v04

mes_significance_tests_v04

mes_dissertations_v4

Sources

Princeton Near Eastern Studies first positions

Princeton Near Eastern Studies current positions

Princeton Near Eastern Studies past dissertation titles

Princeton History career outcomes

Princeton History doctoral degrees awarded

Chicago Middle Eastern Studies alumni placement

Columbia MESAAS recent PhDs

Columbia GSAS dissertation notices

Humanities Indicators, job status at graduation

Middle East Scholar Barometer

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Live Questions in Middle East Studies

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

For Middle East Studies the Iran War tests whether its collective judgment beats Washington’s. The Middle East Scholar Barometer happened to be in the field from February 19 to March 11, so a third of its responses came in after the shooting started. Five percent of the scholars polled supported launching the war. One percent thought a broad assault would produce a pro-American democratic government in Tehran. Ninety-four percent had already concluded that the administration’s approach made war likelier. Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, who run the survey, argue in Foreign Policy that the academics read the cohesion of the Iranian regime and its willingness to absorb costs and hit back better than the policymakers did. Zachary Lockman at NYU makes the same point about the shape of the surprise: American officials appear startled by Iran’s reaction, and anyone who knows the country could have told them what was coming.

In September 2025 the Education Department sent non-continuation notices to every Title VI international education grantee, calling the grants inconsistent with administration priorities, and moved the $86 million to a one-time investment in historically Black colleges and universities. Congress partially restored the money in its most recent budget, but the retrenchment had already started: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began dismantling its six area studies centers in December, and the University of Texas at Austin folded some of its area studies departments together in February. Osamah Khalil at Syracuse describes Title VI as a sourdough starter, roughly ten percent of area studies funding, with universities supplying the rest. Lockman’s read on why nobody defended the centers: institutions are in austerity, under attack, and want to stay invisible, so funding people the Education Department treats as enemies looks unwise to them.

So the field was right on the Iran War and got defunded in the same year. Anyone who assumes that predictive accuracy buys institutional security should sit with that.

Now the live questions, ranked by how much status they currently generate.

First, what political order exists between the river and the sea. This is where the field’s center of gravity sits, and the Barometer records the vocabulary hardening rather than softening: the share of scholars describing Israeli actions as genocide rose from 46 percent to 54 percent in one year, with another 32 percent calling them major war crimes akin to genocide, and the share describing the current situation as a one-state reality akin to apartheid rose from 62 to 68 percent. On the postwar arrangements, three-quarters expect the Trump Board of Peace to make a two-state outcome less likely and four in five expect it to raise the odds of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Sherene Seikaly is the strongest question-framer in this territory because she puts Palestine inside global histories of capital, race, and medicine rather than treating it as a territorial dispute. What has lost standing is the peace-process specialist who treats two symmetrical national movements as needing better mediation.

Second, how authoritarian orders reproduce themselves. Lisa Wedeen remains the most respected asker here, and the reason is the shape of her question rather than her conclusions: why do people publicly repeat claims they privately disbelieve, and how do ambiguity and performance do the work of rule. Asef Bayat holds status for social nonmovements, the idea that dispersed ordinary activity changes social life without capturing the state. Both frameworks now get applied to Iran under bombardment, which no one designed them for.

Third, whether “the Middle East” is the right unit. Laleh Khalili converted ports, shipping, oil, and maritime labor into political institutions, and the Strait of Hormuz closures have made that a policy question as well as a scholarly one. Arang Keshavarzian at NYU is the clearest recent gainer: his Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East took the 2025 Roger Owen Book Award. Timothy Mitchell at Columbia remains the single most portable question-framer across the field, with technopolitics, expertise, and carbon democracy traveling far outside area studies. His status is consolidated rather than rising.

Fourth, what replaces rentier-state theory. Sovereign wealth, migrant labor, logistics, megaprojects, energy transition, and the political consequences of all four. Kevan Harris at UCLA is the model answer-builder here, using welfare institutions and survey data to explain Iranian durability, which the war has just made the most consequential empirical question in the field.

Fifth, how research survives when archives burn, field sites close, and visas vanish. This is methodological and existential at once. Oral history, family archives, remote and collaborative work, and explicit positionality all gain. Narges Bajoghli at Johns Hopkins SAIS bridges the framing and the answering on Iran.

Sixth, race, slavery, empire, and migration inside the region’s own history. The prize record makes this the strongest upward movement in the discipline.

Look at what MESA honored in 2025: Choon Hwee Koh at UCLA for The Sublime Post, on the Ottoman imperial post; Stacy Fahrenthold at UC Davis for Unmentionables, on Syrian American garment labor; Susanna Ferguson at Smith for Labors of Love, on gender and capitalism in modern Arab thought. The political economy prize went to Keshavarzian, with honorable mentions to Nora Barakat at Stanford for Bedouin Bureaucrats and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky at UCSB for Empire of Refugees. Communications, textiles, land tenure, refugee administration. Almost nothing about the present war.

The field runs on two clocks. Prizes reward archival monographs conceived eight years ago, which means the honors list reflects the safe center of the discipline rather than its front line. The podium, the journal front matter, and the panel titles reflect the present. A young scholar reading these incentives correctly writes transregional history of mobility and paperwork before 1948, gets a Stanford University Press book and a prize, and speaks about Gaza and Iran in venues that do not go on the tenure file. That is a rational response to risk, and it will shape the field’s output for a decade.

There are concept-makers, whose vocabulary other people borrow: Mitchell, Wedeen, Bayat, Khalili, Seikaly, Ussama Makdisi on sectarianism. There are evidence-builders, who construct the surveys and comparative datasets that let you adjudicate: Amaney Jamal and the Arab Barometer, Melani Cammett on welfare and coexistence, Harris on Iranian class structure, Marwa Daoudy on climate policy and vulnerability. And there are conveners, who decide which questions become visible.

The third position has appreciated the most. When asking a question carries professional and legal risk, the person who controls the venue holds more power than the person with the better theory. Lynch can make a question visible to a subfield through POMEPS workshops and volumes. Lara Deeb at Scripps and Heather Ferguson at Claremont McKenna edit IJMES, which sets the terms for the humanities and interdisciplinary core. Seikaly holds editorial position at the Journal of Palestine Studies. MESA’s leadership under Aslı Bâli built an institutional apparatus for academic freedom. Editorial and convening power is cheap to run, survives funding cuts, and does not depend on a dean. Departmental prestige is the weakening currency here, because departments are where money gets lost while journals and networks are where status gets made.

Princeton Near Eastern Studies remains the traditional apex on language depth and archival training. Columbia MESAAS remains the concept apex, and its institutional position tells the real story. Federal officials demanded academic receivership for MESAAS as a precondition for negotiating the return of research funding, and the final deal softened that to a review of regional studies starting with the Middle East. Columbia paid $200 million and promised the review. In February 2026 a provost’s committee recommended new courses that should complement MESAAS while remaining clearly differentiated from it, in the social sciences rather than the department’s humanistic, language-based, transregional approach, alongside hiring in economics, history, and political science. MESAAS chair Gil Z. Hochberg says she took no part in those conversations. She also says nothing was imposed on the department and its academic autonomy was respectfully preserved.

The pressure built a second Middle East studies alongside the first, with its own money, its own hires, and its own faculty, and left the original in place with its autonomy and none of the growth. One university, two fields, no conversation between them. I expect that pattern to spread, because it satisfies the government, the donors, and the AAUP chapter simultaneously by giving each of them something different to point at.

Moving up institutionally: NYU on political economy and the Gulf, UCLA on the strength of Koh and Harris together, GW and POMEPS as the political science network, Georgetown CCAS on the policy-facing questions, LSE’s Middle East Centre and Exeter on Gulf political economy and logistics. Moving down: Harvard’s CMES, and every freestanding area studies center at a public university looking at its budget line.

External closure runs through money, immigration status, and litigation, and it is enforceable. MESA’s Academic Freedom Initiative, funded by Mellon, published its first report on the use of civil rights law to repress campus speech on Palestine and has been building datasets toward a public site. Internal closure runs through the cost of framing. It bans nothing and shapes everything, because a scholar who wants to argue that Islamist doctrine carries independent causal force, or that Israeli security calculations sometimes explain policy better than settler-colonial theory does, or that Gulf monarchies are adaptive rather than transitional, has to spend a chapter establishing standing before making the argument.

The freshest number in this area is the one nobody has written up. Self-censorship on Israel and Palestine has been stable and enormous for two years: 77 percent in the latest round, with 81 percent of those most worried about criticizing Israel, against 11 percent worried about criticizing Palestinians and 6 percent about criticizing American policy. Lynch and Telhami added an Iran question this year to establish a baseline. Before the war, 17 percent said they self-censored on Iran. After it began, that doubled to 33 percent overall and 40 percent in the United States. A second closed topic opening inside four weeks, measured as it happened. If you want one thing to watch in this discipline, watch whether that number keeps climbing, because it shows closure as a process rather than a settled condition, and it separates the effect of war from the effect of any particular coalition’s preferences.

Funding. Federal language-and-area money went away and came partly back into institutions that had already cut. Two philanthropic streams are growing, and both have positions on the field’s central controversy. The Education Department launched a foreign gift reporting portal in January 2026 under Section 117, and Qatar tops the list of donor countries, though most of that money went to institutions with branch campuses in Doha. The administration has paired the portal with a compliance crackdown framed as national security. On the other side, donor money is building new capacity fast: the Koum Family Foundation endowed a permanent Israel studies program at Stanford after a three-year pilot, NYU launched an antisemitism center with a seven-figure gift and Emory is planning a policy institute under Deborah Lipstadt, and a Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association launched at the University of Haifa this month with founders from Gratz College and the London Centre.

The result is a field whose material base now consists of two rival philanthropies and a hostile federal government, with its most secure new research program being the study of its own repression. Both sides of the argument claim persecution, both can document some of it, and that is the one topic on which money is available from every direction.

The Sovietologists Got There First: What a Dead Field Tells Us About the One Being Defunded Now

Everything happening to Middle East Studies has happened before, in the same order, to a field that is now gone. Federal money built it for national security reasons. Both political camps accused it of serving the other side. Its funding was cut while officials explained that the knowledge it produced no longer served American interests. Then a crisis arrived, the government discovered it had no bench, and the recriminations ran in every direction at once.

That field was Soviet studies. The record is archival and checkable. It also has the merit of insulting everyone.

How the field was built

David Engerman’s history of American Soviet expertise opens on a striking fact. In 1948, with the Cold War underway, the United States government employed roughly a dozen Russian speakers.

What followed was one of the fastest state-sponsored knowledge projects in American history. The Rockefeller Foundation seeded Columbia’s Russian Institute in 1946. Carnegie funded Harvard’s Russian Research Center in 1948. The Ford Foundation joined in the mid-1950s at far larger scale. The Air Force paid for work at RAND. The CIA used academic research to supplement its own. After Sputnik in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act and put federal money into area studies and language training, which later moved into Title VI of the Higher Education Act.

Engerman’s summary of what the field was built to do is worth keeping in mind, because Middle East centers were built on the same premise. Russian and Soviet studies was designed to serve, in his phrase, both Mars and Minerva, both the national security state and academic life. That double loyalty was the point. It was also the fault line.

Both camps attacked it, and both had evidence

By the 1960s the field faced accusations from opposite directions.

Cold warriors held that Sovietology had gone soft, that its practitioners had talked themselves into treating the Soviet system as a normal state with normal interests, and that the revisionist historians who challenged the standard account of 1917 were performing apologetics in scholarly dress. Richard Pipes (1923-2018) built a career on that charge and got his chance to press it in 1976, when a review panel including academic Soviet specialists was convened to attack the CIA’s own estimate of Soviet strategic capability as too complacent.

From the other side came the argument that the field was bought. Its centers had been founded with intelligence money and foundation money that answered to the same policy establishment. Its scholars moved between universities and government. Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017) went from Columbia to the National Security Council. On this account the field could not produce honest knowledge about the Soviet Union because it existed to supply an adversary’s profile to the people planning against it.

Both charges had evidence behind them. That is the structural lesson, and it is the one that transfers. A field created by state money to answer state questions will be attacked from both directions, permanently, and neither attack will be baseless. Anyone in Middle East Studies who believes today’s crossfire is unprecedented, or that one side of it is manufactured, should read the Sovietology fights of 1968 to 1978 and notice how familiar the arguments sound.

The decline began long before the crisis

Soviet studies did not collapse in 1991 when its subject disappeared. Engerman dates the decline to the early 1970s. Détente lowered the sense of urgency. The American economy slumped and research money tightened. Government and foundation patrons began demanding more immediate policy relevance from the scholars they funded. The academic job market for Russianists stagnated. Senior figures retired or died without training successors into the positions they vacated. Lower-level government demand for expertise was satisfied by master’s degrees rather than doctorates.

By the time the Soviet Union fell, the field had already been shrinking for twenty years. The collapse of its subject finished something that funding and demography had started.

Set that beside the Middle East Studies numbers. Enrollment in Arabic fell 35 percent between 2009 and 2021. Doctoral production at Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies fell from 33 PhDs in the 2000 through 2006 cohort to 17 in 2017 through 2021. Direct entry into tenure-track jobs from that department went from 45.5 percent to 5.9 percent across the same span. All of that predates the funding terminations of 2025. Anyone telling the story as a sudden political attack on a healthy field is telling it wrong in the same way the 1991 story was told wrong.

The reckoning, and who got blamed

After 1991 came the question, put in the tone of an indictment: how did the Soviet experts miss it?

Plenty of specialists had documented economic stagnation, nationalities problems, and legitimacy deficits, and no serious forecasting method available in 1985 would have produced a date. But the recriminations did not wait for that argument. Engerman’s account has the field’s remaining scholars, already diminished in prestige, absorbed back into the disciplines they came from while the blame circulated.

A field built to serve national security is judged by whether it predicted the single event the security state cared about. If it did not, the earlier decades of language training, archival work, and institutional knowledge count for nothing in the verdict.

Middle East Studies is going to face the same test, and the Iran war of 2026 is the exam. The Middle East Scholar Barometer polled specialists in the days around the February 28 attacks. Five percent supported launching the war. One percent thought a broad assault would produce a pro-American democratic government in Tehran. Ninety-four percent had already concluded that the administration’s approach made war likelier. If the war ends the way those numbers imply, the field will have a claim on vindication that Sovietology never had. Whether that claim converts into money or standing is a separate question, and the Soviet precedent says it will not.

The natural experiment nobody talks about

In 1983 Congress passed the Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act, known as Title VIII, and declared in the statute that verified factual knowledge of that region was of the utmost importance to the national security of the United States. The program funded dissertation fellowships, language training, and briefings for embassy staff heading to posts in the region. Its alumni include Madeleine Albright (1937-2022), Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954), and Michael McFaul, who was ambassador to Russia while the program was being killed.

In fiscal 2013 the State Department withheld Title VIII funding. The program’s budget that year was about $3.5 million. Over the same period Title VI money was nearly halved from its 2010 level, leaving regional studies programs across all American universities sharing under $70 million, which one observer at the time compared to the annual cost of running the athletic department at a single large public university.

Russia annexed Crimea the following year. By 2016 the Pentagon had reclassified Russia as a top national security threat and Washington was holding public discussions about its shortage of Russia experts. In 2022 came the full invasion of Ukraine. A 2023 assessment by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies found that 44 percent of surveyed scholars had abandoned or suspended research projects, 36 percent had shifted their interests away from Russia, and 65 percent expected the war to reduce the inflow of Russia-focused doctoral students. Russia banned the association outright. In 2025 and 2026, with a land war in Europe running, reporting describes the Wilson Center shuttered and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships cut, prompting even wealthy universities to scale back Russia research.

Line the dates up and the proposition is testable. The United States defunded its Russia expertise pipeline in 2013, needed that expertise in 2014, needed far more of it in 2022, and cut deeper in 2025. Regional expertise takes decades to build and a budget cycle to destroy.

What the comparison denies to each side

To the field, it denies the victim account.

Sovietology failed to reproduce itself. Its senior figures did not replace themselves. Its job market decayed for twenty years while the field argued internally in a vocabulary that made its quarrels look, to anyone outside, like a private dispute over who was insufficiently critical of whom. It lost its patrons partly by making itself hard to explain to them. Middle East Studies is doing several of those things now, and the funding attack does not exempt it from the charge. A discipline whose honors go to Ottoman postal administration during a regional war may be doing excellent work, and it is also making a choice about legibility that has consequences it should own.

To the government, it denies the claim that defunding area expertise costs nothing.

The 2025 letters terminating Title VI grants called them inconsistent with administration priorities and said they do not advance American interests or values. The 1983 statute killed in 2013 said the opposite about the same category of knowledge, in law, on national security grounds. One of those two judgments has been tested against events. Whatever one thinks of what Middle East scholars believe about Israel and Palestine, the proposition that a country improves its understanding of a region by dismantling the institutions that teach its languages has a track record, and the track record is bad.

The disanalogies

Soviet studies was never widely accused of disloyalty to the United States. It was accused of naivety and of servility, which are different charges from the one now aimed at Middle East scholars over Israel and Palestine. That accusation has more force in American politics than either Cold War charge had, and it comes with donors, litigation, and immigration consequences attached.

Second, Sovietology had a single adversary state whose collapse settled the scoreboard. Middle East Studies has no equivalent terminal event, which means no comparable moment of reckoning and also no comparable moment of vindication.

Third, Soviet studies had essentially one paymaster. The American government and a small set of American foundations supplied the money and set the terms. Middle East Studies has three: a hostile federal government, a domestic donor class building parallel institutions, and foreign states, with Qatar now the largest single foreign source of funding to American universities. A field with one patron faces capture. A field with three faces something else, and the Sovietology literature has no case to offer on it.

What to do with this

The comparison suggests going to the archives.

Engerman documented the pathway from patron money to research question in Soviet studies: which topics attracted funding, which languages got taught, which questions became careers, and how those shifted as the patrons’ interests shifted. The same pathway can be documented for Middle East Studies, and the documents are public. Title VI grant awards by center and year are federal records. Foreign gift disclosures over $250,000 now sit in a searchable Education Department portal. Dissertation titles, job advertisements, and placement records are on department pages and in archived job boards. Put them on one timeline and you can ask whether money moved questions, in which direction, and with what lag.

That study cuts against everyone. It denies the field the claim that its research agenda is independent of who pays. It denies the field’s critics the claim that defunding produces better knowledge. And it is legible to people who will never read a word about settler colonialism, because it consists of dates, dollars, and counts.

The Sovietologists left a full record of how a field of this kind rises, quarrels, shrinks, gets blamed, and dissolves. Middle East Studies is somewhere in the middle of that sequence. Nobody has laid the two timelines side by side and checked which stage we are at.

Sources

David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), and the H-Diplo roundtable on it

Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act of 1983, 22 U.S.C. 4501-4508, and the FY2013 Title VIII decision

Title VI reductions and comparison figures

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, The State of Russian Studies in the United States: 2022 (2023)

Carnegie Corporation on the post-2022 crisis in Russian studies

Area studies funding terminations of 2025 and the partial restoration

Middle East Scholar Barometer on the Iran war

Princeton Near Eastern Studies first positions

Posted in Academia, Middle East | Comments Off

The Live Questions in Anthropology

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

A question is live when knowing the asker’s politics does not let you predict his answer. That test disqualifies a great deal of what anthropology currently treats as its cutting edge, and it clarifies the rest.

By that standard the discipline has fewer live questions than its conference programs suggest, and the ones it has cluster in the subfields with the least cultural authority inside the American Anthropological Association. The 2026 AAA meeting convenes in St. Louis in November under the theme “On the Verge,” which the association describes as covering climate tipping points, encroaching authoritarianism, the transmutations of racial biopolitics, the fate of neoliberalism, the spread of artificial intelligence, and teetering institutions. Read the list again and ask what a paper accepted under it might conclude. The theme names a mood and a set of expected findings. Six items, and a competent reader can predict the sign of the argument on five of them.

Anthropology now has two courts that award status, and they issue contradictory verdicts. The internal court consists of the AAA, its sections, its journals, its prizes, and the hiring committees at twenty or so departments. The external court consists of deans, provosts, funders, the science press, the labor statisticians, and the small readership of higher education journalism. Until recently a scholar could ignore the second court. That ended this summer.

On June 5, 2026, the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis released a report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, written by a ten-person committee chaired by Paul Boghossian (b. 1957) and including Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954) and the Harvard evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich. The committee reported that every field it studied showed a deterioration in scholarly standards driven by the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones, and it singled out anthropology as the most extreme case, describing a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a climate in which dissent on charged topics is suppressed and punished. Among its evidence was the AAA’s 2023 cancellation of an accepted panel titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” which the association said would harm members’ safety and dignity and contradicted settled science.

The AAA fired back within a week. Its president, Carolyn M. Rouse of Princeton, called the report undertheorized, poorly sited, and politically motivated in a letter published in The Washington Post on June 15, and argued that the greatest threat to the humanities comes from the insistence that only one side of a debate represents legitimate knowledge. Then on July 14 The Chronicle of Higher Education published Stephanie M. Lee’s interview with Rouse. Rouse defended the 2023 cancellation, said the idea that there are two sexes is factually incorrect, compared teaching a sex binary to converting an astronomy department into an astrology department, and, when Lee cited a 2022 survey showing a substantial minority of anthropologists treat sex as binary, replied that she does not believe in opinion research. The reaction ran heavily against her, including from people with no stake in the Vanderbilt committee’s politics. The Chronicle‘s own editors asked their readers whether she had validated the report she meant to refute.

Rouse rose through the internal court, and her answers are competent by its standards: she treats the dispute as a coalition conflict, identifies her opponents’ interests, and declines to concede a claim her side has invested in. The external court reads the same answers as a confession. Both courts are now watching, and the internal court has not adapted. Status inside anthropology and standing outside it have come apart, and the people highest in one are increasingly liabilities in the other. Didier Fassin (b. 1955), who holds the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Huxley Memorial Medal, is among the few who still rise in both, which has less to do with his politics than with his habit of grounding moral claims in police stations, prisons, and clinics where the reader can check him.

On the division between those who ask and those who answer, the accurate description is an economy. Cultural anthropology pays in portable nouns. Anna Tsing (b. 1952) holds friction and capitalist ruins. Audra Simpson holds refusal. Elizabeth A. Povinelli (b. 1962) holds geontopower. Fassin holds humanitarian reason. A portable noun is a claim on citations from researchers the coiner will never meet, collectible for decades. The ethnographers who supply the case material collect nothing comparable, which is why the plenary invitations and the coinages travel together.

The noun economy has been depreciating for about five years, and the reason is inflation rather than refutation. Nobody disproved the ontological turn. The field minted more terms than it could absorb, and the marginal term stopped buying anything. Viveiros de Castro (b. 1951), Descola (b. 1949), and Strathern (b. 1941) taught the discipline that other peoples inhabit other worlds, and the lesson took, which is exactly why announcing it now earns no credit. The same exhaustion is overtaking generic multispecies vocabulary. Work that names water rights, mineral concessions, land titles, and who pays the insurance still rises, because the noun has to be earned against something a reader can dispute.

The four-field asymmetry follows from this. Ancient DNA, isotopes, proteomics, and comparative energetics are revising deep human history on an annual cycle. That work appears in Nature and Science under author lists of thirty or forty names, and the AAA’s prestige apparatus cannot process it, because that apparatus was built to reward a single author who writes a book. So the discipline’s most consequential empirical output is produced by people nearly invisible in its own hierarchy, publishing outside its own journals, and its most visible figures produce vocabulary.

Which questions pass the test I started with? Five, by my count.

Whether the standard sequence of social evolution happened. David Wengrow (b. 1972) asks whether agriculture, cities, bureaucracy, inequality, and the state form one irreversible chain, and whether early societies alternated among political arrangements by choice. Specialist archaeologists split on whether his generalizations outrun his evidence, and the split runs through political camps rather than along them. That is a live question, and it is the strongest reason UCL currently draws attention in archaeology.

Whether repatriation increases or decreases what can be known. The 2024 NAGPRA regulations require institutions to obtain free, prior, and informed consent from tribes before exhibiting, permitting access to, or conducting research on covered remains and objects. The American Museum of Natural History closed its Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains halls in January 2024 in response. Two claims are both true and neither settles the matter: the collections were largely assembled coercively, and consent requirements have stopped some forensic and biological research.

What large language models do to theories of language and personhood. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published a themed cluster in April 2026, introduced by Webb Keane and Constantine Nakassis, on the pressure that machine-generated discourse puts on prevailing concepts of language, personhood, and the human. Linguistic anthropology got there first because it has the tools. Whether the discipline builds sustained fieldwork inside model labs, data-labeling operations, and automated state agencies remains open, and it is where a mid-sized department could make its reputation in five years.

Whether ethnographic authority survives a field that refuses observation. Platforms, supply chains, closed war zones, and firms that require nondisclosure agreements do not permit the year in the village. Refusal became a concept in this territory, and refusal also names a practical problem with no agreed solution.

Whether biological variation carries explanatory weight for human difference. This is the question the AAA closed in 2023 and has spent three years failing to reopen. Metabolic and skeletal and genomic work continues to produce results with implications for race, sex, health, and category validity, and the association’s leadership has committed itself to a position on part of it that its own membership does not uniformly hold.

No single department defines the discipline’s center now, and Chicago‘s inability to do so is the significant change of the past twenty years, since its quality has not declined. Princeton holds the AAA presidency and a compact faculty strong in medicine, race, migration, and policing, and it is also, this month, the address of the discipline’s public embarrassment. Columbia concentrates high theory. Berkeley, UCLA, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Stanford together carry more of the rising work on environment, Indigenous authority, migration, technology, and method than any one campus does, and Stanford’s linguistic anthropology matters more now than its size suggests. Oxford holds the safest general reputation. Harvard and the Max Planck institutes hold the biomolecular frontier and are barely legible as anthropology to the association’s cultural wing.

Four parties are trying to close questions. The AAA closed one in 2023 by canceling a panel, and its president has defended that closure this month rather than quietly abandoning it. The membership voted in July 2023 to boycott Israeli academic institutions, with 2,016 of 2,851 votes cast in favor on a 37 percent turnout, which narrows exchange whatever one thinks of the cause. The Vanderbilt and WashU report, having identified suppression, recommended that administrators reform departments using advice from minority voices within the discipline and from adjacent fields with better standards, which the two campuses’ AAUP chapters called a heckler’s veto over any syllabus an administrator dislikes, and on that point the chapters are right. Legislatures and boards restrict teaching on race, colonialism, gender, and Palestine.

The largest closer is the budget office. The New York Fed’s February 2026 release put anthropology first among seventy-three majors for unemployment among recent graduates at 7.9 percent, roughly double the average across majors, with underemployment at 55.3 percent. UNC Greensboro is closing its department. Sheffield closed archaeology. The AAA has run an emergency town hall on defending departments and published a crisis toolkit. Eliminating a program closes every question its faculty and students might have asked, permanently and without argument, and no one has to defend the decision in a journal. Anthropology is generating live questions at the same moment it is losing the institutional capacity to pursue them, and its leadership is spending that capacity on a fight about whether the questions were ever contestable.

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Turner v Turner

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

In mid-December 2023 the senior editors of Theory and Society learned that Springer Nature had decided on a different view of the journal going forward. Ten of them resigned. The corresponding editors followed on January 4, 2024. The names came out on a listserv and then on the sociology blog Scatterplot: Javier Auyero at Texas, Tim Bartley at Georgetown, Jean Beaman at Santa Barbara, Karida Brown at Emory, Miguel Centeno at Princeton, Claire Decoteau at Illinois Chicago, Jack Goldstone at George Mason, Tianna Paschel at Berkeley. The letter thanked the executive editor, Janet Gouldner, and the managing editor, Karen Lucas, for years of service, and said the signers had lost confidence that the journal would continue the project Alvin Gouldner founded five decades earlier.

Alvin Ward Gouldner (1920-1980) took his doctorate at Columbia under Robert Merton and held the Max Weber Research Professorship at Washington University in St. Louis. He founded Theory and Society in 1974 to renew social theory against what he took to be the constraints of positivism. He wrote The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. He described the rising intellectual class as a flawed universal class, one that claimed to speak for humanity while pursuing its own interests, which is the argument Musa al-Gharbi has been running with better data ever since. In 2026 Washington University in St. Louis, which paid Gouldner’s salary and named his chair after Weber, paid for a commission to investigate whether scholarship in the humanistic social sciences has been subordinated to politics.

The publisher replaced Gouldner’s widow with two men. Janet Gouldner had held the post since 1981, the year after her husband died in Madrid at sixty. Kevin McCaffree, an associate professor at the University of North Texas in Denton, and Jonathan H. Turner (b. September 7, 1942), the 38th University Professor of the University of California. They published a statement of goals for the journal, subtitled “The Troubled State of Sociology,” which said that a monoculture of critical approaches dominates the discipline and undermines its professional legitimacy, and called for a theory journal devoted to scientific theorizing. Philip Cohen at Maryland wrote that he would not submit to the journal or review for it, and suggested others do the same. Turner told Retraction Watch he was surprised and saddened by the board’s reaction, could not see why they were upset, and intended to ignore the controversy until the first issues came out and everyone saw that the mission was being served.

Thirty-three years before this, Sage published The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. It remains the standard one-volume history of the discipline. It has two authors who share a surname and little else. One is Jonathan H. Turner. The other is Stephen Park Turner (b. March 1, 1951), born in Chicago, now Graduate Research Professor and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

The book argues that American sociology kept failing to become a science for institutional reasons rather than intellectual ones. It grew out of the reform movements of the Progressive era, so it inherited a demand for moral usefulness before it had a method. It lived on undergraduate enrollment, so its size tracked student taste rather than discovery. It depended on foundation and government patronage, so its questions bent toward what funders wanted asked. It fragmented into subfields that shared no core, so each generation could announce a fresh start without owing anything to the last. The scientific ambition was real and recurrent. So was the failure. The title is a diagnosis.

The two authors then went in opposite directions.

Jonathan Turner kept building. Forty-two books. General theory of interaction, the sociology of emotions, social institutions, stratification, and in the last two decades evolutionary sociology and neurosociology, a program that asks sociologists to reconnect with biology and takes their refusal as an overreaction to sociobiology. He has been president of the Pacific Sociological Association, a fellow of the AAAS, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the ASA emotions section. He directs an institute for theoretical social science in Santa Barbara. He is a man who read the diagnosis in 1990 and spent the decades after trying to supply the missing core by writing it.

Stephen Turner took the tools apart. In The Social Theory of Practices (1994) he argued that the concept everyone was leaning on, the shared practice, a tacit understanding held in common by a group, has no plausible route by which it gets transmitted or reproduced. He traced the contortions from Durkheim to Kripke’s Wittgenstein and concluded that this defect explains why social theory cannot get past constructing fuzzy analogies. Brains/Practices/Relativism followed, then Explaining the Normative, which asks what the appeal to normativity explains that the social sciences do not, and finds the answers all over the place and nobody embarrassed. Then Understanding the Tacit, on what can be made explicit and what cannot. Then American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal (2014), an update on the near-death of the discipline in the 1980s and its transformation inside the new university.

He has written that his intellectual community is European social theory and that he lives on European time. He is happiest in an outdoor cafe on a European square, talking with colleagues. Brill published a volume of essays on his work. A biographical volume, Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory, traces the career from the violent South Side of Chicago through the rebellion against the hegemony of Merton and Parsons. None of it registers in American sociology’s status system, which reads four markers: association office, an editorship at ASR or AJS, a Du Bois award, a chair in a ranked sociology department. He has none of them.

In 2022 he coedited The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science? with Robert Leroux (b. 1964) of Ottawa and Thierry Martin (b. 1950) of Franche-Comté. The book asks whether the subjugation of sociology to political ideology reflects an exhaustion of ideas or a failure in the founding program of making sociology a science. That is the question the American academy would spend 2026 shouting about. Jonathan Turner reviewed the volume in Contemporary Sociology in 2023. A review appeared in Philosophy of the Social Sciences in early 2026. The book entered no fight.

Then the fight arrived without it.

Shelley Correll took the ASA presidency and chose a theme for the New York meeting in August 2026: putting sociology to work for a more equitable society, with an argument that the discipline needs solutions, externally engaged research, and theories of change. Sociologists for Palestine petitioned for a membership vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions, the association declined on procedural grounds, and the group is boycotting the meeting. Melissa Wilde ran for the presidency on the position that the association should stay out of politics and lost to Rory McVeigh of Notre Dame, a quantitative sociologist of right-wing mobilization and a former editor of ASR. Paul Boghossian of NYU delivered a report to the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis finding that scholarly standards in several fields have been subordinated to political goals. Several scholars named in it said they had never been contacted. Pamela Paul told the story in the Wall Street Journal on July 24, 2026, and quoted Christian Smith, lately of Notre Dame, wondering what would happen if the discipline were liquidated.

Every source in that fight reaches for Smith’s The Sacred Project of American Sociology. Almost nobody reaches for The Impossible Science, which is in print and known. Smith wrote a moral indictment, and a moral indictment can be picked up by either side and swung. Stephen Turner wrote an institutional history, and an institutional history gives both sides worse news than they want. It tells the reformers there is no golden age of scientific sociology to restore, because the program failed at the founding and kept failing under Merton and Parsons, who were nobody’s activists. It tells the association that the moralizing it defends is the discipline’s oldest habit, present in the reform societies before the departments existed, and no vocal minority put it there. Nobody can build a coalition out of that.

Grant the incoming editors their premise about the monoculture and grant Springer its case. The publisher says it spent years trying to discuss a successor with Janet Gouldner and got nowhere, raised the question with five senior editors in person in 2019 and got no engagement, and inherited turnaround times that had become indefensible, which the departing side does not much dispute. Take all of that as true. A journal is still a referee network before it is a doctrine. The competence to tell a good theory paper from a bad one lives in the people who have done it for years, and by Stephen Turner’s own argument that competence has no route of transmission apart from those people. It cannot be written into a statement of goals. It cannot be installed by memo. The board walked out and took the thing being restored with them, and the new editors report that the scholars they approached with critical credentials declined. You can announce standards. You cannot appoint the tacit skill that applies them. That inference is mine, drawn from his 1994 book. He has not made it about this journal.

One Turner holds a journal, a program, and a fight, at eighty-three, after nearly six decades of trying to give the discipline the core it lacks. The other holds the argument that explains why the fight will produce nothing, and holds it in books shelved under philosophy, honored in Uppsala and Manchester and read in Europe, uncited by the people whose situation he described. Gouldner’s chair sits at a university that now audits politicized scholarship. The journal he founded to renew critical theory prints a manifesto against critical monoculture. His widow was replaced by mail.

A discipline with a cumulative core would owe The Impossible Science an answer. A federation of moral projects can route around it. It has.

Notes

Theory and Society’s impact factor in 2024 was 1.4. That’s the Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor, from the Journal Citation Reports. The arithmetic: take every citation recorded in 2024 to articles the journal published in 2022 and 2023, divide by the number of citable items published in those two years. So 1.4 means the average article from that two-year window picked up about one and a half citations during 2024. One tracker puts the underlying counts at 36 articles in 2022 and 24 in 2023, drawing 43 and 21 citations in 2024, which lands near that figure. Different databases compute different versions of the same idea and disagree; Scopus-based measures put the journal above 2 for the same period. Clarivate dropped from three decimals to one in 2023 to discourage people from treating small gaps as real.

Three things follow.

It is a mean over a skewed pile. Sixty articles, sixty-odd citations. A few pieces carry most of that and a large share get cited zero times in the window. The mean tells you almost nothing about the typical article.

The two-year window punishes theory journals by construction. Sociology cites slowly. Arguments arrive in books, get absorbed over a decade, and show up in footnotes long after publication. An empirical paper in the American Sociological Review on a hot inequality question gets cited within eighteen months because a dozen people are running adjacent regressions. A theory paper on Bourdieu and valuation gets cited in 2031. ASR has run around 9 on this metric, AJS around 3, both figures a few years old. Theory and Society was never going to sit near them, and never did, including in the decades when the people who just resigned considered it essential.

The third point. The 2024 figure counts citations to articles published in 2022 and 2023. Every one of those articles was submitted, reviewed and accepted under Janet Gouldner. McCaffree and Turner took over in December 2023. Their first acceptances began appearing in 2024, so the earliest report that measures their editorship is the 2026 or 2027 JCR. This is a fact about the old regime.

Springer inherited a journal with long turnaround times and modest measured reach, which is the strongest part of its case for acting.

What would show whether the reform took hold is all countable and none of it comes from Clarivate. Submission volume. Desk rejection and acceptance rates. Time from submission to first decision, since that was the publisher’s stated reason. Whether the new editorial board got populated, given that Turner said the scholars with critical credentials he approached declined. Who publishes there now, and whether job candidates from top-twenty departments list it. Whether the Annual Review of Sociology essays and the section syllabi cite anything from the new volumes. Two more years and that record will exist.

Posted in Philosophy, Sociology, Stephen Turner | Comments Off

The Live Questions in Sociology

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

The live questions, ranked by how much career consequence attaches to them. First, whether sociology is a science or a movement. That question is live because money and state power now attach to it. Florida stripped introductory sociology from general education at its public colleges. The Boghossian commission, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, delivered a report in April 2026 that found political goals had come to sit above the advancement of knowledge in several fields, and it was addressed to presidents and chancellors rather than to the disciplines. The American Sociological Association declined to hold a membership vote on a Sociologists for Palestine proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions, on procedural grounds, and the group is boycotting the August meeting in return. ASA leadership defended the refusal by pointing to members who left after the 2024 ceasefire resolution, saying the association had been harmed. Melissa Wilde ran for president on associational neutrality and lost. Every substantive question below now gets asked inside that fight.

Second, what artificial intelligence does to work, skill and authority. The weak version counts vanishing jobs. The strong version asks who gets to define skill, which workers keep discretion, whether surveillance replaces supervision, and whether automated systems hide badly paid human labor. Arne Kalleberg won the 2026 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award for the institutional frame, and Allison Pugh won the 2025 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for The Last Human Job, which asks what happens when organizations economize on the human relationship. Ya-Wen Lei is asking the sharper technological questions.

Third, what kind of inequality now counts. Income no longer exhausts it. Wealth, debt, inheritance, housing, incarceration and geography do more work, and the hard question is how they interact. Fabian Pfeffer on wealth transmission, Fenaba Addo on racial wealth and debt, Kimberly Kay Hoang and Ken-Hou Lin on elite wealth and financialization.

Fourth, how inequality survives after formal exclusion becomes unacceptable. Organizations endorse equality and produce unequal outcomes. Cecilia Ridgeway built the account of how status beliefs reproduce gender inequality in ordinary interaction. Michèle Lamont made evaluation and boundary work central. Shelley Correll showed how neutral-looking practices produce gendered results. Fabien Accominotti‘s work on meritocratic status orders is the most promising newer entry.

Fifth, fertility. Declines have outrun the models across countries and classes, and sociology is at risk of losing this question to economists and demographers, partly because several candidate explanations are awkward to state inside the discipline.

Then polarization and democratic strain, immigration enforcement as a producer of legal status and racial category, mortality inequality and how to measure it, state capacity and why competent bureaucracies fail, climate as institutional lock-in rather than attitude, and the methods fight over whether digital traces and language models measure meaning.

On who gains status from asking, you have to separate four currencies. Association office is one. Correll holds the presidency and chose a theme built around solutions and externally engaged research, asking how sociology can be put to work to build a more equitable world. Alford A. Young Jr. of Michigan follows her. Rory McVeigh of Notre Dame, a quantitative political sociologist of right-wing mobilization and a former ASR editor, won the 2026 election, with Dina Okamoto of Indiana as vice president-elect. Awards are a second currency, and the 2026 slate rewards two things at once: classical labor-market stratification in Kalleberg, and global-South racial and labor history in Zophia Edwards of Johns Hopkins, whose book on Black radical trade unionism in Trinidad and Tobago took the top book prize. Joya Misra took the Jessie Bernard, Prudence Carter the Cox-Johnson-Frazier, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field and Anna Romina Guevarra the public understanding award.

Journal control is the third and least discussed currency. The ASR editorship sits at UMass Amherst with David Cort, Laurel Smith-Doerr and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, joined by Misra in 2026. AJS sits at Chicago with John Levi Martin, who defends theory and mechanism against technique. Whoever holds those desks sets the price of publication for a decade of assistant professors.

Citation authority is the fourth. Lamont is the closest thing to a general agenda setter. Mario Luis Small, now chair at Columbia after Harvard, is probably the sociologist whose judgment is trusted across the most methodological camps. Robert Sampson is the empirical benchmark. Viviana Zelizer holds nearly universal affection. Matthew Desmond has the largest public footprint and less internal authority than his public profile suggests.

What gains status from asking right now? Interventions with measured effects. Correll‘s theme converts the discipline’s reward structure toward testable theories of change. Whoever produces credible experiments on organizational inequality over the next five years converts that into prizes, chairs and grants.

No single department is most prestigious for the live questions. The old block holds: Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, Chicago, Stanford, UNC, NYU, Northwestern. Prestige for a given question sits elsewhere. UNC for work and the life course. Minnesota for mortality. Michigan and Wisconsin for population and stratification data. Berkeley for economic sociology and digital classification, where Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy‘s account of ordinal ranking has more traction inside the discipline than Shoshana Zuboff‘s surveillance capitalism, which is a business-school idea. Princeton for poverty and for technology-and-race in the public sphere. The department moving fastest is Johns Hopkins, which has taken Monica Prasad from Northwestern as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, holds Pugh, and now holds the book-award winner. Columbia moved up by taking Small from Harvard and making him chair.

On askers versus answerers: The people known for questions collect the presidencies, the theme statements and the book prizes. Lamont asks what sociology’s next large project should be. Christian Smith (b. 1960), Musa al-Gharbi, Kevin McCaffree and Ilana Redstone ask what has gone wrong with the discipline. Andrew Abbott and John Levi Martin ask whether technique has displaced explanation. The people known for answers are mostly quantitative and mostly hold their authority inside one subfield. Sampson answered the neighborhood question with collective efficacy. Bruce Western answered the punishment question. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev answered the diversity-training question by showing which programs move numbers and which do not, which is why they get cited by human resources departments and by critics of human resources departments alike. Prasad wrote the method book for producing answers and moved to Hopkins to do it.

Asking pays better than answering because a question cannot be refuted and an answer can. That asymmetry explains a good deal of what the critics call theory-ladenness.

Moving up: the solutions program, intervention research, wealth and asset inequality, AI and work, mortality measurement, bureaucracy and state capacity, Johns Hopkins, Columbia. Moving down: the descriptive monograph, theory as pure critique, the association’s own leverage, and the undergraduate franchise. Also moving down, the heterodox reform project inside the discipline. Wilde lost. Al-Gharbi holds his appointment in Stony Brook‘s School of Communication and Journalism rather than a sociology department. Theory and Society was captured by publisher fiat rather than persuasion, and the entire editorial board walked when Springer Nature replaced the executive editor and installed McCaffree and Jonathan Turner, who announced they would break what they called a dominant monoculture of critical approaches undermining the field’s professional legitimacy. A journal taken that way has no constituency to publish in it.

Philip N. Cohen writes:

On the Scatterplot sociology blog there are two posts describing the situation at the Springer journal Theory & Society, one by Dan Hirschman and one by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, both of which I recommend. The gist of it is the executives at Springer chose new chief editors for the journal without consulting the editorial board or other editors, so they all quit, and now there are new editors with a very different mission for the journal. Specifically, they want to upend the “monoculture of critical approaches” that “utterly dominate” the discipline, “undermining sociology’s professional legitimacy.”
The two new editors are Kevin McCaffree and Jonathan Turner. The latter of these is a famous “greatest generation” (in his words) sociologist. Probably not coincidentally, Turner has just written a ridiculous get-off-my-lawn screed about the state of the discipline, which he sees as being overrun with women, nonbinary people, and racial/ethnic minorities doing social justice warrior mesearch, and generally wrecking the place (“What drove the change away from science,” Turner writes, “were changes in the demography of sociology.”) It’s basically a recapitulation of Christian Smith’s Sacred Project of American Sociology, which Turner loves (practically the only thing he cites) and which I reviewed here.
I read Turner’s paper and made some notes on the PDF, and I share that version here. Here’s a flavor of his prose:
“Once a professional organization dedicated to the study of all dimensions of the social universe begins to mix highly moralized ideologies with the study of inequality, the possibilities of value-neutral science decline and are replaced by ideological advocacy and political calls to redress the problem on injustice. And once injustice, which is just one aspect of human social organization is over-taught in academic departments—from English through ethnic, gender, sexuality programs to sociology departmental curricula—the curricula all over campuses and the programs at most sociological meetings operate merely to magnify ideological hype at the expense of pushing science and value-neutral research. Indeed, value-neutral research and science are often seen by the new activists as “part of the problem” in overcoming injustices. Thus, sociology has mobilized those who have committed to giving up their professionalism, thereby demonizing those who have created the large knowledge base that now exists in sociology.”
The problem with sociology, in his view, is people obsessed with injustice, who have given up their professionalism, steamrolling over value-neutral research and failing to show appropriate deference to those who came before them, who bequeathed us their knowledge base.

Who is trying to close down questions? Everyone in all directions. From outside, Florida closed the teaching franchise. From inside, the norm Redstone identifies, that a group disparity establishes discrimination, raises the price of stating alternative causal hypotheses, and price is how closure works in a peer-reviewed field. Boycott politics closes a set of collaborators and a set of questions by design. The association closed a membership vote and called it procedure. On the reform side, the Boghossian commission named living scholars as examples of defective work, and several told Inside Higher Ed they had never heard of the report and considered their work misrepresented, which is closure by administrative referral rather than argument. Smith’s line about liquidating the discipline is a closure fantasy even said in exasperation.

I’m a Stephen P. Turner partisan. Why isn’t he in this discussion? Because these maps get built from status signals, and he emits none in the register they read. Turner holds a philosophy appointment. He is Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, where he also holds the title Distinguished University Professor. He has never held ASA office, never edited ASR or AJS, never won a Du Bois award, and does not sit in a ranked sociology department. His books come out in Routledge and Brill series and his articles land in Philosophy of the Social Sciences and the Weber literature. Ask a model to rank sociologists by who gains status from asking live questions and it reads ASA politics, award lists, journal desks and citations inside sociology journals. Turner registers on none of those instruments. The silence is a property of the measuring device.

(Stephen P. Turner sits on some fifteen editorial boards and is the longest-serving Collaborating Editor of Social Studies of Science. He holds no editorship at sociology’s core journals.)

The second reason is that his question has no dataset, no funder and no incoming cohort. He asks what conditions would have to hold for sociology to be a science and whether they have ever held. Nobody is competing for that question, so nobody shows up in a status map for holding it.

On rank, three answers.

On the meta-question, whether the discipline is a science or a movement, he ranks first on priority and first on argument. He co-wrote The Impossible Science, the standard one-volume history of American sociology, and later updated it as American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal. The 2026 fight is downstream of that book and almost nobody in the fight cites it. The critics reach for Christian Smith‘s Sacred Project because a moral indictment travels. Turner’s account gives worse news to both camps. It says the trouble is structural and present near the founding, that the scientific program kept failing for institutional reasons rather than ideological capture, and that a return to science has no golden age to return to. Neither the ASA nor Heterodox Academy can use that, so neither picks it up.

He also got there four years early in print. He co-edited The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science? (Routledge, 2022), which asks whether sociology’s subjugation to political ideologies reflects an exhaustion of ideas or a failure in the original program of making sociology a science. That is the Boghossian question and the Pamela Paul question, posed with better distinctions, by people who know the history. Jonathan H. Turner reviewed it in Contemporary Sociology, and it produced no traction in the argument that broke a year later.

Jonathan Turner, his co-author on The Impossible Science, now co-edits Theory and Society and announced a campaign against the critical monoculture. One author of the standard institutional history runs the reform journal. The other, the stronger philosopher of the two, appears in none of the coverage.

Second register. On the AI and skill question, he holds capital nobody is spending. The live problem is which capacities can be made explicit and which cannot, and that is the subject of Understanding the Tacit and The Social Theory of Practices. Pugh’s connective labor, the deskilling argument, the fight over whether language models capture meaning: all of it needs an account of the tacit, and the sociologists doing the work reach for Polanyi secondhand or for practice theory. Practice theory is the thing Turner argued cannot work, because there is no plausible route by which a shared practice gets transmitted or reproduced. A negative result of that kind is exactly the constraint you need when asking what a model can absorb from a workplace and what stays in the worker. If I were betting on an unfashionable apparatus getting rediscovered in the next five years, this is my bet.

Third register. The Politics of Expertise and Liberal Democracy 3.0 sit on top of the expertise-and-democracy question, and there he has standing, cited by political theorists and science studies people. That is where his authority lives.

So: near zero in the currencies I described in the map, high in the philosophy of social science, first in priority on the discipline’s own meta-question, holding unused theoretical assets on the AI question. Stephen Park Turner is honored, with a Brill volume of essays on his work and a biographical volume tracing the career. Honored in philosophy. Amazon

His absence from these maps supports his thesis. A discipline with a cumulative core would owe him an answer. A federation of moral projects can route around him, and does.

Stephen Turner’s argument resists testing, which is awkward for a man arguing about scientific standards. He is stronger at showing why programs fail than at specifying what would succeed, so the reform camp gets no usable instructions from him. He writes for a small European-inflected audience. And the claim that a discipline ignores a critic because the critic is right cannot be checked.

Notes

The Centre for Heterodox Social Science ran the Heterodox Social Science Conference 2026 at the Vinson Centre, University of Buckingham, July 23 to 25, second annual after the inaugural June 2025, directed by Eric Kaufmann, with tracks on critical woke studies, feminism and gender, populism and the nation, settler colonialism, and a document called the Buckingham Manifesto, described as a countercultural vision for a politically neutral social science. In January the Centre launched a Heterodox Social Science Database, a curated catalogue of work from outside what it calls the dominant cultural left paradigm, with a stated plan to attach its own retrieval model so that researchers querying it get channeled to heterodox sources where mainstream systems channel them to progressive ones.

Korom measures prestige by citation, across generalist, specialist and international journals. A curated rival index with a language model on top is an attempt to build a second citation universe, which is to say a second prestige system. Whether a reference class can be manufactured that way is an open empirical question. Who is asking it?

Germany gives you the nine-year test case. The Akademie für Soziologie was founded July 14, 2017 in Mannheim, out of an April call with 112 signatories, first chaired by Thomas Hinz of Konstanz, committed to analytisch-empirische Soziologie and to sociology as a Realwissenschaft. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, founded 1909 by Tönnies, Weber and Simmel, carried on. A 2023 piece in the International Review of Sociology treats the split as a case study in disciplinary power. Nine years of congresses now exist, so the question has an answer available: has the Academy produced work that DGS members are obliged to cite. Psychology has the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, founded 2022, which held its first conference on February 24, 2023, scheduled against the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, invitation only, roughly seventy-five people, and which Lee Jussim introduced as a samizdat. Anthropology’s version of the science fight runs back to the 2010 quarrel over the American Anthropological Association’s mission statement and the Society for Anthropological Sciences.

Turner appears in the Korom paper three times.

He is in Appendix B, the register of 346 candidate authors. He is in the bibliography twice, cited as the authority: Turner and Turner 1990 supports Korom’s claim that the Columbia, Harvard and Chicago departments established the discipline’s norms, and Turner 2014 supports the footnote that orthodox Parsonianism did not survive Gouldner‘s Coming Crisis and that the money began collapsing in the 1970s. He does not appear in either top fifty. Jonathan Turner appears in the 2010s fifty. So the paper that maps sociology’s prestige elite uses one Turner to explain how the elite was built and ranks the other Turner inside it.

Habermas and Butler entered the 2010s elite as philosophers. Korom notes the shift from anthropologists in the 1970s to philosophers in the 2010s. Korom’s finding is that status requires reception in the discipline’s core, no scholar in either era scored higher with specialists than with generalists, and dominating several communities inside sociology is insufficient. Turner’s reception sits in philosophy of social science and science studies, which are adjacent rather than core. His self-description, engaged internationally and not with American sociology, describes a reception profile that Korom’s data says cannot produce elite status in the discipline, whatever it produces elsewhere.

In 1987 South Florida made Stephen P. Turner the Graduate Research Professor in Sociology. In 1989 he moved the same title to Philosophy. He took the exit thirty-seven years ago, at his own university, and the new book, Cognitive Science and the Reconceptualization of Social Theory: Naturalizing the Social, is listed by Routledge for July 29. He expects no American sociological review and will probably be right. The Buckingham project and the Mannheim academy are the collective version of what he did alone in 1989. The question is no longer whether reform of the incumbent journal takes, but whether exit builds anything that accumulates.

Who Gets to Publish the List

On the night of July 25, 2026, Ashley Rubin sat down to write up the third and final day of the Heterodox Social Science Conference at the University of Buckingham. She had blurry vision from lack of sleep. She said so in the post, along with a warning that she had not coded her notes, that the themes she drew out might reflect her own selective attention, and that she was not going to run the draft through GPT for a coherence check. She is a sociologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, author of The Deviant Prison and Rocking Qualitative Social Science, and the sociologist who worked on the report that the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis commissioned on politicization in the social sciences. She wrote that only in a room like that one can you see how narrow your usual range of exposure is.

The room was at the Vinson Centre. Registration was free, places limited, and the Thursday evening gala dinner also free. Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Buckingham, runs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, and organized the thing. Buckingham is private, which is part of the point. The tracks covered the end of woke, critical woke studies, higher education policy, feminism and gender, psychotherapy and psychology, populism and the nation, and settler colonialism. Attendees debated a document called the Buckingham Manifesto, described as a countercultural vision for a politically neutral social science. This was the second annual meeting. The first ran in June 2025.

Two proposals surface in Rubin’s account, and they are the same proposal in two costumes.

The first is a decadal survey. She has been pushing this for a while and put it at the end of her latest article in Theory and Society. Astrophysics does it: a panel of respected scholars sits down and lays out the research agenda for the next ten years, naming what should be studied and what has been neglected. Rubin wants sociology to do the same, with attention to topics that fell out of fashion because they read as conservative, theories nobody has bothered to test, and questions the field could answer if it were willing to ask them. The purpose is to give direction to the people holding money.

The second is Kevin McCaffree’s. He has been talking about the Hilbert problems, the twenty-three unsolved questions David Hilbert (1862-1943) set before mathematics in 1900. Hilbert named the gaps and mathematicians spent the next century filling them. McCaffree wants a list like that for sociology, so the money follows the unknowns.

A decadal survey and a Hilbert list are both lists of live questions. So is a presidential theme. So is an award slate.

Shelley Correll took the American Sociological Association presidency and set the theme for the New York meeting in August: putting sociology to work for a more equitable society, with an argument that the discipline needs solutions, theories of change, and research partnerships outside the academy. The 2026 awards went to Arne Kalleberg for a career on precarious work and employment institutions, to Zophia Edwards of Johns Hopkins for a book on Black radical trade unionism in Trinidad and Tobago, to Joya Misra, to Prudence Carter, and to Elizabeth Wrigley-Field for public understanding of the discipline. Read those together and you have a statement about which questions carry status and which do not. Nobody involved calls it a list. It functions as one, and it reaches every assistant professor deciding what to write next.

The association publishes its agenda through themes, prizes, journal desks and syllabi, and the publication is invisible because it is continuous. What Buckingham is proposing is the same act performed deliberately, in one document, by a panel with names attached. The novelty is the visibility.

Which brings the story back to a journal.

In mid-December 2023 Springer Nature told the senior editors of Theory and Society it had a completely different view of the journal’s future. The board resigned in stages. Kevin McCaffree of the University of North Texas and Jonathan H. Turner took over and published a statement of goals subtitled “The Troubled State of Sociology,” announcing that a monoculture of critical approaches dominated the discipline and undermined its professional legitimacy. Philip Cohen at Maryland said he would not submit or review. The 2024 impact factor came in at 1.4, computed from articles the old regime had accepted, and people read it as a verdict on the new one.

The journal has a constituency now. In 2024 it ran John Iceland and Eric Silver on how commitments to social justice distort what the field knows about racial disparities. In 2025 it ran a study that coded every article published in Sociological Theory and Theory and Society across the decade from 2008 to 2018, four hundred and forty-five articles, tracking protagonists, antagonists and citation counts. By late June 2026 its roster of contributors included Philip Tetlock, Rubin, Callie Burt, Thomas Schubert and Roy Baumeister. Rubin’s own piece asks where the line falls between appropriate and inappropriate conduct for a researcher who has politics.

So the referee network walked out and a different network moved in. The journal became the press on which the rival agenda gets printed, and its co-editor is the man floating the Hilbert list. Anyone measuring the reform by citation counts is measuring the wrong thing, and will keep getting the wrong answer for years, because the incoming constituency is small and sits outside the discipline’s core where citations accumulate fastest.

Here is why the fight over the list is the fight that decides everything.

Philipp Korom of Graz spent a study of about forty-nine thousand pages establishing who belonged to sociology’s prestige elite in the 1970s and the 2010s. His finding: elite status requires reception in the discipline’s core, and dominating several communities inside sociology does not suffice. In neither period did any scholar score higher with specialist audiences than with generalist ones. Eminence lasts under forty years. Besides Durkheim and Weber, only Parsons and Merton held the top ten across both eras. The 1970s elite came out of Chicago, Columbia and Harvard; by the 2010s no single breeding ground remained. The currency throughout is citation, which means status flows to whoever poses the question that other people have to answer in print.

That explains the database. In January the Centre for Heterodox Social Science launched a curated catalogue of work from outside what it calls the dominant cultural left paradigm, with a stated plan to attach a retrieval model so that researchers querying it get channeled to heterodox sources where mainstream systems channel them to progressive ones. If prestige is citation, a rival index with an engine on top is an attempt to manufacture a reference class from scratch. It is also the movement’s worst instinct, for the reason Rubin identified about her own conference report: an index that answers your questions with your own literature cannot test you.

The deeper problem is the one nobody in the fight has picked up, and it comes from the co-editor’s own book.

Hilbert could name twenty-three problems because mathematics had a cumulative core and agreed criteria for what counts as a solution. Astrophysics can run a decadal survey because the field agrees what an instrument is and what a result looks like. The Impossible Science, which Jonathan Turner co-wrote with Stephen Turner in 1990, argues that American sociology never built either, and that the scientific program kept failing for institutional reasons: reform-movement origins, dependence on undergraduate enrollment, dependence on patronage, and fragmentation into subfields that owed nothing to each other. That book is the standing objection to a sociological Hilbert list, and it is the standing objection to Correll’s theories of change. One of its authors now edits the journal where the proposals appear. The other keeps publishing the argument and expects no American review of the new book (Cognitive Science and the Reconceptualization of Social Theory: Naturalizing the Social) Routledge issues on July 29.

Lee Jussim launched Unsafe Science on Substack in early 2022, left Psychology Today for it that spring, and routes two thirds to eighty percent of his subscription income into a Rutgers research account that backstops student projects and the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, founded that same year, whose first conference he scheduled against the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in February 2023. Small money, and nobody can withdraw it over a paper he accepts. Heterodox Academy, whose inaugural president John Tomasi left an endowed chair at Brown in January 2022 to take, has been criticized since before he arrived over funding from Charles Koch and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. Both sides now take money from people with views about the answers. The 1990 book predicted the shape of that problem without predicting who would occupy which side of it.

Tomasi has called publicly for more reports like the one Rubin wrote. Rubin says the documentation phase has reached saturation and the work now is filling the holes. She reports colleagues describing short-term plans that run ten to twenty years and longer plans framed as hundred-year projects, and a recurring line she renders as “no one is coming to save us except us.” She wants journals first, then centers, then interdisciplinary social science departments where scholars can be rehoused after becoming unemployable in their own fields.

Both lists will get published. The test is narrow and countable: whether either agenda gets cited by people who had no hand in writing it. An association can compel attention to its theme through prizes and journal desks. A movement in exile has to earn it. Nine years after the Akademie für Soziologie broke from the German association to pursue sociology as an empirical science, that question has data attached and I wonder if anybody in the American fight has gone to look.

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What are the Live Questions in Economics Now?

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Tariff incidence and the sequel to the ruling comes first. Who bears the cost, over what horizon, and what happens when a tax is removed. Gopinath and Neiman own the aggregate accounting. Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein own the border incidence estimates. Alberto Cavallo owns the high-frequency retail data. Aaron Flaaen, Ali Hortaçsu, Felix Tintelnot, Nicolás Urdaneta, and Daniel Xu own the supply-chain decomposition. The 2026 addition is refunds: the government collected at least $160 billion in IEEPA duties through February 20, and the majority opinion says nothing about whether refunds will be available. A potential transfer of that size, with contested legal incidence, is an unclaimed research question.

Second, the production function for AI. It contains labor displacement, firm productivity, aggregate productivity, and knowledge production. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen own the entry-level finding. Humlum and Vestergaard own the administrative-data nulls. Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond own the call-center evidence. Ethan Mollick and Fabrizio Dell’Acqua own the jagged-frontier framing. Chad Jones and Anton Korinek own the growth theory. The subordinate questions: whether AI substitutes for junior labor while complementing senior judgment, and whether removing junior work destroys the apprenticeship system that manufactures future experts.

Third, r-star and monetary-fiscal interaction. Reis, Williams, Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi are the names. The live question concerns which instrument carries the signal, and whether high debt changes the inflation cost of tightening.

Fourth, fiscal capacity, phrased without a threshold. What combination of debt service, maturity, primary deficits, and market absorption forces monetary policy or fiscal policy to yield.

Fifth, fertility. Claudia Goldin (b. 1946) on the mismatch between women’s economic autonomy and men’s domestic adaptation, Matthias Doepke and Fabian Kindermann on the household bargaining models, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine on the American decline. Distinguish between postponement and lower completed fertility.

Sixth, industrial policy design. Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, and Rodrik hold the field.

Seventh, the inflation postmortem: under what market structures do sectoral supply shocks raise markups temporarily and propagate. Bernanke, Blanchard, Isabella Weber, Emi Nakamura, Jón Steinsson, Laurence Ball.

Eighth, top-income measurement. Piketty, Saez, Zucman, Auten, Splinter. The deeper question is whether distributional national accounts can carry the political weight placed on them.

Ninth, geoeconomic fragmentation, which subsumes friendshoring, export controls, and critical minerals. Laura Alfaro, Davin Chor, Kyle Handley, Pinelopi Goldberg.

Tenth, China’s transition away from property and investment-led growth. Kenneth Rogoff, Zhiguo He, Wei Xiong, Chang-Tai Hsieh. The answer moves commodity exporters, German manufacturing, global savings, and r-star, which is why it ranks above several better-covered topics.

Eleventh, housing, split into the three propositions the review document separates: whether supply moderates rents, whether upzoning produces housing, and whether reform delivers inside a political horizon. Ed Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, Enrico Moretti, Evan Mast.

Twelfth, private credit. Where leverage and liquidity transformation migrated, how private funds connect to banks and insurers, and whether reported values conceal correlated losses until redemptions force recognition. Victoria Ivashina, Gregor Matvos, Jeremy Stein.

Thirteenth, remote work and urban fiscal structure. Nicholas Bloom, Steven Davis, Jose Maria Barrero on the labor side; Arpit Gupta and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh on the office-value and municipal-revenue side.

Fourteenth, the structure of the AI industry as distinct from its labor effects. Whether foundation models are natural monopolies, who captures the surplus, and how antitrust treats vertical integration across compute, models, and applications.

Fifteenth, methods. How to combine local identification with structural models and explicit external-validity tests, and whether LLM-generated synthetic respondents can substitute for human samples. Guido Imbens (b. 1963), Susan Athey, Isaiah Andrews, John Horton.

Then a second tier that could move up: climate adaptation and insurance retreat, with Benjamin Keys and Parinitha Sastry on mortgage and insurance markets; GLP-1 drugs and whether they pay for themselves; the minimum wage at high bite, with Dube, Reich, Neumark, and the automation margin; stablecoins and Treasury demand; and the 2021-24 immigration surge as an identification strategy.

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Why Do So Many University Professors Hate AI?

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

With change, there are winners and losers. With change, some things get better and some things get worse.
I don’t share the hysteria about AI in any direction because I accept that life is a series of trade-offs. And nobody is coming to save us.
And our problems are not in our stars, but in ourselves.
And a stitch in time saves nine.
I’m tired of the one-sided coverage of AI (it seems like 80% of the public hates it). In particular, I’m tired of all the university professors publishing one-sided essays decrying AI abuse by their students.
The professors always have good points to make. What they lack is a sense of proportion. I grant the professors every point they land.
This is what I want to know about any group complaint: How much is self-interest and how much is public interest?
Interest shapes what a man notices, and a threatened man often notices problems first. So the useful question is whether the claim hold up.
Start with what professors say they fear. The complaints cluster around students. A January 2026 national survey found large majorities warning that the tools drive student overreliance, weaken critical thinking, and erode academic integrity and the value of degrees. College Board research on more than three thousand faculty found the sharpest negativity in writing-intensive fields such as English and history, while faculty in STEM and business report using AI for their own research and writing and hold more positive views. The AAUP survey registers damage to the teaching environment and to job enthusiasm. Almost nobody writes essays saying a blogger with a chatbot might match his monograph. They write essays saying they can no longer tell whether a twenty-year-old learned anything.
Why exactly would they care if their student learns anything? Most professors at research universities don’t have many incentive to care about their undergraduate students.
If the take-home essay was your instrument for measuring thought and the instrument now measures access to a subscription, you have lost the ability to do your job the way you expected to do your job. Whether the replacement assessments are better or worse, the transition cost falls on the professor, unpaid, while administrators announce initiatives.
Second fact that complicates the picture: seventy-seven percent of faculty use AI in their teaching, up sixteen points from 2025. The loudest critics are often the same people using the tools. That looks less like a guild sealing its borders and more like ambivalence under deadline.
Andrew Abbott (b. 1948) showed that professions defend task boundaries by claiming exclusive possession of judgment that cannot be written down. Every encroachment gets recast as a quality problem or an ethics problem, and sometimes the recasting is honest and sometimes it is a jurisdictional move dressed as principle. Randall Collins (b. 1941) argued in The Credential Society that credentials often mark position in a queue rather than skill. Where AI threatens the queue, expect noise. One survey detail points this way: negative sentiment rises with institutional selectivity. Faculty with the most positional capital dislike the tools most. You can read that as pedagogy or as portfolio.
The status anxiety I’d locate in a felt loss of prestige. Fluent, well-cited, register-appropriate prose used to be rare and expensive. It took years to acquire and it certified membership. It is now cheap. That devalues an asset many people paid for in their twenties and thirties, and men rarely experience the devaluation of their hard-earned asset as a neutral fact.
Prose fluency and argumentative competence were never what separated good academic work from bad. Plenty of fine scholars write badly. The moat is elsewhere: new evidence, and knowing the live question.
New evidence means somebody read the court records, sat in the room, ran the experiment, worked the archive, interviewed the man who was there. AI cannot do that. Where a field’s contributions require primary material, an outsider with a chatbot produces synthesis, and synthesis is the most abundant commodity in academic publishing.
Knowing the live question is harder to see from outside. I don’t know which 2021 article everyone in the subfield privately thinks was refuted at a conference in 2024. I don’t know which framing marks you as ten years behind. A specialist knows what would count as news to eleven people who care. That tacit map is what a PhD buys, and it decays without contact.
Then verification. AI citations require checking, and the checking is where the hours go. A man who skips it publishes fabrications and gets caught, and the field’s suspicion of outsiders gets one more data point.
So, can fluency with AI plus some knowledge of a topic produce work equal to what the average professor publishes? Against the median low-cited article in a mid-tier journal, often yes. Against work that adds evidence or moves a live argument, “some knowledge” is not enough. AI is a multiplier on what you already hold. Productive output tracks the depth of your reading, your instinct for what is missing, and your willingness to check. A man with thin knowledge and high fluency produces confident mush, and specialists smell it in a paragraph.
The test is whether a reader in the field learns something he didn’t know. That test doesn’t care about your credentials, and it doesn’t care about AI.

Posted in Academia, AI | Comments Off

I Finally Read The Novel ‘Submission’

Posted on July 26, 2026 by Luke Ford

The second paragraph of Submission is silly and cliche.

So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don’t notice right away because they’re hypnotised by the desire for money or, if they’re more primitive, the desire for consumer goods (though these cases of acute product – addiction are unusual: the mature, thoughtful majority develop a fascination with that ‘tireless Proteus’, money itself). Above all they’re hypnotised by the desire to make their mark, to carve out an enviable social position in a world that they believe and indeed hope will be competitive, galvanised as they are by the worship of fleeting icons: athletes, fashion or Web designers, film stars and models.
For various psychological reasons that I have neither the skill nor the desire to analyse, I wasn’t that way at all.

I don’t believe the narrator. We are all status-seeking primates. We want to feel pride because pride feels good and it correlates with how much we contribute to others.
I’m less troubled by the unreliability of the narrator than that I don’t like him. He’s a freak.
More silliness soon follows: “Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilisation now ending before our very eyes…” Literature is not ending, and a single overstatement like that destroys credibility in my eyes. Why would I want to read on about this silly deluded man?

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. The beauty of an author’s style, the music of his sentences have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author’s reflections, the originality of his thought certainly can’t be overlooked; but an author is above all a human being, present in his books, and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters – as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them.

It’s not just the books, bro. It’s the reader response. We respond to people like ourselves. We love people like ourselves. Read John J. Mearsheimer and David Pinsof and embrace reality and enjoy the feeling of pride that comes from contributing to the lives of those around you.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature – it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 per cent of the time.

As opposed to other jobs? How is the study of literature less full of meaning than normal work? Does work as an insurance adjuster lead somewhere?
The primary purpose of work is to support yourself and those you love by making a lawful contribution to your community.
I don’t like the protagonist from the start which makes reading the novel a chore.

The way things were supposed to work (and I have no reason to think much has changed), young people, after a brief period of sexual vagabondage in their very early teens, were expected to settle down in exclusive, strictly monogamous relationships involving activities (outings, weekends, holidays) that were not only sexual, but social. At the same time, there was nothing final about these relationships. Instead, they were thought of as apprenticeships – in a sense, as internships (a practice that was generally seen in the professional world as a step towards one’s first job). Relationships of variable duration (a year being, according to my own observations, an acceptable amount of time) and of variable number (an average of ten to twenty might be considered a reasonable estimate) were supposed to succeed one another until they ended, like an apotheosis, with the last relationship, this one conjugal and final, which would lead, via the begetting of children, to the formation of a family.
The complete idiocy of this model…

Sigh. Everyone’s an idiot.
Grow up, bro. There’s no one model of love and relationship that is globally superior to others. The problem is not in France but in you. You’re miserable and that distorts your perceptions.

My own sex life, during my early years as a lecturer at Paris III, hadn’t evolved in any notable way. Year after year, I kept sleeping with students, and the fact that we were now teacher and student didn’t change things much at all. At the beginning, there was scarcely any age difference between us. Only gradually did an element of transgression enter in, and this had more to do with my rising academic status than with my age, real or apparent. In short, I benefitted from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from year to year, or even from month to month. The one real change, since my student years, was that now I was usually the one who broke it off when the academic year began. It wasn’t that I was a Don Juan, or yearned for some kind of untrammelled sexual freedom. Unlike my colleague Steve, who also taught nineteenth – century literature to the first – and second – year students, I didn’t spend the first days of university eagerly checking out the ‘new talent’.

Does this still fly in France?

‘You know, François …’ she said, after she’d taken a first sip, ‘I’m not a whore. I’m not a nymphomaniac, either. When I go down on you, it’s because I love you. I do love you, you know?’
I did know. And I knew there was something else, something she hadn’t yet told me. I looked deep into her eyes, but I didn’t know how to ask what was the matter. She finished her champagne, sighed, poured another and said: ‘My parents are leaving the country.’
I was speechless. She drained her glass and poured herself a third.
‘They’re emigrating to Israel. They fly to Tel Aviv on Friday. They’re not even waiting for the run – offs. The crazy part is, they’ve done it all behind our backs, completely in secret. They opened a bank account in Israel, they lined up a flat, my father cashed in his pension, they put the house up for sale, and they never said a word to any of us. My little sister and brother I could maybe understand, they’re pretty young, but I’m twenty – two years old and they didn’t even consult me. They’re not forcing me to go with them. If I insist, they’ll rent me a room in Paris, but we do have the summer break coming up, and I don’t see how I can leave them, not right now. They’re too scared. I hadn’t really noticed till now, but in the last few months they’ve stopped going out. The only people they still see are other Jews. They stay in at night, working each other up – and they’re not the only ones, they’ve got at least five other friends who’ve sold everything so they can move to Israel. I spent a whole night arguing with them, but they’ve made up their minds. They’re convinced that something really bad is going to happen to Jews in France. It’s weird, it’s like a delayed reaction fifty years after the war. I told them they’re being idiots, the National Front stopped being anti – Semitic a long time ago – ’
‘It wasn’t all that long ago. You’re too young to remember, but the father, Jean – Marie Le Pen, he still had connections to the old French far right. He was a drunk and a total philistine, he certainly hadn’t read Drumont or Maurras, but I’m sure he heard people talk about them. They were part of his mental landscape. The daughter doesn’t even know who they are, obviously. At any rate, even if the Muslim wins, I don’t think you’ve got much to worry about. He’s still allied with the Socialists, he can’t just do whatever he wants …’
‘Hmm …’ She shook her head, unconvinced. ‘I guess I’m less optimistic than you are. When a Muslim party comes to power, it’s never good for the Jews. Can you think of a time it was?’

This lands.

She stepped into her skirt. ‘With everything that’s going on now, it’s obvious the National Front’s going to win. That’s all we’ll talk about at lunch. “We told you so, sweetheart.” Still, they’re good people, they only want what’s best for me.’
‘Yes, they are good people. Truly good people.’
‘But what about you? What will you do? What do you think’s going to happen at the university?’
We were standing at the door. I realised that I hadn’t the slightest idea, and also that I didn’t give a fuck. I kissed her softly on the lips, and said, ‘There is no Israel for me.’

This lands.

I realised – I’d known for years – that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to something chaotic, violent and unpredictable…
‘What about the Jews?’ The question slipped out – I hadn’t planned on asking. The image of Myriam on my bed that last morning, in her T – shirt, with her little round bottom, flashed through my mind. I poured myself another large glass of Cahors.
‘Ah,’ he smiled again. ‘With the Jews, of course, things are somewhat more complicated. In theory, it’s the same – Judaism is a religion of the Book, Abraham and Moses are recognised as prophets of Islam. In practice, though, relations with Jews in Muslim countries have often been more difficult than with Christians. And of course the Palestinian question has poisoned everything. Some small factions of the Muslim Brotherhood call for retaliation against the Jews, but I don’t think they’ll get anywhere. Ben Abbes has always maintained good relations with the Grand Rabbi of France. Every once in a while he may let the extremists act out, because even if he really hopes to convert Christians in massive numbers – and who says he won’t? – he can’t possibly have high hopes for the Jews. What would really make him happy, I think, is if they left France on their own and emigrated to Israel. In any case, I assure you, he’d never compromise his vast personal ambitions out of love for the Palestinians…
The change in the political regime had left no visible mark on the neighbourhood. Tight knots of Chinese men still gathered in front of the OTB, racing forms in hand. Others hurried along pushing handcarts full of rice noodles, soy sauce, mangos. Nothing, not even a Muslim government, could curb their incessant activity – Muslim proselytising would dissolve without a trace, like the Christian message before it, in the vast ocean of their civilisation…
It was two weeks before I received the letter from Paris III. According to the new statutes of the Islamic University of Paris – Sorbonne, I was no longer permitted to teach. Robert Rediger, the new president of the university, had signed the letter himself. He expressed his profound regret and assured me that this was no reflection on the quality of my scholarship. I was, of course, welcome to pursue my career in a secular university. If, however, I preferred to retire, the Islamic University of Paris – Sorbonne could offer me a pension, effective immediately, at a starting monthly rate of 3,472 euros, to be adjusted for inflation. I was invited to schedule a meeting with HR in order to fill out the necessary paperwork…
From outside, nothing about the university looked different, except for the gilded star and crescent above the doors, next to the big inscription ‘Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III’. Inside the administrative buildings, the transformations were more visible. In the waiting room, one was welcomed by a photograph of pilgrims making their way around the Kaaba, and the offices were decorated with posters bearing hand – lettered verses from the Koran. The secretaries had changed, I didn’t recognise any of them, and they all wore veils. One of them gave me a pension application. Its simplicity was disconcerting. I filled it out right there, on the corner of a table, signed it and gave it back. As I walked out into the courtyard, I realised that my academic career had just ended in a matter of minutes…
I had no friends, that was true, but when did I ever? Besides, if you really thought about it, what was the point of having friends? Once you reach a certain stage of physical decline, the only relationship that really, clearly makes sense is marriage (the bodies blend together, to a degree, and produce a new organism, at least if you believe Plato)….
This brief surge of hope came during the most optimistic moment that France had known since the Thirty Glorious Years half a century before. The first days of Ben Abbes’s national unity coalition had been a unanimous success. All the pundits agreed that no newly elected president had ever enjoyed such a ‘state of grace’….
Story of O contained everything I didn’t like in a novel: other people’s fantasies disgusted me, and the whole thing was so ostentatiously kitschy – the apartment on the Île Saint – Louis, the hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint – Germain, Sir Stephen , all that stuff was shit. All the same, the book had a passion, a vitality that swept everything before it.
‘It’s submission,’ Rediger murmured. ‘The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there’s a connection between woman’s submission to man, as it’s described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man’s submission to God. You see,’ he went on, ‘Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such , Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha – unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called “the prince of the world”? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really, but one long mystical poem of praise? Of praise for the Creator, and of submission to His laws. In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea to learn about Islam by reading the Koran, unless of course you take the trouble to learn Arabic and read the original text. What I tell people to do instead is listen to the suras read aloud, and repeat them, so you can feel their breath and their force. In any case, Islam is the only religion where it’s forbidden to use any translations in the liturgy, because the Koran is made up entirely of rhythms, rhymes, refrains, assonance. It starts with the idea, the basic idea of all poetry, that sound and sense can be made one, and so can speak the world.’
…Yes, my intellectual life was finished, though I could still participate in vague colloquia and live on my savings and my pension; but I started to realise – and this was a real novelty – that life might actually have more to offer.

When you are in a fight you can’t win, submission and making the best of things seems like a good idea.
This book deserves its fame. It’s not a fun read, there’s nobody to like, but for me it was a haunting and horrifying read. I don’t look at Islamic civilization right now and see anything the West lacks. I don’t look at Islam and think, “I wish we had more of that in America!” I am open to the argument that increased Islamic immigration blesses Western countries, but I’ve never heard anyone make a compelling case for that.
Here are objective criteria that might lead immigration restrictionists such as myself say, “I’m fine with more immigration from X group.”
1. Net lifetime fiscal contribution. The National Academies panel of 2016 found the 75-year net present value per immigrant swings from strongly positive to strongly negative depending on education level. Test: does the group’s median member, with dependents counted, pay more over a lifetime than he draws? Education distribution, earnings by age, and program participation give you this.
2. Program use compared to natives at the same income. This tests behavior rather than earnings, and it separates a group that is poor from a group that is oriented toward transfers.
3. Second-generation and third-generation trajectory rather than first. Immigrants are selected; their children reveal what the group brings. Test: does the education and earnings gap with natives close by the third generation or persist? George Borjas (b. 1950) documents Mexican third-generation stagnation. East and South Asian convergence runs the other direction, and fast.
4. Crime, adjusted for age and sex, measured in the second generation. First-generation rates flatter almost every group because migrants are self-selected for low time preference.
5. Political and civic attitudes. Support for free speech including blasphemy, legal equality for women, religious liberty for apostates, acceptance of election results. Pew Global Attitudes and the World Values Survey run these instruments. Test: diaspora attitudes sit inside the native distribution by the second generation.
6. Whether the origin state claims authority over its diaspora. Turkey funds and staffs mosques abroad. China runs United Front organs. Eritrea levies a tax on emigrants. A group whose home government organizes it politically on your soil imports a foreign state’s interest along with the people.
7. Naturalization rates and language. Do members seek citizenship, and does second-generation fluency approach universal?
8. Rate and volume, measured against both the receiving population and the co-ethnic population already present. The same group at different rates produces different results. Above a density threshold, enclaves form.
9. Selection control and chain multipliers. A nationality admitted through a points system is a different sample from the same nationality admitted through family reunification. Ask how many additional admissions each primary admission generates over twenty years.
The biggest difference between this novel and the discussion about it is that there is not one negative sentiment about Islam or Muslims in it. Instead, the portrait is overwhelmingly positive.
I love the Acknowledgements at the end: “I did not attend university, and everything I know about academic life I learned from Agathe Novak – Lechevalier, maître de conférences at the University of Paris X – Nanterre. If the backdrop to these inventions of mine is at all credible, it is entirely thanks to her.”
I love Mark Lilla’s review:

Given all this, it will take a long time for the French to read and appreciate Soumission for the strange and surprising thing that it is. Michel Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale. Soumission is not the story some expected of a coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. It is about a man and a country who through indifference and exhaustion find themselves slouching toward Mecca. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever…
François is shipwrecked in the present. He doesn’t understand why his students are so eager to get rich, or why journalists and politicians are so hollow, or why everyone, like him, is so alone. He believes that “only literature can give you that sensation of contact with another human spirit,” but no one else cares about it. His sometime girlfriend Myriam genuinely loves him but he can’t respond…
Except in the schools, very little seems to happen at first. But over the next months François begins to notice small things, beginning with how women dress. Though the government has established no dress code, he sees fewer skirts and dresses on the street, more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body’s contours. It seems that non-Muslim women have spontaneously adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq describes so chillingly in his other novels. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women, grateful for new family subsidies, begin to leave the workforce to care for their children.
François thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, inspired by a religion he knows little about, and which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned. They are always surrounded by their children, who have lots of siblings and feel loved by their parents, who never divorce. François, who lives alone and has lost contact with his parents, is impressed. His fantasy (and perhaps Houellebecq’s) is not really the colonial one of the erotic harem. It is closer to what psychologists call the “family romance.”
…At a certain point he couldn’t ignore how much the Islamists’ message overlapped with his own. They, too, idealized the life of simple, unquestioning piety and despised modern culture and the Enlightenment that spawned it. They believed in hierarchy within the family, with wives and children there to serve the father. They, like he, hated diversity—especially diversity of opinion—and saw homogeneity and high birthrates as vital signs of civilizational health. And they quivered with the eros of violence. All that separated him from them was that they prayed on rugs and he prayed at an altar. But the more Rediger reflected, the more he had to admit that in truth European and Islamic civilizations were no longer comparable. By all the measures that really mattered, post-Christian Europe was dying and Islam was flourishing. If Europe was to have a future, it would have to be an Islamic one.

The reader experience with Submission is going to be very different from The Camp of the Saints, which shocks and appalls and angers. Submission moves slowly. There’s no hatred of out-groups. There are no heroes.

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Had We But World Enough: On Reading Marvell at Twenty Two

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Every year, in every English-speaking country, several hundred thousand adolescents receive a photocopy of the finest argument for sex ever written in English and are asked to identify the metaphysical conceits. The teacher discusses the three-part syllogism. If we had time. But we do not. Therefore. The class notes the hyperbole, the tonal shift at line 21, the couplet at the end. Then the bell rings.

Somewhere in that room sits a boy who has just been handed an argument for the only thing he wants and cannot get.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) wrote “To His Coy Mistress” for a coterie of readers who would have recognized every move in it. The carpe diem argument was old when Horace (65-8 BC) made it, and Catullus, Ovid, and Herrick had all worked the same ground. Marvell’s contribution is the compression and the logic. What the poem became, four centuries later, is a document read by the sexually unsuccessful in private, long after the class discussion ends, and read differently by them than by anyone else. Nobody has written about that reader. He is the most numerous reader the poem has.

Start with what he lacks. Fluency. Social skills. Status. He wants and cannot speak, and the gap between the wanting and the speaking is the misery. He rehearses sentences in his head and delivers none of them. He has watched other boys say ordinary things in ordinary voices and get ordinary results, and he cannot work out how it is done.

Marvell’s speaker is nothing except fluency. He has no body in the poem, no face, no circumstances. He is a voice that will not stop until it has won. To read the poem is to borrow a mouth. This is the first and largest part of what the poem does for the boy who cannot speak, and no critical account of the poem has registered it, because critics have assumed a reader who can already talk.

Then notice the situation the poem describes. She is coy. Present tense. She has not said yes. She does not say yes anywhere in the hundred and twenty-four words of argument, and the poem ends with the case still open. The speaker of “To His Coy Mistress” stands, at the moment of speaking, in the same condition as the boy reading it. He wants and has not got. This is why the poem consoles. It is not a report of somebody else’s conquest. It is a record of an unconsummated argument, delivered by a man with everything to say and nothing yet to show. The boy reads it and feels represented.

The middle movement is where the poem takes hold. At my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near. The deserts of vast eternity. The worms that will try that long-preserved virginity. Read as an argument aimed at her, this is pressure applied through the threat of her own decay. Read by the boy, it does something else. It is about his death, not hers.

A twenty-year-old virgin experiences time in a way nobody else does. Every month is a verdict. Every birthday is a figure entered in a ledger he believes everyone else can read. The hurry he feels is shameful to him because it looks, from outside, like appetite without dignity. What Marvell does is convert that private hurry into a cosmic one. Your urgency is not pathetic. It is the condition of a mortal creature under the aspect of eternity. The poem launders shame into philosophy, and the boy takes the loan gratefully, and reads the passage over and over.

He also understands the grotesque better than the erotic. The tomb, the ashes, the worms, the dust. He can picture these. What he cannot picture is a bed with a woman in it, because he has never seen one, and his imagination fails at the point where experience would supply detail. Morbidity and lust arrive in the same year of a boy’s life and the culture gives him almost no text that fuses them without flinching. Marvell fuses them in eight lines.

The last movement runs on force. Roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball. Tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life. Make the sun run. There is no tenderness in it. Critics have often held this against the poem, and against the speaker, and the reading is defensible. But a boy who has never been touched has no experience to draw on. He has plenty of experience of force as fantasy, of wanting to break through something that will not open. Marvell’s closing images describe wanting as it feels to somebody who has only ever wanted.

The poem can be read as a man overriding a woman’s reluctance with rhetoric. What that reading assumes is a reader standing where the speaker stands, holding what the speaker holds. The boy in the back row holds nothing. He has no power over any woman anywhere, and he knows it. He experiences the poem as a fantasy of having a chance. The distance between those two is the distance between his life and the speaker’s, and it is the reason the poem works on him because it opens a window into a better life.

He misses the jokes, too. An hundred years to praise the eyes. Two hundred to adore each breast. Thirty thousand to the rest. The hyperbole is comic, and the speaker is a man who talks far too much and knows it, and the poem is partly a comedy about the ratio of argument to result. None of this is visible to a reader for whom nothing in the situation is funny. On first reading the poem is a war cry. Twenty years on it is a joke about a man who has confused eloquence with progress, and the joke is generous, because the man in it is not going to get anywhere.

Marvell gives us no picture of the woman. She has coyness, skin, a heart somewhere, and a body distributed across the world’s geography, rubies by the Ganges, complaints by the Humber. She has no face, no speech, no history, no name. The boy reading does not notice the vacancy, because he has no picture of a woman either. He has a picture of women. The poem is legible to him because its object is empty.

Then he meets somebody. She has a face and opinions and a particular laugh and a way of being wrong about things. He goes back to the poem and finds it smaller. The argument still gleams. The woman is still not there. Some poems open as you age. This one closes. It is a poem calibrated to one condition. A boy needs a text that speaks for the unspeakable painful yearning. That text exists. It has been in the anthologies for three hundred years, and every teacher who assigns it hands a lifeline to a boy in the room.

During the school year 1988-1989 at UCLA, he had this poem above his dorm room bed and he regularly recited it to his girlfriend and any other attractive woman who would listen.

He loses his virginity in February 1989, and afterward the poem doesn’t work the same way. He keeps it anyway. Men keep the stories that get them through stuff.

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On Loving John Donne

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

AI helped me with this post.

Stanley Fish opens his essay on Donne with a confession. For years he could not teach the poems. He had nothing good to say about them. He kept returning with approval to C. S. Lewis, who had written half a century earlier that Donne is the saddest and most uncomfortable of English poets, and that his verse exerts the fascination we feel in the grip of the worst kind of bore, the hot-eyed, unescapable kind. Fish went further than Lewis. He found the poetry sick. He assumed he must be missing whatever everybody else could see.

Then he stopped assuming that. He built the essay out of the aversion because he found a poet who uses language to dominate, poems that exercise verbal power and then report the exercise, so that any question about a local choice receives one answer, that the choice secures further control. That essay has organized Donne criticism for a generation. Defenders of Donne now defend him against Fish.

Read the confession again. Fascination. Inescapability. A voice that will not release you. Fish and Lewis are two hostile witnesses testifying to a grip, and the grip is what the lovers report. Ask a man who reads Donne for pleasure what the pleasure consists of and he will tell you about the sentence that refuses to let him breathe until the last word, the argument that arrives before his objection can form, the feeling of being taken over. He says it fondly. Fish says it and files a complaint. The two camps agree about the sensation and split on the verdict. What divides them is a prior disposition toward being overpowered by words.

John Stuart Mill laid down a rule in 1833. Eloquence is heard. Poetry is overheard. The poet writes as though no one listens. Donne breaks the rule in his first line, every time.

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love. Mark but this flea, and mark in this. Busy old fool, unruly sun. Batter my heart, three-person'd God. Death, be not proud. Go, and catch a falling star.

Someone gets addressed. A woman, God, the sun, Death, a friend who has said something stupid. In none of these is it you. The second-person slot arrives already occupied, and you find yourself standing in the doorway of a room where a man is working on somebody else.

Arthur Marotti supplies the historical fact underneath. Donne wrote for named readers. Friends, patrons, men from the Inns of Court, the woman he married in secret and ruined his career over. The poems went out in manuscript to people who knew who the you was, and they came to us four hundred years late, out of the private circuit and into print. We read another man's correspondence while the ink is still wet. Part of the intoxication is the intoxication of access we were never granted.

Being argued at hurts. Watching a man argue at somebody else, at close range, with everything he has, delights. This is why the syllogisms please. They are aimed past our heads. The flea has bitten her and bitten him, their bloods are mingled in it, so the mingling has already happened and her objection collapses. The logic is fraudulent and we know it and we are not the ones being asked to yield. We get the rhetoric without the bill.

Fish sat down in the chair. Reading in 1990, inside a criticism organized around the critique of masculine rhetoric, he took the addressee's position and reported assault. I read the same work and feel intoxicated.

Donne turns to the reader at length in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and he says, No man is an island. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

There is the address, aimed at us, and it consoles. That passage left literature and entered common speech. When he speaks to somebody else we get intoxicated. When he speaks to us we get a proverb. Two pleasures, and they run on different circuits.

Donne's speakers lose. TThe woman in “The Flea” kills the flea, and the speaker has to improvise a new argument out of the wreckage of the old one. The woman in “Woman’s Constancy” has prepared her exit. The speaker of “The Apparition” is reduced to threatening her with his ghost, which is what a man does after running out of arguments. “The Sun Rising” wins its case against the sun, and the sun keeps rising. The Holy Sonnets ask God for violence and record no answer. A rhetoric this overwhelming, deployed this often, with this rate of failure, might be doing something other than domination.

Hans Robert Jauss gives us the vocabulary for the rest, and Dayton Haskin gives us the evidence. Every generation reads the Donne it needs. The eighteenth century could not read him at all. The Victorians recovered a churchman named Dr. Donne through Izaak Walton's biography, and printed the sermons. Grierson edited him and T. S. Eliot reissued him as the poet of unified sensibility, after which admiring Donne became a credential in modernist company. The the New Critics found the well-made conceit. John Carey found an apostate consumed by ambition. Marotti found a coterie careerist working the patronage circuit. Fish found a coercer. Each of those was the real Donne to the people reading, and each reading tells you as much about its decade as about the poems.

Who loves Donne in 2026?

Donne returns as the poet of the unpermitted address, in a decade that has thought harder about consent to being spoken to than any since the Victorians. Every screen we own delivers speech we did not ask for. We have built an entire apparatus of blocking, muting, unsubscribing, and opting out, and we have grown a fine sensitivity to the demand made without invitation. Donne's imperatives land in that atmosphere and feel dangerous again in a way they did not feel to the the New Critics, who heard only wit. His speaker demands, and accepts that he might be refused, and gets refused, and demands again. That combination has become rare. We are surrounded by address that cannot be argued with and by argument that risks nothing. Donne risks everything on a syllogism and loses.

Roland Barthes divided texts that give pleasure from texts that give bliss. The first confirm the reader in what he already is. The second unsettle him and put his relation to language at hazard. Donne belongs in the second category, and the people who love him love a small controlled annihilation, administered by a stranger, on a schedule of their own choosing, in a room where the door stays open.

Donne's contemporaries copied his poems out by hand into commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies, and Deborah Aldrich Larson has used those books as evidence for his early reputation. What a man chooses to transcribe with a pen is a record of pleasure, made at cost, without an audience, and there are hundreds of such records. The Variorum commentary volumes digest three and a half centuries of what readers said about the Songs and Sonets. Nobody has read either archive with the question of intoxication in hand.

Some readers will always find the voice a bore, and Lewis was too good a critic to be wrong about what he felt. He was wrong only in thinking that what he felt disqualified the poems. He felt the grip. So do I. I close the book with my pulse up and no idea whether the argument was sound, and I go back the next night to be worked on again, from the doorway, while he talks to somebody else.

I like to watch.

Notes

The landmark piece of reader-response criticism proper is Stanley Fish (b. 1938), “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,” in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds., Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Chicago, 1990), 223-52. It gets reprinted in Andrew Mousley’s John Donne casebook (1999) and again in Fish’s Versions of Antihumanism (Cambridge, 2012). Fish opens by admitting he could not teach the poems, that he found them sick, and endorsed C. S. Lewis‘s verdict on Donne (1572-1631) as the saddest and most uncomfortable of English poets, whose verse holds a reader the way the worst kind of bore holds him. He then converts that reaction into a thesis: the poems exist as occasions for exercising the power words exert, they report that exercise and stage it again in the reporting, and the answer to any question about a local choice is that it secures further control. Achsah Guibbory, Heather Dubrow, and others have pushed back, and the Essays in Criticism piece “Donne Rethinks Misogyny” (2019) treats Fish as the position to argue against.

Fish had already done the Donne prose. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972) is the standard practical criticism of seventeenth-century texts from the reader-response side, and its Donne text is the sermon Death’s Duell. The method there is what Fish called affective stylistics: track the incremental and disruptive effects of the language on the reader at each stage, and make the reading experience the object of inquiry.

The second tradition is reception history. Dayton Haskin’s John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2007) came out of his Variorum assignment: tracing how Donne’s Songs and Sonets were received between 1800 and 1900, and telling the story the Variorum’s editorial limits would not let him tell, of how the Doctor Donne of Izaak Walton‘s Life became the poet John Donne by 1900. Reviewers call it a reception study that credits Americans other than T. S. Eliot with the recovery, and praise the readings Haskin extracts from nineteenth-century writers rather than critics. Behind that sits A. J. Smith’s John Donne: The Critical Heritage (1975) and the Variorum’s own commentary volumes, one of which digests general and topical commentary on the Songs and Sonets from the early seventeenth century through 1999, with sections on critical reception, autobiography and persona, and the manuscript tradition.

The third tradition studies Donne’s first readers. Arthur Marotti‘s John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986) argues that Donne kept his verse among chosen readers, friends, acquaintances, patrons, and the woman he married, and that criticism has to attend to work designed for manuscript transmission. Ilona Bell‘s “The Role of the Lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonets,” SEL 23 (1983), 113-29, reads the poems as addressed to a woman whose implied reactions govern the speaker’s moves. Deborah Aldrich Larson worked the commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies for evidence of Donne’s contemporary reputation in the John Donne Journal 12 (1993).

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