What would you say about a publication devoted to writing about America that never has anything positive to say about our country? You might think it’s horribly biased and has an agenda—and you’d be right.
That’s exactly what’s happening in the subject of American Studies—an academic field dedicated to examining U.S. history, literature, society, and politics. It also reveals something very troubling about the state of academia today.
A recent report by the liberal-leaning Progressive Policy Institute found that the leading journal in American Studies appears unable to publish positive scholarship about the United States or its institutions. The analysis reviewed 96 articles published between 2022 and 2024 in American Quarterly, the field’s flagship journal, and found a stark imbalance. Eighty percent of the articles were critical of the United States, while the remaining 20 percent were neutral—none offered a positive assessment. The findings indicate that a discipline once marked by broad intellectual inquiry has narrowed into a largely one-directional critique, leaving little space for scholarship that examines American history or institutions in a constructive light.
In a comment to The Wall Street Journal, the journal’s editor rejected the implication of bias, arguing that the publication’s role is not “national boosterism,” but critical inquiry—certainly a defensible position, but one that sidesteps reality. That response obscures how academic publishing actually operates within universities. What was left unsaid was not just what gets taught in classrooms, but who gets to do the teaching in the first place. Academic journals typically determine what research is rewarded, which faculty receive tenure and promotion, and who eventually gains relief from teaching responsibilities to produce more scholarship in the first place. These publications serve as a gatekeeping mechanism for professional advancement, and the editors know it.
This pattern extends beyond American Studies. A recent report from the Goldwater Institute titled Peer Review Gone Wild detailed how the ideological capture of a once-prestigious academic journal in political science transformed it into a mechanism for left-wing advocacy.
In 2019, the American Political Science Association openly recast its premier journal, the American Political Science Review, as a vehicle for activism rather than scholarly objectivity. The organization appointed a group of radical faculty calling itself “the Feminist Collective” as editors and almost immediately saw them consolidate power and aggressively rewrite the journal’s standards. Rather than prioritizing methodological rigor and scholarly relevance, the new regime elevated activist research and enforced racially discriminatory review practices justified in the name of “equity” and “inclusion.” The Feminist Collective betrayed the historical mission of this flagship journal, abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of a leftist crusade against supposed “systemic oppression.”
When an entire discipline’s flagship journal systematically excludes positive or even mixed assessments of American institutions, the issue is no longer about “national boosterism” as the AQ editor would have you believe—it’s about intellectual siloing and credibility. A journal that produces an “unrelentingly negative portrait” of its subject matter ceases to function as a disinterested evaluator of scholarship and instead becomes an instrument of advocacy.
This erosion of trust is precisely what the American Higher Education Restoration Act is designed to address.
Developed by the Goldwater Institute alongside Defending Education and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, the proposal starts from a simple premise: taxpayers should not be required to subsidize ideological activism masquerading as academic research. When journals can no longer be trusted to provide credible, disinterested evaluation of scholarship, universities must reform how they allocate public resources.
The Act restores a teaching-first norm in higher education. Non-STEM faculty seeking relief from normal instructional loads would be required to justify publicly funded scholarship through a transparent approval process incorporating both peer expertise and public oversight. Automatic course reductions tied to publication in ideologically captured journals would end. Teaching excellence and civic instruction would again take precedence over narrow, ideological activism.
Equally important, the Act returns the authority to approve new faculty job postings to governing boards rather than the departments that have sought to ensure that only candidates who share their ideological views are hirable. This is not an attack on academic freedom. It is a reassertion of institutional responsibility at publicly funded universities that aims to reorient them back to their original missions of serving the public interest broadly.
Criticism of the United States has a legitimate—and essential—place in serious scholarship. But when academic journals abandon objectivity in an effort to steer who succeeds and fails in academia, reform is no longer optional, particularly at our state institutions. The American Higher Education Restoration Act restores a basic social contract: public funding in exchange for scholarly rigor, intellectual seriousness, and high-quality teaching. In today’s academic environment, especially within the humanities, that kind of measured reform is long overdue.
Carl Paulus is a Senior Writer for the Goldwater Institute.
