What’s Wrong with American Studies?

The field’s leading figures have no real response to findings of bias

The field of American Studies appears to be in a defensive crouch.

This January, we published a study analyzing the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly. In the report, we objected to Donald Trump’s attempt to whitewash negative aspects of our country’s story but found that the articles in American Quarterly did the reverse by erasing anything good about the United States. Examining nearly 100 articles over a three-year period, we found that 80% were critical of America, 20% neutral, and not a single article was positive.

We published the full report, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” with the Progressive Policy Institute and a summary in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject.” We said there were plenty of valid reasons to critique America, but also asked, how could the articles in American Quarterly show no curiosity about any of America’s worthwhile attributes? How could there be no articles exploring, for instance, why the United States is cited as the most desirable destination for immigrants, or why we have so many Nobel Prize winners?

The response to our findings from leading academics has been as revealing as the original study. We thought professors might argue that particular articles should have been categorized as positive. Alternatively, academics might have seen the study as an opportunity for self-reflection, to ask whether they needed to do a better job of telling the full American story. Instead, with one admirable exception, their responses have been mostly misleading and dismissive, mischaracterizing the way we conducted our review and going so far as to deny the very existence of objective historical truths.

In this article, we focus on three major critiques of our study from several leading scholars: Penn State professor and American Studies Association President Alex Lubin, Agustin Fuentes of Princeton University, Iván Chaar López of the University of Texas at Austin, and Erin McElroy of the University of Washington.¹

Mischaracterizing Methodology

In “Misunderstanding American Studies” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lubin claims that our analysis employed a “simplistic methodology” of coding articles by relying on a “word search.” In another Chronicle piece, “Are Leftist Professors Really Destroying the Academy’s Credibility?” Fuentes doubled down on this point, claiming that our report reached its conclusions by conducting something similar to “a DOGE-esque word search to find certain disfavored concepts.”

These claims are flatly incorrect. Our report made explicit that conducting a word search was “only the first step” of determining how an article should be categorized.

We did not simply assume that if a critical word (say “imperial”) showed up in a word search that the story was critical. After all, an article that celebrated America for its lack of imperialistic ambition would show up as employing that word (as would a word search of the report you are reading). The word search provided a hint of the likely leaning of the article, but further investigation was necessary to make a final determination on coding. (Indeed, as discussed below, it turned out that all of the articles we coded as “neutral” also contained the critical words). The second crucial step involved a content analysis of the articles. We examined the titles, abstracts, and the articles themselves and provided an initial coding. Third, before providing a final coding for each article, we sought to identify a representative quotation to help ensure that our categorization was correct.

In short, we did the reading. There were no Muskian shortcuts.

In “Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?” López and McElroy also criticized our methodology, claiming our conclusions are “based only upon selective and superficial readings of American Quarterly.” The authors never explain how our reading was “selective” given that we included every regular edition article published over a three-year period. (The themes from the special editions suggested those articles could be even more negative.) Nor do the authors explain why our reading was “superficial.” They could have tried to demonstrate where they thought we had a shallow understanding of an article’s meaning. But in nearly 3,000 words, the authors don’t cite a single example of where our reading missed the mark.

Denying Objective Truth

López and McElroy also object to our notion that there exists an “objective truth about the past.” The authors contend that history is made up only of subjective truths, which they say are shaped by each individual’s experiences and stories.

In making this claim, López and McElroy seem to provide the left-wing version of the Trump administration’s concept of “alternate facts.” But can we not agree that we once had a terrible system of chattel slavery, and now we do not? Why is it controversial to say that beginning with the founding of the country, women could not vote in America, but that in 1920, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment changed that? Are these really subjective interpretations?

Alleging Bad Motives

Several of the critiques of our American studies report alleged bad motives on our part. Lubin, for example, questions the timing of publication. “Why now?” he asks. He hints that we’re in cahoots with the Trump administration in creating a “false panic about higher education” in order to “justify federal oversight and meddling in our affairs.” López and McElroy, likewise, claim that we are enabling a larger effort to “seek to silence and eliminate any source of dissent, any knowledge practice that questions their orthodoxy.”

In fact, our report chides the Trump administration for seeking to “erase the negative components of American history” and rejects the administration’s heavy-handed intervention in higher education. We write: “Government intervention should be reserved for instances when universities violate civil rights or civil liberties.” Instead, we call on academe to “reflect upon whether it is guilty of erasing discussion of what is right about America, just as surely as the Trump administration is seeking to erase discussion about what is wrong about America.” We did so specifically because we believe in academic freedom, and think that the best way to improve a field is through open, vigorous debate.

As for our paper’s timing, the reason was simple: It was part of a wider project on American identity that we decided to launch for the country’s 250th anniversary. It’s a news hook, not a conspiracy.

Who is Actually Enabling Trump?

If they did engage in a little self-reflection, professors of American studies might recognize that it is they who are unwittingly enabling the likes of Donald Trump with their absurd views of the American project that discredits the political left with average Americans. Consider how a typical American voter would react to López and McElroy’s dismissal of the idea that the abolition and civil rights movements provided redemption for the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. The authors write of today’s America: “How are we supposed to maintain ‘redemption’ in the sustained exercise of settler colonialism or structural violence?” Astonishingly, they argue that our call for teaching both the sins of America and positive change “eerily mirrors and facilitates far right maneuvers to ‘teach both sides of slavery.’” The analogy is telling. Just as there is no good side of slavery to teach, they suggest, there is no good side of American history. How, one wonders, does America’s defeat of the Nazis fit into this worldview?

Despite having fewer years of formal education than those in the academy — or perhaps because of it — most average Americans are smart enough to recognize that the United States has made extraordinary progress. In a speech in Selma, Alabama, in 2015, President Barack Obama declared that while racism had not been banished, “we do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.”

Yet that is exactly what leading scholars of American studies have been doing. Rejecting the overwhelming evidence of progress is empirically dubious and politically toxic. We hoped our report would spur self-reflection in the halls of the academy. So far it has yielded, instead, tendentious responses that distort our methods and our motivations. It’s time for a new generation of American studies scholars to provide a course correction that will take what should be a fascinating field of inquiry in a much better direction.

1. López has recently become a cause célèbre in academic circles after UT denied him tenure. As the Dallas Morning News noted, whether the denial is right or wrong, he “regularly announces views well outside the mainstream when it comes to his area of expertise — border security.” For example, he argues that “the border itself is war.”