The problem, rather, is that scholars who study these questions have been driven into sub-specializations that are not always seen as integral to larger fields or to the humanities as a whole. Sometimes they have been driven there by departments that are reluctant to accept them; sometimes they have been driven there by their own conviction that they alone have the standing to investigate these topics.

In either case, because graduate students and junior faculty members in the humanities are expected to produce journal articles and citations much in the way graduate students and junior faculty members in the sciences are, and because they are discouraged by tenure committees and sometimes by their own ideological provincialism from thinking broadly and connecting their work to larger questions of universal relevance, there is an increasing incentive to publish in journals with narrow purviews that are read by correspondingly few scholars. The proliferation of journals that few people are invested in, along with the pressure to produce ever greater numbers of articles, leads to more work being published with fewer safeguards guaranteeing its quality.

Furthermore, hyper-specialization in the humanities means that the very people who should be thinking broadly about culture and ideas, and teaching students to encounter and engage with a variety of positions and opinions, are becoming accustomed to defining their interests in the narrowest possible terms. They read and exchange ideas in hermetic academic bubbles, in very much the same way that the public has increasingly tended to read and exchange ideas in hermetic news bubbles.

How the media has responded to the story of the hoax rehearses this very tendency and reveals something about how identity politics is being weaponized in the service of tribalism. The Wall Street Journal broke the story in the form of an opinion essay by Jillian Kay Melchior headlined “Fake News Comes to Academia,” feeding a popular narrative on the right that universities are overrun by “tenured radicals” hawking fringe ideas to their innocent students. With stories like this in the news, it’s hardly a surprise that according to a recent Pew poll, political party affiliation predicts whether one believes universities are having a positive or a negative effect on the country.

The solution is not to attack those scholars who are devoted to studying marginalized people. The solution, rather, is to ensure that the study of the marginalized not itself be marginalized — or self-marginalized. The experiences of racial and gender minorities are essential aspects of history, literature and philosophy because they are experiences essential to all societies, and always have been. When disciplines are reformed to include these stories as well as the stories of how they became excluded in the first place, then they are benefiting knowledge as a whole.