The quest for truth remains in high esteem among scholars but American, European or Western heritage is gradually falling out of favor, an analysis of roughly half a million dissertations written since 1960 has found.
“Truth-oriented vocabulary and its positive associations have been maintained across all fields and all decades,” states a new report from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters titled “Humanities in Crisis: A Study of 65 Years of American Dissertation Trends.”
“Meanwhile, the tone toward American, European, and Western has shifted systematically and durably,” the report continues. “Scholars have become more critical of terms that concern the Western and American cultural heritage in their writing while simultaneously maintaining — or even strengthening — their rhetorical commitment to the vocabulary of facts and truth and to the value of the term Truth.”
The report says the two trends are “separate phenomena” and that conflating them could lead to a distorted view of how doctoral scholarship has changed over the past six or so decades. It also says the trends are being driven mostly by large research universities in the Northeast and California, whereas Midwestern and Southern institutions “provide a counterbalance.”
The analysis – which entailed examining the “content and sentiment” of 443,543 PhD dissertations produced in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences between 1960 and 2025 – also found that power and identity vocabulary has grown substantially in dissertations over the past several decades.
“Power vocabulary surged sharply starting around 1988, especially in Literature and Language programs,” the report states. “During the 1990s, Power vocabulary in Language and Literature programs overtook both Evaluation and Aesthetics.
“Identity vocabulary has risen steadily since 1980 and is now as common as Evaluation vocabulary” the report states. It notes that the sharpest growth in identity vocabulary has been in Literature/Language, Interdisciplinary Studies, and certain Social Sciences.
“Our statistical models show Identity vocabulary growing at 5–8% per year — meaning it doubles every 8–12 years,” the report states. “This is much faster than any other category.”
The report also found that the term “subversive” has “gradually become less negative over time — suggesting a rhetorical rehabilitation.”
The analysis of how scholars deal with truth, power and Western culture comes at a time when the scholarship being produced at colleges and universities in the U.S. is under increased scrutiny for both its viewpoints and veracity. Conservatives in power are calling for more “viewpoint diversity” and lament that leftists have a stronghold on institutions of higher learning, whereas culturally conscious scholars see a need to “decolonize” how knowledge is produced, presented and understood.
Colleges and universities are also wrestling with how to stop AI from encroaching upon human thinking and to ensure that it doesn’t undermine the accuracy and authenticity of scholarship.
