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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.
The interview:
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.
The interview:
A month ago, 10 high-profile scholars released a document — titled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” — that lit up a million scholarly group chats. The chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, vocal critics of the purported politicization of higher education, charged the group with evaluating a number of disciplines for signs of political skew. The conclusion: All the fields showed “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)
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.”
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. Rouse was elected president-elect of the AAA in 2023, and assumed the role last year. The Chronicle asked her about her views on the Vanderbilt report and the questions it raises about her field. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I was interested in your top-line reaction to reading that, of all the disciplines they studied, the authors singled out anthropology as the most extreme case of “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”
They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments. I don’t know what methods they used. They do not distinguish a fact from a truth from wisdom. They don’t define their terms like “politics.” It’s pretty clear, actually, that they didn’t just search for some combination of words that would validate their own beliefs, but I don’t think they even bothered to read more of the person’s work or try to understand it in the context. I can’t defend anthropology, because this is such a poorly researched report that’s so unreflexive, lacking in any rigor, and it reminds me of why scholars need to pull back from AI. It reminded me of some of the papers I’ve been getting from my students, where I have to pull them in and say, “I think you’ve used AI,” so it’s really hard for me to take this report seriously. At the same time, unserious things right now have so much power in the academy.
So I thought you were being facetious when you said they used AI, but it reads to you like they used an LLM to write this?
In The Chronicle of Higher Education report, “Inside the Report That’s Divided the Academy,” by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin, on June 11, Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.
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.
And the biological anthropologist who is on it, he has his own quirkiness. I think my colleague Agustín Fuentes does a great job of responding to that in The Chronicle of Higher Education on June 12.
Can I ask what you think about Joseph Henrich, the sole anthropologist on this commission? Had you heard of him? Were you aware of him having some kind of reputation or something prior to this?
No.
OK. So theoretically the field-specific individual reports may be released at some point. How do you feel about the prospect of seeing the anthropology report that Dr. Henrich presumably wrote?
If I’m still the president, and they present it, I should be interested to read it. I still don’t know what he’s doing. I’m a socio-cultural anthropologist, and these people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that. I’ve been relying on wonderful pieces by people who actually know, like Michael Bérubé in the Pittsburgh Review of Books. And then Jason Stanley also wrote something, and it was so interesting, because I realized so much of this is insider analytical philosophy baseball.
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. I love Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and she’s somebody I rely on to think through some questions as I do ethnography. You know what’s interesting about ancient Greece, is that the polis, and the place where people used language to deal with things rather than violence, and that new thing that was established, was wonderful. But she also notes that the people who were loud in that space were men, and the only reason they were fed and clothed and everything else is because they had slaves and women. They could have lofty ideals about democracy. But the private space of the home was not a space of democracy. It was a space where men lorded over their slaves and their wives.
One of the critiques I mentioned was that [the Vanderbilt authors] say that the reason we have the humanities is because we want to educate citizens to be able to take advantage of their freedom, and so that’s the value, but we don’t like social justice. But social justice is just another refinement of this question about freedom. We’ve just taken it into the 20th and the 21st century. These questions of freedom, where we are saying, “OK, you can’t just have a group of men who rely on slave labor to feed them. We have to think about the freedom of the people who are putting food on the table, cleaning the toilets.” 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.
How did you and the AAA come to decide to issue an official response to the Vanderbilt report, and how did that response come together?
When I became president-elect, I ended political-statement writing by the AAA. Just saying, you know, “the State Department should do more about the war in Sudan” — I think that anthropological knowledge production is always nuancing things, and most members are not experts on the Sudan, so why are they signing on to a statement? Our 501(c)(3) mission is to promote anthropology, our scholarship, our members, academic departments, and academic freedom, so let’s stick to our mission when it comes to statements.
So this [Vanderbilt report] falls in our expertise, because they’re attacking our discipline. It’s all a set-up to begin to chip away at the humanities, the social sciences. And universities are doing that, they’re closing departments, they’re merging them. So that’s why immediately we got to work.
Let’s talk about some of the specific critiques that were raised in the Vanderbilt report regarding anthropology, perhaps as a way of talking about these broader issues you have with its conclusion. So, in 2021, then-AAA President Akhil Gupta gave a presidential address where he said anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” and the Vanderbilt report said that this kind of remark is an explicit rejection of “the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?
Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil. Here’s the thing that I think they don’t understand: We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation. We have to do a lot of refining of our instrument, our way of thinking, what we’re doing it for, how we’re seeing it, in order to collect data that we know is, of course, subjective, but uncover some truth. So that’s why we teach our students to be self-reflexive — why you’re doing this, what motivates you, what presumptions did you go into the field with, what do you think this information is going to do for the world? And so actually a lot of our literature is people just kind of sharing with other people, “This is how I’m thinking.” It doesn’t actually compel us to change how we teach methods in the classroom, it doesn’t compel us to change how we do our own fieldwork. It’s simply part of a conversation, because it’s a constant struggle.
For instance, I have been studying declining white life expectancies in a rural community for 10 years. I’m finishing up. I have two films and a book that are coming out, and I’m a Black woman entering this space, and what are my motivations? What do I see? What do I not see? What do they tell me? What won’t they tell me? For the most part, I only want to do work in places where I feel a sense of hope, and where I like the people — “like” in the sense of I respect them. I don’t want to work in a place where I disrespect people, because then I worry that I’m doing something else. And I’m trying to understand their hopes and aspirations, to understand the delta between their aspirations and the things that they keep doing, so I often say I’m studying “commitment to bad ideas.” Again, I am a Black woman from an elite institution.
They know that. They know I’m wealthier than they are, and so there’s a lot going on in these encounters that I need to unpack. And when I had a postdoc work with me, and she went to the same place, because she has studied poor white Appalachians, one of her interlocutors became this guy who’s committed to white racist politics. He sells historical memorabilia and has Confederate flags. She was tapping into a vein in my field site that I will never have access to, which is why we have to be careful, and why we have those conversations ad nauseam. I think about what we’re doing in the field, why, what our commitments are, and what the limits of all of that are. Does that make sense?
The anecdote and the values you’re conveying do make sense. I wanted to understand how this ties back to the quote that the Vanderbilt report pulls. When you’re doing that kind of fieldwork, do you feel like your “political project” — to use his words — is to “challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism”?
That’s what he said. Yeah, that’s not what I said.
This is from his presidential address, or the written version of it. Not to be repetitive, but the report highlights this remark and says this remark is a rejection of the idea that “scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.”
It’s a cherry-picked quote. They misquoted him, that’s what he says.
I mean, I wasn’t in the audience for this speech, either, but he published a version of this address —
I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it.
So that quote is in there, you know.
But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else. And here’s an example from a recent thing that I read in The New York Times about this woman from Texas who’s Muslim, and wanted to have a pool party for the end of Eid. She was so focused on the Muslim community and their fears about their kids being in bathing suits and around people who weren’t pious that she wrote “Muslims Only.” She was so focused on that and those concerns, that when people outside of it read it, it read like “only whites” or “only Blacks,” or it read as something else. She just wasn’t attending to that context. So we’re speaking to an audience that has a particular understanding of the history of the discipline, recent struggles and debates within the discipline. There’s so much going on in that conversation that to just swoop in, grab a quote, and go out — I think it’s unfair. I could swoop in, go to a sociology conference, a history conference, grab a quote, and go, “Look what they said,” and it’s just missing all the context in history.
In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote “the committee did not contact the American Anthropological Association, not its elected leadership, not its editors, not the broad range of scholars who comprise the discipline.” You called this a “central methodological failure.” So, if the committee had contacted the AAA, what would you have told them?
I would track-change a lot of it, give feedback, but I would demand methods. So, if I were a social scientist doing this research, first of all, I’d want a sampling of universities across the country, and there are religious universities, you know, Liberty University, Wheaton [College], right? So we’d want public and private, we’d want a representative sample from all of these different colleges, universities along what we would call a political spectrum — even though we know it’s not red and blue in the way that we think about it — but like that. Then I would collect syllabi from maybe one intro course and one upper-level course, and you try to make that consistent and in different disciplines, a lot. Then I would interview the professor of the class. Then I would do observations of the class, and actually see the kinds of conversations. That would be the beginning of a systematic study. There’s nothing close to that.
The Yale report [Ed.: In April, a Yale faculty committee published a report about “trust in higher education”] has a section on politics in the classroom. They actually did methods that were robust. They interviewed hundreds of people affiliated with Yale in different ways. They come up with a nuanced understanding of what’s going on in the classroom, and nobody who they interviewed wanted the classroom to be an echo chamber. So that’s what happens when you start actually interviewing people. And as anthropologists, you have to do more than interview, you have to observe, too — the educational outcomes, what the professor’s doing. If you were to just have AI capture all of the texts that are being taught — I assign texts I disagree with, so you don’t know, just by grabbing that, whether I’m teaching with it, against it, beside it, whatever way I’m teaching it.
On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”
To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.
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.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.” You were elected president-elect of the AAA shortly after that incident. 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.
The second question: It should never have been accepted. At this point, we are demanding that people do good peer review, because that’s what happened — they slacked on the peer review.
OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.
I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.
So I guess the question we’re trying to unpack here is, how do we know when something is astronomy versus astrology, right? So I want to ask you about this question —
Let me ask the question back to you. Is it XX and then XY? Is that the binary?
I think it’s defined in different ways.
Well, it’s two, binary means two. So, what are the two? One is XX and one is XY, but we know that there are more than that. That’s not binary. I mean, isn’t that a mathematical fact? I don’t know how else to make the case. It’s very strange to me. I don’t what people are — why that matters to people so much. You know, genetic variation is an interesting thing.
Getting to the slightly larger principle that’s being debated in this kind of debate is what “nonsensical speech” is, to use a phrase that you’ve used before. I was reading your essay from last year, “Meaningless Speech and Political Capture.” Academic freedom, you said, is different from freedom of speech or absolutist free speech. You said, “Why should professors be forced to waste class time on nonsense?” You wrote, “I do not want my students to be punished, but I want to be able to let them know that relitigating the value of Nazism, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, eugenics, or McCarthyism is not appropriate in a class on, for example, development. Those were all failed policies, so let’s move on.” In that same essay, you also wrote that the concept that “there are only two sexes” is an example of “nonsensical speech.” So I guess I was wondering how you or how the AAA decides what is “nonsensical speech,” or how you define “nonsensical.”
So I think those are two things. One is nonsensical, one is discussion about dehumanization in the classroom. I can’t have somebody in the classroom who is, let’s say, was born with some kind of condition that means that they are nonverbal, but super smart and super capable, and in a wheelchair, and then have a debate about whether or not they should have been aborted. Sure, there are debates like that online. Go for it, students. But anthropology humanizes people. It doesn’t dehumanize people. We’re not teaching empathy, we’re teaching that humans are very diverse. I mean, if people become empathetic as a result, that’s fine, but we’re teaching that people are diverse, just like you. Their value system is built not on an objectively rational set of values, but these values work in this way to sustain this group around this set of material things and rituals. So we humanize people, and we’ve done that since we pushed back against eugenics in the early 20th century, the discipline. So I’m not going to relitigate these things with my students. And I knew when I gave the “F%*# Free Speech” talk, people were talking about absolute free speech, that this was where we were heading — to a place where we brought back, and we’re bringing back, ideas of Black biological, intellectual, and cultural inferiority, and we’re exhausted. I’m exhausted. We call it Whac-a-Mole, and it prevents us from being able to do more creative stuff, because we’re constantly tethered to having to react to some new reactionary piece of data.
If Princeton decided that we really want to open up the classroom to thinking about internment again for certain populations, based upon their phenotype, I’d have to leave. We’ve done these things before. They didn’t end well. So, if I’m having a class on development where we’re trying to think about ways to make a better world, why would I engage dehumanization as a possible strategy?
So just to connect the dots, the matter of binary sex — to you, that is as done with, or over with, as Japanese internment or eugenics?
OK, so one is dehumanization, the other one is factual. So I still don’t know what people mean. If binary is two things, male, female, XY, XX, and we have more than that, then doesn’t that mean it’s not a binary? I’m just confused about that. That’s just a factual thing. There’s the work on race and biology, people don’t understand. It takes me a whole semester of my race and biology class, and when they get it, they get it, and they’re like, “Oh my goodness,” they can’t believe how wrong most of what they have been taught is.
I disabuse people of things like “Black community.” There’s no “Black community.” So I disabuse students of a lot of presumptions, so we’re not an echo chamber, we’re not a podcast, we’re not funded by this mysterious organization called Antifa that doesn’t exist. Again, another fact, right? Can we stick with facts?
We’re not just trying to change their minds. That’s a caricature. This is why, if you did this data on what’s actually happening in the classroom, you need to actually get into people’s classrooms. You need to read their syllabi. So there’s a lot of caricaturing of academia, and I feel like this report is just — they’re just using those caricatures and cherry-picking whatever they can find that seems good, that seems right, without truly engaging a whole history of a discipline, like English or anthropology.
In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote that anthropology contains “vigorous and ongoing debates about theory, evidence, ethics, method, public engagement, and the future of the discipline itself.” Is there any contradiction between those stated values and the cancellation of the panel in 2023?
Rigorous debate with factual information, or rigorous debate with just people who like to troll people on social media? I think one of the people in [the panel] is big on right-wing social media. I don’t know, I’m not on social media at all; it just seems like a big waste of time.
I don’t think we’re contradicting ourselves. I think that that panel might never have made it into the program, if it had been peer-reviewed properly.
Properly.
Yes, because I think sometimes people get a little lazy. Things like that are cut all the time in peer review, you never see it. Journalists never see it. I never see it. There’s actually a filter happening all the time. This one just happened to make it into the public space.
But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)
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.”
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. Rouse was elected president-elect of the AAA in 2023, and assumed the role last year. The Chronicle asked her about her views on the Vanderbilt report and the questions it raises about her field. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I was interested in your top-line reaction to reading that, of all the disciplines they studied, the authors singled out anthropology as the most extreme case of “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”
They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments. I don’t know what methods they used. They do not distinguish a fact from a truth from wisdom. They don’t define their terms like “politics.” It’s pretty clear, actually, that they didn’t just search for some combination of words that would validate their own beliefs, but I don’t think they even bothered to read more of the person’s work or try to understand it in the context. I can’t defend anthropology, because this is such a poorly researched report that’s so unreflexive, lacking in any rigor, and it reminds me of why scholars need to pull back from AI. It reminded me of some of the papers I’ve been getting from my students, where I have to pull them in and say, “I think you’ve used AI,” so it’s really hard for me to take this report seriously. At the same time, unserious things right now have so much power in the academy.
So I thought you were being facetious when you said they used AI, but it reads to you like they used an LLM to write this?
In The Chronicle of Higher Education report, “Inside the Report That’s Divided the Academy,” by Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin, on June 11, Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.
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.
And the biological anthropologist who is on it, he has his own quirkiness. I think my colleague Agustín Fuentes does a great job of responding to that in The Chronicle of Higher Education on June 12.
Can I ask what you think about Joseph Henrich, the sole anthropologist on this commission? Had you heard of him? Were you aware of him having some kind of reputation or something prior to this?
No.
OK. So theoretically the field-specific individual reports may be released at some point. How do you feel about the prospect of seeing the anthropology report that Dr. Henrich presumably wrote?
If I’m still the president, and they present it, I should be interested to read it. I still don’t know what he’s doing. I’m a socio-cultural anthropologist, and these people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that. I’ve been relying on wonderful pieces by people who actually know, like Michael Bérubé in the Pittsburgh Review of Books. And then Jason Stanley also wrote something, and it was so interesting, because I realized so much of this is insider analytical philosophy baseball.
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. I love Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and she’s somebody I rely on to think through some questions as I do ethnography. You know what’s interesting about ancient Greece, is that the polis, and the place where people used language to deal with things rather than violence, and that new thing that was established, was wonderful. But she also notes that the people who were loud in that space were men, and the only reason they were fed and clothed and everything else is because they had slaves and women. They could have lofty ideals about democracy. But the private space of the home was not a space of democracy. It was a space where men lorded over their slaves and their wives.
One of the critiques I mentioned was that [the Vanderbilt authors] say that the reason we have the humanities is because we want to educate citizens to be able to take advantage of their freedom, and so that’s the value, but we don’t like social justice. But social justice is just another refinement of this question about freedom. We’ve just taken it into the 20th and the 21st century. These questions of freedom, where we are saying, “OK, you can’t just have a group of men who rely on slave labor to feed them. We have to think about the freedom of the people who are putting food on the table, cleaning the toilets.” 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.
How did you and the AAA come to decide to issue an official response to the Vanderbilt report, and how did that response come together?
When I became president-elect, I ended political-statement writing by the AAA. Just saying, you know, “the State Department should do more about the war in Sudan” — I think that anthropological knowledge production is always nuancing things, and most members are not experts on the Sudan, so why are they signing on to a statement? Our 501(c)(3) mission is to promote anthropology, our scholarship, our members, academic departments, and academic freedom, so let’s stick to our mission when it comes to statements.
So this [Vanderbilt report] falls in our expertise, because they’re attacking our discipline. It’s all a set-up to begin to chip away at the humanities, the social sciences. And universities are doing that, they’re closing departments, they’re merging them. So that’s why immediately we got to work.
Let’s talk about some of the specific critiques that were raised in the Vanderbilt report regarding anthropology, perhaps as a way of talking about these broader issues you have with its conclusion. So, in 2021, then-AAA President Akhil Gupta gave a presidential address where he said anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” and the Vanderbilt report said that this kind of remark is an explicit rejection of “the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?
Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil. Here’s the thing that I think they don’t understand: We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation. We have to do a lot of refining of our instrument, our way of thinking, what we’re doing it for, how we’re seeing it, in order to collect data that we know is, of course, subjective, but uncover some truth. So that’s why we teach our students to be self-reflexive — why you’re doing this, what motivates you, what presumptions did you go into the field with, what do you think this information is going to do for the world? And so actually a lot of our literature is people just kind of sharing with other people, “This is how I’m thinking.” It doesn’t actually compel us to change how we teach methods in the classroom, it doesn’t compel us to change how we do our own fieldwork. It’s simply part of a conversation, because it’s a constant struggle.
For instance, I have been studying declining white life expectancies in a rural community for 10 years. I’m finishing up. I have two films and a book that are coming out, and I’m a Black woman entering this space, and what are my motivations? What do I see? What do I not see? What do they tell me? What won’t they tell me? For the most part, I only want to do work in places where I feel a sense of hope, and where I like the people — “like” in the sense of I respect them. I don’t want to work in a place where I disrespect people, because then I worry that I’m doing something else. And I’m trying to understand their hopes and aspirations, to understand the delta between their aspirations and the things that they keep doing, so I often say I’m studying “commitment to bad ideas.” Again, I am a Black woman from an elite institution.
They know that. They know I’m wealthier than they are, and so there’s a lot going on in these encounters that I need to unpack. And when I had a postdoc work with me, and she went to the same place, because she has studied poor white Appalachians, one of her interlocutors became this guy who’s committed to white racist politics. He sells historical memorabilia and has Confederate flags. She was tapping into a vein in my field site that I will never have access to, which is why we have to be careful, and why we have those conversations ad nauseam. I think about what we’re doing in the field, why, what our commitments are, and what the limits of all of that are. Does that make sense?
The anecdote and the values you’re conveying do make sense. I wanted to understand how this ties back to the quote that the Vanderbilt report pulls. When you’re doing that kind of fieldwork, do you feel like your “political project” — to use his words — is to “challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism”?
That’s what he said. Yeah, that’s not what I said.
This is from his presidential address, or the written version of it. Not to be repetitive, but the report highlights this remark and says this remark is a rejection of the idea that “scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.”
It’s a cherry-picked quote. They misquoted him, that’s what he says.
I mean, I wasn’t in the audience for this speech, either, but he published a version of this address —
I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it.
So that quote is in there, you know.
But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else. And here’s an example from a recent thing that I read in The New York Times about this woman from Texas who’s Muslim, and wanted to have a pool party for the end of Eid. She was so focused on the Muslim community and their fears about their kids being in bathing suits and around people who weren’t pious that she wrote “Muslims Only.” She was so focused on that and those concerns, that when people outside of it read it, it read like “only whites” or “only Blacks,” or it read as something else. She just wasn’t attending to that context. So we’re speaking to an audience that has a particular understanding of the history of the discipline, recent struggles and debates within the discipline. There’s so much going on in that conversation that to just swoop in, grab a quote, and go out — I think it’s unfair. I could swoop in, go to a sociology conference, a history conference, grab a quote, and go, “Look what they said,” and it’s just missing all the context in history.
In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote “the committee did not contact the American Anthropological Association, not its elected leadership, not its editors, not the broad range of scholars who comprise the discipline.” You called this a “central methodological failure.” So, if the committee had contacted the AAA, what would you have told them?
I would track-change a lot of it, give feedback, but I would demand methods. So, if I were a social scientist doing this research, first of all, I’d want a sampling of universities across the country, and there are religious universities, you know, Liberty University, Wheaton [College], right? So we’d want public and private, we’d want a representative sample from all of these different colleges, universities along what we would call a political spectrum — even though we know it’s not red and blue in the way that we think about it — but like that. Then I would collect syllabi from maybe one intro course and one upper-level course, and you try to make that consistent and in different disciplines, a lot. Then I would interview the professor of the class. Then I would do observations of the class, and actually see the kinds of conversations. That would be the beginning of a systematic study. There’s nothing close to that.
The Yale report [Ed.: In April, a Yale faculty committee published a report about “trust in higher education”] has a section on politics in the classroom. They actually did methods that were robust. They interviewed hundreds of people affiliated with Yale in different ways. They come up with a nuanced understanding of what’s going on in the classroom, and nobody who they interviewed wanted the classroom to be an echo chamber. So that’s what happens when you start actually interviewing people. And as anthropologists, you have to do more than interview, you have to observe, too — the educational outcomes, what the professor’s doing. If you were to just have AI capture all of the texts that are being taught — I assign texts I disagree with, so you don’t know, just by grabbing that, whether I’m teaching with it, against it, beside it, whatever way I’m teaching it.
On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”
To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.
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.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.” You were elected president-elect of the AAA shortly after that incident. 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.
The second question: It should never have been accepted. At this point, we are demanding that people do good peer review, because that’s what happened — they slacked on the peer review.
OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.
I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.
So I guess the question we’re trying to unpack here is, how do we know when something is astronomy versus astrology, right? So I want to ask you about this question —
Let me ask the question back to you. Is it XX and then XY? Is that the binary?
I think it’s defined in different ways.
Well, it’s two, binary means two. So, what are the two? One is XX and one is XY, but we know that there are more than that. That’s not binary. I mean, isn’t that a mathematical fact? I don’t know how else to make the case. It’s very strange to me. I don’t what people are — why that matters to people so much. You know, genetic variation is an interesting thing.
Getting to the slightly larger principle that’s being debated in this kind of debate is what “nonsensical speech” is, to use a phrase that you’ve used before. I was reading your essay from last year, “Meaningless Speech and Political Capture.” Academic freedom, you said, is different from freedom of speech or absolutist free speech. You said, “Why should professors be forced to waste class time on nonsense?” You wrote, “I do not want my students to be punished, but I want to be able to let them know that relitigating the value of Nazism, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, eugenics, or McCarthyism is not appropriate in a class on, for example, development. Those were all failed policies, so let’s move on.” In that same essay, you also wrote that the concept that “there are only two sexes” is an example of “nonsensical speech.” So I guess I was wondering how you or how the AAA decides what is “nonsensical speech,” or how you define “nonsensical.”
So I think those are two things. One is nonsensical, one is discussion about dehumanization in the classroom. I can’t have somebody in the classroom who is, let’s say, was born with some kind of condition that means that they are nonverbal, but super smart and super capable, and in a wheelchair, and then have a debate about whether or not they should have been aborted. Sure, there are debates like that online. Go for it, students. But anthropology humanizes people. It doesn’t dehumanize people. We’re not teaching empathy, we’re teaching that humans are very diverse. I mean, if people become empathetic as a result, that’s fine, but we’re teaching that people are diverse, just like you. Their value system is built not on an objectively rational set of values, but these values work in this way to sustain this group around this set of material things and rituals. So we humanize people, and we’ve done that since we pushed back against eugenics in the early 20th century, the discipline. So I’m not going to relitigate these things with my students. And I knew when I gave the “F%*# Free Speech” talk, people were talking about absolute free speech, that this was where we were heading — to a place where we brought back, and we’re bringing back, ideas of Black biological, intellectual, and cultural inferiority, and we’re exhausted. I’m exhausted. We call it Whac-a-Mole, and it prevents us from being able to do more creative stuff, because we’re constantly tethered to having to react to some new reactionary piece of data.
If Princeton decided that we really want to open up the classroom to thinking about internment again for certain populations, based upon their phenotype, I’d have to leave. We’ve done these things before. They didn’t end well. So, if I’m having a class on development where we’re trying to think about ways to make a better world, why would I engage dehumanization as a possible strategy?
So just to connect the dots, the matter of binary sex — to you, that is as done with, or over with, as Japanese internment or eugenics?
OK, so one is dehumanization, the other one is factual. So I still don’t know what people mean. If binary is two things, male, female, XY, XX, and we have more than that, then doesn’t that mean it’s not a binary? I’m just confused about that. That’s just a factual thing. There’s the work on race and biology, people don’t understand. It takes me a whole semester of my race and biology class, and when they get it, they get it, and they’re like, “Oh my goodness,” they can’t believe how wrong most of what they have been taught is.
I disabuse people of things like “Black community.” There’s no “Black community.” So I disabuse students of a lot of presumptions, so we’re not an echo chamber, we’re not a podcast, we’re not funded by this mysterious organization called Antifa that doesn’t exist. Again, another fact, right? Can we stick with facts?
We’re not just trying to change their minds. That’s a caricature. This is why, if you did this data on what’s actually happening in the classroom, you need to actually get into people’s classrooms. You need to read their syllabi. So there’s a lot of caricaturing of academia, and I feel like this report is just — they’re just using those caricatures and cherry-picking whatever they can find that seems good, that seems right, without truly engaging a whole history of a discipline, like English or anthropology.
In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote that anthropology contains “vigorous and ongoing debates about theory, evidence, ethics, method, public engagement, and the future of the discipline itself.” Is there any contradiction between those stated values and the cancellation of the panel in 2023?
Rigorous debate with factual information, or rigorous debate with just people who like to troll people on social media? I think one of the people in [the panel] is big on right-wing social media. I don’t know, I’m not on social media at all; it just seems like a big waste of time.
I don’t think we’re contradicting ourselves. I think that that panel might never have made it into the program, if it had been peer-reviewed properly.
Properly.
Yes, because I think sometimes people get a little lazy. Things like that are cut all the time in peer review, you never see it. Journalists never see it. I never see it. There’s actually a filter happening all the time. This one just happened to make it into the public space.
