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By Megan McArdle
Washington Post
It can’t have been fun for the anthropologists when their discipline was singled out as a hive of political groupthink. In fact, they got very angry about the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis.
The 10 scholars who authored the report, which was released in June, offered anthropology as an example of a field where “we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards … together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” For instance: The American Anthropological Association canceled a 2023 conference panel on the relevance of biological sex to anthropology.
Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association and Princeton professor, was not one to stay silent while outsiders claimed that her field had abandoned rigorous argument in favor of social justice orthodoxy. No, sir. Instead, she opened her mouth and proved it.
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Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
