The full report is here, and there is a collection of choice excerpts here. Readers of Professor Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge* will recognize themes from that book in the report. (Of course, it has to be open to scholars to defend relativism and constructivism, especially since relativism and constructivism in some domains are probably true!)

A recurring theme is the influence of politics on scholarship, with the result that scholarly inquiry is subordinated to political goals:

The most straightforward form of distortion [in scholarship] arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it [footnote omitted]. Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise. This is so not simply because a preordained consensus is likely to be wrong (or at best right for the wrong reasons). The deeper problem is that an artificial consensus of this sort can only be maintained by distorting the scholarly ecosystem in ways that are profoundly damaging. In any discipline structured in this way, research findings will inevitably sometimes conflict with the conclusions that have been sanctioned in advance. The social and historical facts relevant to social justice are complex and hard to know. Given this, genuinely open inquiry will inevitably serve up results that challenge orthodox assumptions. (This is so even if those assumptions are ultimately correct; in any area of academic interest, there is a perennial risk that good faith scholarship will turn up what is later shown to be misleading evidence.) A discipline that has subordinated scholarly rigor to its political project will need mechanisms for suppressing this sort of conflict, and indeed we find many such mechanisms in the disciplines we have studied.

Unsurprisingly, from philosophy, they give this example:

Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organized around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense. While this view is in fact controversial even among feminist philosophers, the field has devoted considerable energy to closing off discussion by blocking the publication of dissenting views.

There is quite a lot of analytic philosophy in this report, unsurprisingly given the authors: besides Boghossian, also Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, plus some linguists, sociologists, psychologists historians and other humanistic scholars. This explains some of the rather surprising claims in the report, such as that “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming” (the main citations are to Boghossian’s book and work by his NYU colleague Thomas Nagel). So much for Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and some ways of understanding Quine–not to mention Herder, F.C.S. Schiller, and many other serious humanists. (And what about Boghossian’s colleague Hartry Field?) The report would make itself less vulnerable to dismissal had it not taken that position.

Of course, it is true that the serious arguments for relativism did not influence recent developments in the feebler humanities. It is also true that some of the non-humanistic social sciences–most obviously economics–suffer from ideological blinders in a different way, a subject perhaps for a different report?

*Disclosure: I was one of the OUP referees for Fear of Knowledge, which, as I remember, I said was a very good book, but too argumentatively dense to reach a popular audience.

UPDATE: CHE has a useful summary of some of the main themes of the report:

The report presents three sources of politicized distortion: when research must be constrained by an “accepted political goal,” when the disinterested pursuit of knowledge is “displaced by” the goal of serving “a pragmatic purpose,” and rejecting the very idea that one is capable of assessing evidence on a claim “independently of our political commitments.”

The scholars cite anthropology as a potent example of the first source, quoting a 2021 speech from the president of the American Anthropological Association then who said the field’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.” These sorts of definitions — and the subtler ways that they manifest — result in the sometimes-unconscious censorship of scholarship that doesn’t serve the political goal, the report says.More broadly, the report condemns what it calls the widespread embrace of postmodernism and relativism among scholars as antithetical to their very project. And it traces postmodernism’s appeal, in part, to the permission it grants scholars to discard evidence they don’t find personally palatable.

The authors of the report are careful to distinguish themselves from those who think the primary problem with academe is political imbalance. The fact that academics “are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public” is “not by itself a problem for scholarship.”

Universities exist to support disinterested inquiry, the report concludes, and the obstacles it names in fulfilling that mission are serious. “They are not mere problems in the administration or operation of a university,” the scholars write, “but strike at the very heart and soul of what a university should be for.”

UPDATE: More on the responses of Professors Boghossian and Appiah.