WashU’s Martin Skips Faculty Discussion of Humanities Report for Photo Op with Sec. McMahon
While concerned Washington University in St. Louis faculty were meeting to discuss a new report hostile to humanities programs at the university, Chancellor Andrew Martin participated in a photo op with US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. On Wednesday, September 15, at 4:00 PM, six faculty presented lightning talks addressing the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences recently commissioned by Martin and Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier. That report makes broad and mostly unfounded claims that humanities disciplines such as anthropology, history and literary studies produce inferior scholarship because of a commitment to left-wing political ideology.
Faculty at both Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University have objected to the report’s methods as misleading, biased, and selective. Some fear it presents a message trustees will use as cover for future cuts and program mergers. The American Anthropological Association condemned the report as elitist and out of touch in that the authors did not interview faculty in the disciplines they criticize. Scholars whose published works are cited in the report, including University of California-Berkeley anthropology and law professor Khiara Bridges, have observed that their analysis of certain ideas is wrongly depicted as personal opinion.
Washington University in St. Louis’s Center for the Humanities organized an event, “Advocacy, Objectivity and Method: A Forum to Discuss the Special Commission Report,” to open dialogue around the report and its findings. Six faculty members, including Corinna Treitel, Adrienne Davis, Abram Van Engen, Dwight McBride, Diana O’Brien and Rebecca Lester , provided brief talks critiquing Martin and Diermeier’s report. While that event was unfolding last week, Secretary McMahon visited Washington University’s Gephardt Institute across campus to participate in a roundtable on rural healthcare.
Rather than attend the faculty gathering on his own report, Martin chose to meet McMahon and pose for a photograph, which the Department of Education proudly presented on McMahon’s official Facebook page. Washington University’s Student Life newspaper extracted metadata of photographs the administration provided of McMahon’s visit, revealing the timestamps on the photographs extended from 3:31 PM through 4:33 PM on September 15th.
This is not the first time that Martin’s coziness with the Trump administration came into question. On August 3, McMahon sent a letter to the nation’s university leaders and board members calling on them to issue statements “to describe to the American public your commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service—commitments that make our universities a bedrock institution of the American republic.” The letter required commitments in several areas, including rebutting alleged favoritism in admissions, advancing “American security interests” against supposed foreign influences, politicization of teaching and research, and lack of rules against “unruly and violent protestors.” McMahon’s letter contained a familiar litany of right-wing claims about American higher education institutions, customarily presented without supporting evidence.
In the letter, McMahon favorably cited Martin and Diermeier’s report as a bit of evidence of her claims. Furthermore, in interviews, McMahon claimed that four university presidents helped her write the letter, including Martin. Martin provided St. Louis Magazine with a statement denying any role in writing the letter while admitting to collaboration with the Trump administration: “For several months, I have participated in broader discussions with the White House and other higher education leaders about issues affecting the sector. I expect those conversations helped inform the administration’s thinking around their Monday letter. I was not involved, however, in the drafting of the letter.”
In fall 2025, McMahon’s Education Department released the controversial Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which would have required any college or university to submit to a pledge of ideological fealty to the Trump administration’s goals in order to receive any federal research funding. Among the Compact’s requirements: eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, punishing campus protestors, suppressing academic freedom for professors not aligned with the far-right, eliminating faculty governance rights, destruction of tenure protections, and other demands.
After the Compact’s release, Martin met with Department of Education officials to discuss Washington University in St. Louis’s potentially embracing it. After uproar at his own institution, including a strong statement from Washington University’s American Association of University Professors Chapter, Martin denied any intention of signing the Compact.
McMahon’s most recent demand has become known as Compact 2.0. Andrew Martin may not be offering outright endorsement, but his continued legitimation of the Trump agenda for higher education and disinterest in his own faculty’s concerns about the current right-wing assault on academic freedom now comes with photographic proof.
