“Serious scholars” ought to generate a “fair-minded account” of what makes “America” unique and exceptional, propose Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, two researchers from the Progressive Policy Institute who in January 2026 published a 74-page report critiquing the field of American studies and its flagship journal, American Quarterly. The field of American studies, they argue, should “teach an honest and hopeful account of American history … [that] acknowledge[s] America’s sins but also the ways in which liberal democratic norms made redemption possible.” Indigenous genocide, enslavement, lynching? Sure, but with good vibes, please.

This is where any pretext for empirical study is abandoned in Kahlenberg and Lin’s study “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s.” At its core, the non–peer reviewed study makes broader claims about what stories may be told about the US, past or present. They claim to tackle what they deem is the unacceptable distortion of US history perpetrated by the academic field of American studies: “a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait” of “the American experience.” Paradoxically, the “study” does not offer a “fair-minded account” of the field. It fails to do the hard work of examining the soundness of the claims made about US history and society.

Instead, the authors enforce a normative framework of “balance” and “fair-mindedness” that questions the contributions and merits of a whole scholarly field without the rigor of engaging its insights. We question, in turn, the “study’s” purpose in a time of institutional capture by political actors that prohibit independent inquiry and dissent.

After all, what does it mean to be “honest and hopeful” about US history? How are we supposed to maintain “redemption” in the sustained exercise of settler colonialism or structural violence? How are fair-minded accounts realized? Redemption and fair-mindedness for whom? Who benefits?

Apparently, Kahlenberg and Lin seem quite certain as to what “America” is, who constitutes it, and how it has “progress[ed].” In correcting American studies’ supposed distortions, they are themselves tragically distorting and destroying the field they claim to be saving. Since the “study’s” publication, conservative politicians and university administrators in places like Texas eliminated and consolidated academic programs that are a part of American studies or are in conversation with the field. We find the “study” and administration actions represent a movement undermining, constraining, and eradicating those who have sought to document, understand, and name the experiences of systematically marginalized communities in US history.

As Kahlenberg and Lin police what can be written and taught about the past and present US, elected and government officials at the federal and state levels work on silencing uncomfortable yet profound truths. Policing and silencing independent inquiry through the unabashed embrace of narratives of unimpeded improvement makes it impossible to understand the production and perpetuation of harm.

By interrogating criticisms of American studies (and ethnic studies), we reveal the ongoing struggle to reshape US educational, cultural, and research institutions. Reports like “The Distortion of American Studies” create a specter of unreliability for any critical research that questions injustice while feeding right wing attacks on higher education, scientific inquiry, and dissent. The claims of those who champion so-called reforms of disciplines like American studies and universities tuck away their ideological project’s authoritarian impulse through a facade of academic rigor. Their critiques are not, in fact, about a matter of “credibility,” a “return to academics,” or “fair-mindedness.” Instead, American studies and higher education are being challenged to displace and delegitimize many of its practitioners within today’s moments of danger.

Reports like “The Distortion of American Studies” create a specter of unreliability for any critical research that questions injustice while feeding right wing attacks on higher education, scientific inquiry, and dissent.

As Kahlenberg and Lin’s “study” has continued to circulate and garner both support and dissent, it seems as if we are indeed in the midst of another “paradigm drama” in the history of American studies. Some people have identified some patterns of belief—such as critical race theory, gender as category of analysis, and transgender identity and care—and declared them to be controversial. In response, they offer neatly folded explanations of progress that occlude difference and inequality. These actors grow troubled by the dominant undisciplined character of American studies which unsettles expectations for neat resolutions or, at the very least, offers ambivalent conclusions. American studies scholar Gene Wise proposed “paradigm drama” to understand how these patterns of beliefs found material expression in the scholarly contributions of exemplary figures or groups in the field. Kahlenberg and Lin’s “study” constitutes a direct assault on these approaches. Their work is part of wider controversies around how and whose history must be written and circulated.

In Kahlenberg and Lin’s argument (based only upon selective and superficial readings of American Quarterly), they suggest that the field’s scholarship reproduces the same genre of bias that the field critiques. Scholars, they claim, become inured to positive transformations while stressing harms committed in the past. As such, Kahlenberg and Lin contend that American studies itself lacks the objectivity to counter the far right’s distortions. Highlighting positive outcomes is supposed to undermine far right critiques of systemic failures. Such a stance, in fact, eerily mirrors and facilitates far right maneuvers to “teach both sides of slavery” and the like in K–12 across states such as Florida and Texas. Furthermore, the authors’ positivist bent seems to ignore an insight that emerged from extensive debates about narrative, fact making, and history since the 1970s.

Narratives are neither innocent nor neutral. They work to prioritize who counts, who does not, how, and why. In placing the US nation as the central character, as the “study” and many conservative thinkers insist, its peoples are mere plot devices to explain its grandeur. Rather than understand how people live, what they endure, with what, and under what conditions, these thinkers apply a rigid frame that cuts out whatever may trouble the nation’s exceptionalism and persistent improvement. In other words, they imply there is only one objective truth about the past.

American studies as well as fields ranging from feminist studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and more contradict this positivist claim. Decades of interventions persistently showed that stories not only contain but are shaped by its plots, scenes, and tropes. If we fail to reflect on these, we risk missing out on the choices made along the way. Choices, actions, and circumstances that may very well question plots and tropes of greatness. Kahlenberg and Lin insist there is only one objective truth through which to reach a “neutral” understanding of US history. But history is both what happened in the past and what people say happened in the past. And these are inevitably entangled with conflict and choice.

Kahlenberg and Lin position themselves as offering an objective assessment of the field of American studies and suggest their quantitative analysis, a seemingly neutral approach, justifies their critique for how the broad field reproduces a distortion prevalent on the right. And yet they themselves produce fundamental distortions of US history and American studies.

The authors’ alleged concern for American studies masks their own political maneuverings. Kahlenberg and Lin struggle to align their visions of “America” with those examined, documented, and accepted by scholars in the field. The failure to align these interpretations of the past is not understood by them as the product of lack of evidence or interpretive frameworks, to name two possibilities. Instead, Kahlenberg and Lin invalidate and delegitimize other scholars’ work as “not telling the whole truth.” This reproduces an epistemic fantasy, long dismantled by myriad thinkers in American studies, not to mention history, feminist studies, ethnic studies, Black studies, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies (STS). No past can be known in its totality. Those who seek to understand the past must tend to its intentional and unintentional fragmentation—of ignored or forgotten experiences, of silenced voices, of lost materials and partial perspectives, and more. Those who work to reconstruct the past are not omniscient actors that stand outside of history, but entangled ones with their own limited perspectives and situated understandings. Interventions that trouble the kind of epistemic fantasies expressed by Kahlenberg and Lin illustrate how stories of the past (as much as studies of social, cultural, political, and economic processes) inevitably grapple with how that which is translated—from physicality to language, from norms to embodiment, and more—is itself transformed in translation.

Scholarship from these fields has long troubled imaginations of a liberal, post-racial world untroubled by the haunting of US empire, transatlantic slavery, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, while at the same time supporting ongoing movement work committed to racial justice, feminist knowledge production, and antifascism. Therefore, Kahlenberg and Lin’s appeal to objectivity and balance, in fact, disregards American studies and the rich insights it has given people to understand their lives and circumstances.

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And even as Kahlenberg and Lin’s report polices a whole field of expertise, the timing of its landing makes their motives even more suspect. Right now, there are open attacks to independent inquiry (e.g., cuts to scientific research, undoing institutional autonomy) and to public data collection (e.g., health, climate, food insecurity). Meanwhile ICE operations across the United States reveal “the long shadow of racial fascism” in this country, a nightmare that unfolds through liberal and conservative logics alike. Worse still, their report arrives just as higher education institutions—under the mask of “restoring the academic social contract,” whether through political and economic coercion, or willful aggression—close and consolidate academic programs to remove knowledge, encroach on free speech (academic freedom), especially regarding critiques of US empire, and unsettle programs that center and support minoritized communities. Indeed, this is why The University of Texas at Austin is eliminating the Department of American Studies as well as those of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies—departments that we have both been a part of. This is also why the University of Washington, where one of us is now based, recently fired the director of the Middle East Center for speaking out against the US and Israeli–led bombing of Iran.

Such “restorations” are often masked by claims that they seek to recover “the American way of life,” just as they undermine open debate for difficult and controversial topics. Yet the misalignment between their vision—a static and unchanging conception of an “American way of life”—and the scholarship actually emerging from American studies is profound. In fact, scholars in this field have produced the kind of inquisitive, rigorous, and creative thought that help us understand these and many more processes. This is what is threatening to the authors of the PPI “study” and to conservative university administrators. These actors seek to silence and eliminate any source of dissent, any knowledge practice that questions their orthodoxy.

Calling to undo the field’s supposed “distortions,” Kahlenberg and Lin purport to embrace an ambivalent stance towards the past. Their proposal is a tragedy that we reject, as it would leave us without the analytical apparatus to understand our present.

The rhetorical move in “The Distortion of American Studies” is indeed confusion in distortion. A heterogenous field with diverse practitioners, outputs, journals, and practices is said to be represented by a single journal in a three-year span. No considerations are given to research and teaching that comes from the more than 150 programs and departments in the US.

The proposal from Kahlenberg and Lin embodies the kind of rigid, normative discursive moves against which the “founders” of the field rebelled as they operated in the borderlands of inquiry. Where was the complexity when engaging the diverse constituencies that meet in American studies? Where were the positive contributions of existing scholarship assessed? Where was the examination of the substantive evidence and claims presented by the authors in and beyond American Quarterly? It seems that those concerned with American studies’ “lack” of nuance can’t account for why their own methods and conclusions are flat.

Arguments about a “credibility” problem with American studies, as a field, simply lack substantive evidence. In fact, these arguments are based on political conjecture only.

If these arguments do mobilize evidence, like Kahlenberg and Lin do, they actually document how the extensive reach of the field wouldn’t be possible if it was not successful in aligning with diverse constituencies. Credibility, in broad terms, is not a state of affairs but an ongoing process of communication. It requires continued work in constructing claims based on collectively agreed rules of argumentation, verification, and validation. The circulation of ideas from American studies in public discourse, higher education, and K–12 education represents the expansive influence of the field and its extensive, well-researched work. What is held as credible in communities of knowledge production emerges through the encounter and agreement of diverse worlds.

Those leveraging arguments about “credibility” are only expressing interpretative disagreement. To truly argue for a new interpretation would require hard work, such as conducting empirical research on questions central to American studies and compelling its constituencies to not only entertain but embrace them. This work is something the “non-distortionists” have simply failed to do. Still, they may succeed in destabilizing and undermining the field’s current paradigm or, worse yet, legitimize the elimination of American studies from the landscape of higher education.

If they succeed in this distortion, what follows is the collapse of independent inquiry and expertise. Only narrow stories that celebrate the nation and its proud citizens would be permitted to circulate, tales that would echo in classrooms, grace the walls of cultural institutions, and inform the exercise of political power. But that is not scholarship. And with the collapse of the field, we ask how many stories and communities will then go undocumented and unserved.

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Normativity, in the hands of the “non-distortionists,” smuggles into American studies assumptions that we’re told we must describe rather than prove. A key question the field has tackled, which Kahlenberg and Lin recognize, is what exactly is “American culture”? What is distinct from other cultures, in “its customs, norms, history, literature?” But what they should know—and we must remember—is that the actual error with the field is how the boundedness of the object of study (“America”) was an assumed truth, rather than a question.

Instead, the distinction of “America” was taken for granted, rather than something to uncover. During the collapse of empires (post–World War I) and the growing consolidation of US power (post–1898 to post–World War II) in the international arena, early American studies scholars were concerned with national identity (and perhaps anxious about its character); as such, they sought to understand and preserve some uniqueness. The authors insist the US is exceptional. In their eyes, “exceptionalism” is a truth to be described, just like “American culture.” The boundaries of these objects are taken for granted. What, who, when, and where they contain are but elements to find in the archive or the field. Like boxes to tick, or t’s to cross.

Such truths, apparently, outweigh the extensive work American studies has already done in questioning the construction of grand narratives (from Vine Deloria, Jr. and Amy Kaplan to Robin D. G. Kelley and Katherine McKittrick). And they ignore how so much work has showed (and continues to show) how the singularity of “America’s” culture has always been questioned by heterogeneous individuals, groups, locations, and more, a diversity that conjures up specters of a different identity: unifying and divisive but always multiple.

This is what Wise described as the “pluralistic approach,” which became prominent and dominant since the 1960s, because of the substantive contributions from ethnic studies, Black studies, women’s studies, popular culture studies, and more. The search for uniqueness found commonality and difference. In the process, the voices of those constituting the “American experience” multiplied; and this, in turn, expanded nuanced, conflictive, and variable understandings of what is the United States and what are its cultures.

Such conclusions, however, don’t fit neatly in the singular, grand narratives of progress that are called for by Kahlenberg and Lin. Nor by those called for by so many other political actors in the public arena, including those frantically closing academic departments to build schools predicated on national dogma, where dissent is only an idea and not a practice. The distortion executed by Kahlenberg and Lin is meant to inform public policy and to provide cover for the kind of political work affecting educational, cultural, and research institutions around the country. For all its insistence on fair-mindedness, the current persecution of people and ideas is not fair. What does it mean for these institutions to abandon principles of autonomy and expertise at the feet of political expediency? What society emerges from this arrangement and at whose expense?

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The task for American studies, it seems to us, is to follow actors in the making of their lifeworlds. What that means is to slowly assemble, interpret, and understand the materials and practices that make life possible.

The empirical challenge for American studies practitioners is to not assume where our sources take us, which includes the violence the authors of the “study” supposedly entertain. But where they insist on sugarcoating or entertaining vague notions of “balance,” we stay with the trouble of dreams deferred. Their missing “balance” in understanding American studies shows that such value is but a hollow attempt to tilt the balance against those who dare to speak truth to power.

Otherwise, we should rename the field to “American exceptionalism studies.” And not be ambivalent about it.