[…]
Like Field, Sandhya Shukla, professor of English and chair of American Studies, remarked in a statement to The Cavalier Daily not just on the report’s conclusion about the fields she studies, but also on how the conclusions were reached. The report’s discussion of American Studies is based on a paper by Richard Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, who argue that American Quarterly — the leading journal of American Studies — promotes a politically biased worldview for a discussion of American Studies that Shukla wrote is everchanging.
“A coding of journal articles in terms of positive or negative portrayals of America illuminates very little about a complex and changing interdisciplinary project that is much more interested in ‘how’ nation has been imagined and lived, than the ‘what’ of any stance like exceptionalism,” Shukla wrote. “That’s a problem of method and theory.”
Shukla also argued that Kahlenberg and Lin’s statement for American Studies to teach an “honest and hopeful account of American History” itself is an ideological demand.
“They are really arguing for an ideological agenda, for an academic field, in a strange echo of what they and other critics of ‘liberal’ or ‘left-wing’ humanities decry,” Shukla wrote.
[…]
