Princeton Anthropologist's Response to Humanities Report Raises Academic Freedom Concerns

Tal Fortgang 
‘17 

A report commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in  St. Louis recently concluded what most Americans already suspected: the humanities are in serious trouble. The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, released in June, brought together ten scholars from across disciplines to evaluate whether the humanities and humanistic social sciences are living up to their own stated standards of open inquiry and scholarly rigor. Ten scholars surveyed the landscape and found politicization, degraded standards, and a “toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” Of all the disciplines examined, anthropology was singled out as the most extreme case of scholarly deterioration.

The Chronicle of Higher Education offered Princeton anthropologist Carolyn Rouse, the American Anthropological Association’s president, a chance to respond. What resulted was the interview heard ‘round the academic world — because Rouse attempted to defend the academy against the report’s findings and ended up confirming them more convincingly than any study could.

Over the course of a lengthy exchange, Rouse dismissed the so-called Vanderbilt report without engaging a single finding; claimed to have ended political advocacy by the AAA when the record shows the opposite; alternated between purism for objective facts and suggesting that objectivity is impossible; likened defending the sex binary to astrology; and declared that she does not credit opinion polls, even polls of her own members, because “people don’t know a lot.”

The best way to discredit academia, it turns out, is to let prominent academics defend their cause. Rouse’s interview is a case in point of how to lose the capacity for self-correction while retaining  perfect confidence in one’s own rigor. And it should trouble anyone who cares about the future of higher education. Rouse believed her responses were appropriate, if not exemplary, coming from a leader in an esoteric academic field. That she chose to take the tacks she did, without fearing that other academics would throw her or anthropology under the bus, says a lot about the impressions Rouse presumably has of her colleagues, and what they would consider appropriate.

On to the substance. Presented first with the report’s conclusions, Rouse leveled vague methodological criticisms: “They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments.” The interviewer noted that the authors used AI as one method among several to survey large bodies of text. Rouse was unmoved: “Even before we read that, we were all thinking, ‘This reads like they used AI.’” It would be better for her cause if she could cite a single finding and explain why it was  wrong. And surely, she would have to confront the fact that real human beings signed off on the report. The one anthropologist on the commission, who found that their field was badly degraded, “has his own quirkiness.” That does not explain why he should be written off, to say the least.  

The Vanderbilt report argued that the humanities exist to educate citizens to exercise their freedom, not to encourage social justice activism. Rouse countered that these critiques came from “people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that.” It takes her two sentences to do that: “I realized so much of this is insider analytical [sic] philosophy baseball,” she continues, acknowledging that she was about to enter a field unlike her own. “They have this weird cut-out for Socrates, as if in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they did this kind of Ivy League dispassionate theorizing…They could have lofty ideals about democracy. But the private space of the home was not a space of democracy.” 

She then tried to explain how social justice belongs to the philosophical tradition: “Social justice is just another refinement of this question about freedom.” Specifically, “Social justice is about finding a way to have a democracy where whatever freedom — whatever we mean by freedom, right? — the idea that, like, how can you have somebody who’s not going to necessarily even have the kinds of absolutist free speech that a lot of these people, for instance, talk about.”  

Candidly, these are not the considered judgments, or even stray observations, of someone prepared to defend her discipline. More egregious than the fragmented thoughts and lack of systematic reasoning she betrays is that Rouse elides the difference between education and activism. 

It’s that difference that haunts her throughout. “When I became president-elect,” she claims, “I ended political-statement writing by the AAA.” At best, this boast highlights the fact that Rouse does not believe all statements that sound political are truly political statements. Claiming that the AAA stopped making political statements on Rouse’s watch is simply untrue. She became president-elect on October 5, 2023. On October 30, twenty-five days later, the AAA issued a statement on “violence in the Middle East” highlighting how “anthropological literature has empirically demonstrated the many forms of structural and everyday violence imposed by the Israeli government on the Palestinian population.” 

There was also a boilerplate conflation of study and activism: “The mission of the AAA has human rights and dignity at its core. This means we must work to dismantle the systems of oppression that deny basic human rights and dignity.” 

Nor was that the end of the AAA’s politicization. With Rouse at the helm, for example, it has advocated for the defense of a buffer zone around Chaco Canyon on behalf of Indigenous communities. Rouse herself has written for the AAA on “meaningless speech and political capture,” in which she argues that academic freedom is meant to preclude “nonsensical speech”  that could proliferate when “decoupled…from ethics and evidence” such as the assertion that “there are only two sexes.” (More on this shortly.)  

Asked about objectivity, Rouse declared that anthropologists “are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation.” In the same breath, she insists that  anthropological “data…is, of course, subjective.” When pressed on a former AAA president’s description of anthropology’s “political project” to “challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” she responded: “Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else.” Aside from misunderstanding the meaning of “free” in “free  speech,” this seems to indicate that all freedoms are exercised in service of power, or an agenda. It’s still unclear whether Rouse thinks that anthropology is objective data collection or part of a  subjective political project.  

The conversation turned to biological sex, which serves as a touchstone for fights over academic freedom, objectivity, and politicization. In 2023, the AAA canceled a conference panel on its importance in anthropological research. Rouse expressed no regret: “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.” She added: “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.” This does not display a sophisticated understanding of those who disagree, and Rouse made her incuriosity about opponents’ views explicit: “I don’t know why people care so much. You know, genetic variation is an interesting thing.” To Rouse, the wrongness of the sex binary is blindingly obvious, even as researchers churn out peer-reviewed biological philosophical explanations for why this view, held by nearly all human beings since the dawn of time, remains true.  

The interviewer observed that only 56 percent of anthropologists themselves accept Rouse’s view on sex and gender. Rouse responds: “I just don’t trust opinion polling.” Did canceling the panel on the topic contradict the AAA’s stated commitment to “vigorous and ongoing debates”? No, because the panelists would not have brought “factual information” to the table — objectivity is back! — and “I think one of the people in the panel is big on right-wing social media.”  

It’s all enough to ask what on earth is going on here. I believe the answer is relatively simple. Rouse made a name for herself in 2016 for leading a walkout from a speech by social scientist Charles Murray. In 2017, she delivered a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” to which she regularly refers still today. In 2023, perhaps not despite but because of these antics, the largest professional organization of anthropologists elected her its president. She distinguished herself at a time when hostility to open inquiry was considered vogue among academics. Now that the tide has turned, with powerful critics accusing academics of losing the plot, she must reposition herself as a leader in the academic resistance who can maintain her activist posture. Wriggling out of such a jam requires an extraordinary degree of mental dexterity, cleverness with language, and a theory of mind — the ability to perceive what people unlike you are thinking. Most people do not have all those skills in spades, and Rouse is no exception. She is profoundly unable to fathom what it is that anthropology’s critics are so upset about even as she displays it without irony. Maybe an ideologue, maybe suffering from a bad case of Ivory Tower Syndrome, maybe just a product of her field, she ends up looking confused, skittish, and obfuscatory.

Save the academy from its enemies, by all means. But save it from its defenders first.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS  and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.