What’s Wrong with American Studies?

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What’s Wrong with American Studies?<br>The field’s leading figures have no real response to findings of bias

Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin<br>Jul 28, 2026

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The field of American Studies appears to be in a defensive crouch.<br>This January, we published a study analyzing the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly. In the report, we objected to Donald Trump’s attempt to whitewash negative aspects of our country’s story but found that the articles in American Quarterly did the reverse by erasing anything good about the United States. Examining nearly 100 articles over a three-year period, we found that 80% were critical of America, 20% neutral, and not a single article was positive.<br>We published the full report, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” with the Progressive Policy Institute and a summary in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject.” We said there were plenty of valid reasons to critique America, but also asked, how could the articles in American Quarterly show no curiosity about any of America’s worthwhile attributes? How could there be no articles exploring, for instance, why the United States is cited as the most desirable destination for immigrants, or why we have so many Nobel Prize winners?<br>Thanks for reading Radically Pragmatic! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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The response to our findings from leading academics has been as revealing as the original study. We thought professors might argue that particular articles should have been categorized as positive. Alternatively, academics might have seen the study as an opportunity for self-reflection, to ask whether they needed to do a better job of telling the full American story. Instead, with one admirable exception, their responses have been mostly misleading and dismissive, mischaracterizing the way we conducted our review and going so far as to deny the very existence of objective historical truths.<br>In this article, we focus on three major critiques of our study from several leading scholars: Penn State professor and American Studies Association President Alex Lubin, Agustin Fuentes of Princeton University, Iván Chaar López of the University of Texas at Austin, and Erin McElroy of the University of Washington.1<br>Mischaracterizing Methodology<br>In “Misunderstanding American Studies” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lubin claims that our analysis employed a “simplistic methodology” of coding articles by relying on a “word search.” In another Chronicle piece, “Are Leftist Professors Really Destroying the Academy’s Credibility?” Fuentes doubled down on this point, claiming that our report reached its conclusions by conducting something similar to “a DOGE-esque word search to find certain disfavored concepts.”<br>These claims are flatly incorrect. Our report made explicit that conducting a word search was “only the first step” of determining how an article should be categorized.<br>We did not simply assume that if a critical word (say “imperial”) showed up in a word search that the story was critical. After all, an article that celebrated America for its lack of imperialistic ambition would show up as employing that word (as would a word search of the report you are reading). The word search provided a hint of the likely leaning of the article, but further investigation was necessary to make a final determination on coding. (Indeed, as discussed below, it turned out that all of the articles we coded as “neutral” also contained the critical words). The second crucial step involved a content analysis of the articles. We examined the titles, abstracts, and the articles themselves and provided an initial coding. Third, before providing a final coding for each article, we sought to identify a representative quotation to help ensure that our categorization was correct.

In short, we did the reading. There were no Muskian shortcuts.<br>In “Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?” López and McElroy also criticized our methodology, claiming our conclusions are “based only upon selective and superficial readings of American Quarterly.” The authors never explain how our reading was “selective” given that we included every regular edition article published over a three-year period. (The themes from the special editions suggested those articles could be even more negative.) Nor do the authors explain why our reading was “superficial.” They could have tried to demonstrate where they thought we had a shallow understanding of an article’s meaning. But in nearly 3,000 words, the authors don’t cite a single example of where our reading missed the mark.<br>Denying Objective Truth<br>López and McElroy also object to our notion that there exists an “objective truth about the past.” The authors contend that...