I hadn't heard about this but last month a pair of universities released a, “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” What the report concluded is that the humanities have been, in some cases, taken over by poor scholarship dictated by politics. That conclusion was not popular with many academics.
Even though class is out for the summer, Washington University faculty are abuzz with discussions of a recent report—jointly commissioned by the chancellors of WashU and Vanderbilt University—meant to evaluate the state of the humanities and humanistic social science scholarship. The committee was chaired by New York University philosophy professor Paul Boghossian, and the 10 scholars authoring the report do not hail from either of its sponsoring schools.
The report’s authors warn that humanities and humanistic social science scholars have become biased towards objectives like “anti-racism, feminism, and decolonization,” which they say stray from the disciplines’ core missions to pursue knowledge...
Soon after the Provost’s email, WashU and Vanderbilt’s chapters of the American Association of University Professors released a joint statement condemning the report as a hypocritical and politically motivated attack on scholarship.
“It suffices for us to say that the report falls far short of the standards of political neutrality and disinterested inquiry it claims to champion,” the statement reads. “Historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are singled out for caricature while the authors fail to acknowledge their own public biases against scholarship performed in the name of social justice.”
Here's a bit of the report itself so you can see what all the fuss is about. Anthropology was particularly singled out for criticism.
In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.
The goals vary from area to area, but in a contemporary context they are generally though not exclusively associated with the progressive left. Put most broadly, the goal might be characterized as turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice, or the elimination of pernicious social hierarchies. More specific goals under this heading include anti-racism (the eradication of racial hierarchy), feminism (the rejection of patriarchy), the “decolonization” of the academy and of society more generally (undoing the legacy of imperialism), full equity for gender and sexual minorities and, to a much lesser extent, the eradication of class distinctions and the replacement of “neoliberal” capitalism with some form of socialism...
In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.
For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences…because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added).
In response to the report, the president of the American Anthropological Association gave an interview to The Chronicle of Higher Education which was intended to set people straight. The interview was headlined "Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized? The leader of the field’s scholarly society has a lot to say." Here's how Carolyn M. Rouse was introduced.
Rouse is an anthropology professor at Princeton University who researches race and inequality in religion, medicine, education, and economic development. In 2016 and 2017, she went viral for leading a walkout of a speech by the political scientist Charles Murray, and for delivering a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” in which she argued that free-speech absolutism does not exist.
And here's a bit of what she said:
They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments. I don’t know what methods they used...
[Anthony] Appiah says, “We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on.” Is that what you’re referring to?
Even before we read that, we were all thinking, “This reads like they used AI.”
OK, so the writing of it, in addition, sounded to you like AI? Because I think here he’s describing research.
Research. Anthropology has been in existence for — in the U.S., American anthropology has really existed for over 100 years. Now we have a large body of literature. They don’t know what anthropology is.
So they admitted to using AI for research purposes and Rouse is accusing them of using AI to write the entire paper. It's not the same thing but she doesn't seem to care. A bit later on she's asked about a panel on sex that was canceled.
In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.”...Do you regret today the fact that the AAA canceled that panel, or the justification that it gave for canceling it?
There’s a point in that Vanderbilt report where they talk about astronomy departments becoming astrology departments. All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders.” You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY — they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world. And then we have people who identify with genders that don’t match to their chromosomes, and people like Anthony Appiah, who are gay, and so I don’t know what they want, why they want us to teach in that way — that’s the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.
You get the idea. She's practically proving their point. Megan McArdle has a good piece about that interview up today.
When the interviewer pushes back on that last point, she tries to dodge and weave, but has no idea what an effective dodge would be. So we end up watching an unintentional comedian take repeated pratfalls, such as suggesting that people who believe sex is binary maybe “want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY,” and that teaching that sex is binary is as inappropriate in a classroom as debating the pros and cons of interning Japanese people. Perhaps this sounds more coherent if you are fluent in Anthropologese, but to those outside the tribe? Woof...
Rouse had one job in that interview: to defend the integrity of her discipline. She botched that assignment because the only audience she cared about believes it has no reason to be defensive. It is the latest in a long line of such errors: the college presidents who fumbled their congressional hearing, the public health experts who issued a get-out-of-lockdown-free pass for George Floyd protests, and the endless think pieces arguing that reformers who are trying to rebuild trust are quislings handing academia’s enemies more ammunition...
They can get away with this in the classroom. They can play those lines for applause at disciplinary conferences. But in the world outside, “experts say” no longer works. Academics spent years lending their institutional credibility to various political projects. Now they are reputationally bankrupt. If they don’t repair the damage, and convince people to keep writing the checks, many institutions will eventually be financially bankrupt as well.
Having as president of your association someone who doesn't believe in free speech is not a great way to rebut the idea that politics has taken over the discipline. But I doubt many of the people in the field are self-aware enough to realize it.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.
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