A blue-ribbon panel of senior humanities professors at American universities recently admitted that undergraduate interest in their fields has plummeted.

“Despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble,” reads the State of Scholarship report released in early June by Vanderbilt University and addressed to American university chancellors and presidents. “It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi.”

This admission is a good place to start, but their eminences, who may have a healthy sense of self-interest in how (or, indeed, whether) our failing system of higher education should be reformed, continue, “With rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues.” Instead, they write, “our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship.”

Though it became an exercise in academic navel-gazing, the Vanderbilt report started out with noble intentions. It was commissioned last September by chancellors at Vanderbilt University and Washington University of St. Louis, just as the Trump administration was beginning to freeze federal funds to institutions that government investigations had found insufficiently compliant with civil rights laws. Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber attacked chancellors Daniel Diermeier and Andrew D. Martin, according to Rose Horowitch in a piece at the Atlantic, alleging that they were “making matters worse by agreeing with President Donald Trump, against the evidence, that the sector had grown illiberal and out of touch with mainstream America.” The Trump administration imposed a $4 million funding freeze on Eisgruber’s institution and had placed it under a separate Department of Education investigation during Trump’s first term.

The forum for Eisgruber’s attack on Diermeier and Martin was a meeting of the American Association of Universities, an organization of about 70 leading universities of which Eisgruber is president, and where such confrontations are far from common. Diermeier and Martin hit back, arguing that the heavy politicization of Ivy League schools had discredited their own less controversial universities, and that Ivy League administrators should yield the pretense to national academic leadership to less controversial figures, like themselves.

The confrontation reportedly only lasted for about 15 minutes, but it clearly stung both sides. Eisgruber went on to publish a critically panned and thoroughly unconvincing book, Terms of Respect, with a farcical subtitle that claims that our colleges and universities already largely “get free speech right.” Meanwhile, Diermeier and Martin commissioned their report and began media appearances arguing the opposite case: that American universities badly need to reform their policies protecting free speech, academic freedom, and institutional neutrality.

Their report, however, seems to be at cross-purposes with those noble, if vaguely defined, goals. The committee that produced it begins its analysis of the question of academic shortcomings by proclaiming “the first thing to say is that we reject the complaint in this bald form” and that “at their best, the humanities and the social sciences are as rigorous and as fruitful as they have ever been.” In the very next sentence, however, they hedge their apparent certainty by admitting to “a mixed picture” in which “every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies,” including “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria.” Only a few sentences later, they laboriously qualify their work a second time, saying that despite having devoted an entire academic year to the task, their “conclusions are provisional” and “not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study of these matters.” Showing little courage in their convictions, they “urge caution on the part of administrators who might wish to act on the basis of our report.”

So what does this inconclusive, unsupported, and premise-rejecting report tell us? The committee’s first recommendation merely passes the buck yet again, recommending that any administrator who cares about the humanities should conduct further study. “In our view,” the committee members say in concerned italics, “nothing in this report warrants any intervention more intrusive than such first steps.” Nevertheless, they are bold enough to caution against any attempt “to promote politicized scholarship from the right.”

The report drones on aimlessly, initially making a lengthy, pedantic, and highly repetitive case for the importance of the humanities, a conviction that even a doctorate-holding specialist might doubt, as I came to do, by the time he reaches the end.

At the end of the report, the only problem with American higher education the committee appears to have identified is the decentering of “disinterested inquiry,” which they define as “inquiry aimed at knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and for the sake of further goods that require genuine knowledge and understanding.”

“If the pursuit of disinterested inquiry is compromised,” the committee concludes, “it strikes at the very foundation on which a university should be based.” That sounds suddenly much more serious than anything else in their report, including the committee’s own opinion of its conclusions.

In the final analysis, however, the report is such a parody of academia’s limitations that it only leads to disinterest in the fate of higher education itself.