In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7, the subsequent congressional hearings with university presidents, and the encampments that followed, academia has once again found itself at the center of the culture wars, from which it rarely strays far. On one side, critics denounce universities for “wokeness,” while on the other side, defenders of universities condemn the anti-woke critics of reactionary politics and bad faith. These battle lines are tediously familiar to anyone who paid attention to the history wars, which had until October 7 formed the principal theater in the academic culture wars. The combatants are occupying the same lines of trenches from which they fought over the 1619 Project, the Florida AP African-American Studies standards, and so on. Behind the coils of rusting barbed wire, the front has scarcely budged. It is striking to me, as a somewhat rare creature — a military historian in civilian academia who has studied the work not only of Clausewitz but also of Foucault — how incomplete and self-serving are the arguments of both sides. But one need not know German military theory to appreciate that the narrow slits of pillboxes offer less than comprehensive views of reality. Nor need one know French critical theory to grasp that the tales people tell about themselves and their opponents do psychological work for them. Analyzing these tales requires attention to what they exclude as well as what they include. In all the hue and cry about the university, there has been virtual silence about the ostensibly unexciting subject of scholarly standards — those quaint things supposed to ensure that academics generate and communicate knowledge more rather than less rigorously. Instead, we have had a great deal of talk about ideology, or rather ideological corruption, by and about both academics and their critics. The driving question is not, “what is the evidence for your argument, and is it sufficient?” but “whose side are you on?” Accusing each other of ideological corruption enables both sides to avoid reckoning with the collapse of scholarly standards in their own ranks. In effect, they have colluded to misdiagnose — or at best incompletely diagnose — the nature of the problem, and in a way that serves both their interests. To paraphrase the description of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s products in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the superficial design flaw of ideology hides the fundamental design flaw of declining standards. The indifference to scholarly standards should be evident to even casual observers of the academic culture wars. The late Harvard law professor Charles Fried justified his refusal to consider the accusations of plagiarism against Claudine Gay on the merits because of who was making them: they were part of an “extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.” In strikingly similar language, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman refused to consider the accusations of plagiarism against his wife on the merits because they were part of “attacks on my family.” This is not the language of standards. This is the language of the bunker. Likely less evident to the casual observer is the indifference to scholarly standards that has characterized the history wars in recent years, or the way in which shared silence about standards between ostensible opponents in the history wars anticipated the same shared silence in the academic culture wars more broadly. Too many historians, of varying ideological stripes, mimic the forms of scholarship without reproducing its substance. They make trips to archives, consult the secondary literature, and cite sources in footnotes, but their research lacks rigor and integrity. It is not scholarship, it is pseudo-scholarship. The intellectual incompetence — or dishonesty — of many critics of the historical profession simply mirrors that of a great deal of the profession itself. No wonder neither wants to look in the mirror: they would find their enemy, themselves, staring back out at them. Reframing the problem in terms of standards rather than ideology is important for three reasons. First, it provides the basis for a vital center in academia, which is needed there just as much as in politics. This center, if it is to be real and not merely a band-aid over differences, cannot be defined by a priori ideological commitments; it must be defined by reinforcing commitments to process — be it scholarly or liberal-democratic — and to human dignity. A call for “process” may not sound like an inspiring blast from a trumpet, but (as I have argued previously in these pages) process secures moral substance, to which the heart should thrill. It channels historians towards humanizing and away from dehumanizing the people they study; it encourages them to treat those who lived in the past as subjects to be understood as fully as possible, not as mere objects to be over-simplified and manipulated according to historians’ whims. Thus standards, which distinguish between more and less rigorous process, also distinguish between more and less humanistic substance. Not coincidentally, liberal democracy requires the same humanism. Second, thinking in terms of standards rather than ideology has implications for how we understand the directionality and the substance of the relationship between universities and politics in seeking to explain the dysfunctionality of both. One formulation has it that (left-wing) politics have corrupted universities; spaces that were once about the pursuit of objective truth have succumbed to the lure of pursuing ideological victory. Another, expressed by the statement that “we all live on campus now,” has it that universities have corrupted politics by leaking out dangerous (identitarian) ideologies. While these two formulations reverse the directionality, both see the substance of the transmission as ideological in character. Hence the transmission of low scholarly standards — the decline of the quality of evidence and argument — has also largely escaped notice and analysis. Doubtless this transmission in and out of the academic bubble goes in both directions. But the transmission from universities to the public deserves special scrutiny, because the public is not responsible for upholding scholarly standards the way universities are. In effect,
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