When a group of distinguished scholars, including historian Sean Wilentz, warned in 2025 in what became known as the Vanderbilt Report of the politicization of scholarship in the Humanities, they did not have in mind Heideman’s Rogue Elephant. The book is more polemic than scholarship per se. This is not to say that Heideman does not have some useful observation, something to say, but his argument and sources are filtered through a thick political lens to reach a predetermined conclusion. The idea for the book grew out of an article Heideman was invited to write for Catalyst: A Journal of Read more