In his opinion piece, “Are Leftist Professors Really Destroying the Academy’s Credibility?” (The Chronicle Review, June 12) Agustín Fuentes claims that a report I co-authored for the Progressive Policy Institute analyzing the leading scholarly journal of American Studies reached its conclusions by conducting something similar to “a DOGE-esque word search to find certain disfavored concepts.”
Not true. Our report, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” which found that 80 percent of articles in recent years were critical of America, 20 percent neutral, and none positive, makes clear that conducting a word search was insufficient to make a determination of how an article should be categorized.
