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US Vice President JD Vance said, “Universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth,” and quoting Nixon, asserted that “professors are the enemy.” These statements stem from a belief that scholarly commitments to intellectual and representational diversity, structural equity, and the inclusion of historically unrepresented groups and voices have “corrupted” the American academy. This view is prominent in the current US presidential administration, prevalent among right-wing foundations such at the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute, and central to the anti-intellectual activism of white-supremacist billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. This belief is a key factor in the current extensive and vicious attack on the academy in the United States. So, it is quite disheartening that a cluster of prominent academics came together in an effort that supports the anti-intellectual frame and specious arguments of these attacks. While the authors of the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences explicitly deny this as their goal, and despite their intent not to “promote politicized scholarship from the right, let alone stigmatize and punish serious scholarship from the left,” this is exactly what the Report ends up doing.
The Report argues that “leftist” scholars in certain disciplines are destroying the social sciences and humanities via their emphasis on “anti-racism (the eradication of racial hierarchy), feminism (the rejection of patriarchy), “decolonization” of the academy and of society more generally (undoing the legacy of imperialism)” and the push for “full equity for gender and sexual minorities.” The Report’s list of “bad” epistemologies matches almost perfectly to those areas of the academy that folks like JD Vance and the Heritage Foundation have labeled as “anti-American.” The Report does not examine any right-wing scholarship or criticize its methodology or political framings.
Regardless of if one likes a given theoretical or methodical approach or not, there is no academic debate that the study and assessment of race and racism, patriarchy, colonialism/imperialism, and the use of feminist theory are widely recognized as valid and important avenues of scholarly inquiry. Yes, such approaches are more common in some disciplines than others and many scholars who are engaged in these areas are also engaged in public-facing scholarship. But the Report itself clearly states that these facts are not an issue and that “there is serious scholarship in every field we have studied, and at their best, the humanities and the social sciences are as rigorous and as fruitful as they have ever been.” If this is the case, why does the Report argue that scholars of anti-racism, decolonialism, and feminism are destroying the academy?
The actual assertion of the Report is not that these approaches are in themselves harmful, but rather that “a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding” is what is harmful. Basically, the Report asserts that many scholars doing these kinds of work are letting their political commitments be the primary shapers of their intellectual activities to such an extent that the outcomes are biased to the point of invalidity. The Report goes on at length in an attempt to make the case that this dynamic is most dangerous among scholars in the “progressive left,” and that it is ubiquitous and hegemonic in Anthropology, where “a 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.”
In other words, anthropologists are so rabidly political/social justice-y that our work and departments need to be evaluated and potentially remediated. The Report specifically suggests that universities undertake “an intensive study of the units in question conducted by reliably broad-minded disciplinary experts (in-house and external) and by experts in adjacent disciplines who take the problems seriously and can be relied on to take a measured view.”
When the Report attempts to support its assertions about Anthropology, the result is subjective, selective, and not at all convincing. It’s clear that much of what the Report presents as field-degrading “social justice scholarship” are primarily epistemologies and other disciplinary dynamics the authors of the Report don’t like. Elsewhere I demonstrated the Report’s lack of quantitative data or substantive analyses to support its claims about anthropology (and see here, here, and here, or similar critiques of the Report from other disciplinary foci). Basically, the Report offers a few quotes from senior anthropologists and one junior anthropologist, mispresents scholarship on sex and gender, nods to an (as of yet) unreleased internal study, and offers superficial inference about how lefty “postmodernist” and overly “relativist” anthropologists are shutting down scholarly inquiry and ruining the discipline.
Given the prominent role the Report assigns to malfeasance in Anthropology and the shoddy state of the “evidence” in support of their assertions, one must ask if, and how widely, the Report’s authors read articles in anthropological journals, attend anthropology conferences, or even just hang out with anthropologists? Joe Henrich, the lone anthropologist amongst the Report authors, is a distinguished scholar with multiple degrees in Anthropology from Notre Dame and UCLA. But he has not been affiliated with an anthropology department in 20 years, rarely attends anthropology conferences, and infrequently publishes in broadly anthropology-focused journals. It does not appear that any of the other Report authors have any engagement with the scholarly output and intellectual or pedagogical life of the field of Anthropology. I don’t think it’s a big ask that if a committee composed primarily of non-experts is to assess the intellectual validity of work and trends in a discipline, they should be expected to seriously engage with the actual current scholarly activity of that discipline. However, in this case the Report’s core assessment seems to hinge on a belief that some mythical standard- issue, postmodernist thinking underlies most of the the discipline’s content (see Henrich 2022 drawing on Pluckrose & Lindsay 2020). Debates about postmodernism are certainly not new in anthropology (e.g. D’Andrade 1995), and there are many ongoing points of critique/debate about what anthropology is and should be (e.g. Segal and Yaganisako 2005, Harrison 2008, Jobson 2020, and many more) but the Report does not engage any of that.
It’s abundantly clear that the authors of the Report do not have a coherent idea of what anthropology is or what anthropologists do. The AAA and others have described how the Report ignores the breadth of anthropological practice. Anthropology is intellectually diverse, encompassing a multiplicity of theory and method, pedagogy and practice. There is no intellectually uniform position, nor one hegemonic Anthropology. If the authors of the Report were truly interested in getting to the intellectual and scholarly core of debates in the discipline, they would’ve been amenable to doing what anthropologists see as basal to any such inquiry—listening and talking to the people of interest and reading their work.
One should not take my critique of the Report as a statement that there are not serious issues in the academy and in anthropology. There are. Equity, access, governance, the support, dissemination, and assessment of scholarship, debates about what academic freedom is/should be, and the role(s) of academics in the public sphere are all important and unsettled areas for examination and discussion. And anthropology as a discipline has challenges, including debates about the roles and structures of public engagement, research, and scholarship, and struggles of identity and inter- and intra-disciplinarity, and even its place in the broader academy. But the Report does not engage these issues at all. Rather, at the end of the day, the point of the Report seems to be a venting of anger and frustration by its authors related to the fact that a commitment to social justice and equity, and critical analyses of racism and sexism, currently occupy significant geographies in academic scholarship.