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Across the country, anthropology is under threat—a target of budget crunches and institutional restructuring sweeping through higher ed as well as broader attacks on the social sciences, humanities, and DEI.
In response, the American Anthropological Association, through its Anthropology Advocacy Council (AAC), developed Anthropology Watch: a tracker documenting every closure, cut, and admissions freeze as it happens. Below is an interview with AAC co-chairs Jeff Maskovsky and Emily Metzner about the project, including why they built it and where they see it going.
Why did you create Anthropology Watch? How did you decide what to track?
The AAA needs to play a role in helping our members track what is going on with the discipline, good or bad. These last few years have been difficult for many anthropologists, for a variety of reasons. Some scholars have been attacked for speaking out politically. Departments have been shut down or merged. Majors have been discontinued. Tenure-track lines, too. Curriculum has been censored. MA and PhD programs have been shuttered, temporarily or permanently. This is happening across the United States, and also in many parts of the world. AAA members are very concerned about all of this. But it is not always easy to find out the finer details of what is actually happening in each case. So we decided to create AnthroWatch as a place where we could post accurate news and updates about what is happening in the field.
Where does the information come from? Are departments and faculty reporting to you directly, or are you pulling from news, university announcements, other sources?
This is a member resource with all information coming directly from our members. All AAA members can post a program update—and we rely on our members to do so. We feel that our members are the best source of information about what is happening. But we verify every entry before it is posted publicly. For this we scan news, university announcements, and other sources. Thus far it has been very easy to verify the information that our members send to us. We have not rejected any entries.
What have been some of the challenges of creating and maintaining the database—getting people to report, keeping entries current, something else?
Thus far, with very little fanfare or publicity, we already have over 20 entries. We will be publicizing it more soon and hope to expand it, too, so that people can post different kinds of information and updates more easily. And so far, the member response has been very positive. People really appreciate knowing what’s going on.
There are two big challenges for us. The first is getting the word out—making sure that our members know that AnthroWatch is there and that they can post to it and read it if they want to know what’s going on. People are so busy. Although we have written to every single AAA member telling them about AnthroWatch, we know that many of our members are too busy to keep up with every AAA update that ends up in their inbox. Publicizing something like this is always a challenge.
The second challenge is technical. Right now, the database looks pretty unexciting on the website. It’s full of useful and important information. But we don’t have the resources to build it or update it the way that a professional news organization might.
How are you hoping the AAA can use the information in the tracker? How are you hoping others might use the information?
One point is to tell everyone what is going on so people can find each other. We hope that people can use the information on AnthroWatch to form solidarities and to build networks of support. For example, many programs have been threatened with mergers lately. If you find out that an administrator at your university wants to merge your department with another or, even worse, to eliminate it, isn’t it important to ask people who have been through this what they did to defend the department? These threats have affected so many of our colleagues already, and they and their students and supporters have responded in all kinds of creative ways. When it happens to any one of us, especially in light of how busy we all are, instead of reinventing the wheel, there should be a clearinghouse of strategies and responses we can visit, where we can also find similarly affected colleagues with whom we can organize and strategize. The AAA, working through the AAC, has also produced additional resources to help when programs are threatened.
Have you noticed any patterns or anything surprising?
We didn’t set up AnthroWatch as a comprehensive database. It’s more for members to use to exchange information. But it’s quite clear that there are two things going on right now that are of grave concern to us. The first is program mergers and eliminations. The second is PhD program pauses. What’s surprising is not that these things are happening. We all have an inkling of that. Rather, it is the extent to which it is happening, and where it is happening. Some people think that the attack on anthropology is only happening in Florida and Texas, but programs are under threat in many other places. AnthroWatch has already been useful in showing just how broad the threat is.
What’s next for Anthropology Watch? What do you hope it looks like in five years?
From its inception, we never envisioned AnthroWatch as a place where we only shared bad news. If anything good happens—big grants, innovative new programs, scholarly accomplishments, anything that would be useful to share—we want AAA members to know about it. We acknowledge that these days people have a lot of bad news to share but we hope that won’t always be the case.
AnthroWatch is just in its infancy. Right now, it is just a database that shows what is going on with different programs experiencing changes. In the future, when the site becomes more dynamic, we will be pulling from other sources so that anything newsworthy that happens to anthropology can be posted.
In the next five years, we hope to make AnthroWatch look more like what you might see on a magazine website or even build an app that our members can check to see what’s going on with the discipline. We are dreaming big even though our resources are limited. In the short term, we definitely will be able to make improvements to the site so that the interface is more pleasant and dynamic. That’s our main short-term goal. The medium-term goal is to integrate it with social media to make it even more interactive and up to date. We hope members will be patient as we get this off the ground, visit the site, and share any relevant news that should be posted there.