The interview that exposed academia’s cluelessness

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, 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.

Her interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it three times, and I am still struggling to convince myself that it’s real.

“They used AI,” said the Princeton anthropology professor, apparently unaware that using artificial intelligence to survey large bodies of text is an increasingly common method in many social science fields. She rambled about a couple of passing references to Socrates as if this somehow discredited the report. (Did you know the ancient Greeks had enslaved people?) She asserted that teaching there are two sexes would be “the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.”

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.

It makes for painful reading, not just because Rouse can’t seem to untangle her foot from her tonsils, but because she exemplifies some of the deepest problems with academia today. She also illustrates the reasons those problems haven’t been fixed.

Rouse comes off as someone who has not talked to anyone outside of academia for a long, long time. That can’t actually be true, since she mentions her extensive fieldwork in a rural White community. This boast makes it even more disturbing that she is so comically bad at communicating with normal people.

But then communicating with outsiders is not what she was elected for. At a time when academia is under unprecedented attack, it needs public relations adepts who can sell the value of higher education to the masses. Instead, most academics still do and say things mostly to soothe their colleagues, rather than the public that pays their salaries.

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.

This inward-focused culture was bred when a college diploma was a near-guaranteed ticket to a good job, and public faith in academia was high. Academics didn’t have to cater to the public; the public had to cater to them.

Those days are over, though word does not yet seem to have reached the faculty lounge. Only 50 percent of Democrats now express much confidence in higher education. Independents are at 39 percent, Republicans at 23 percent. The most common reason given for distrusting academia is “political agenda,” closely followed by “cost” and the perception that degrees no longer prepare graduates for the workforce. Meanwhile, a demographic cliff is hitting enrollments.

Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned that report.

But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they are wrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.

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.