Because no defense was possible
Once upon a time, I dreamed of being an academic. I thought that a life spent in scholarly pursuits would be one worth pursuing. Unfortunately for me, that dream was torn away from me by a combination of ADHD and my own stupidity, and mostly the latter.
The more time marches on, though, the more I really need to remove the “un-” from “unfortunately” in that sentence, because I’m pretty sure that my stay in academia would have been brief.
After all, even when I was pretty lefty in my politics as a young man, there were lines I didn’t really see any reason to cross, such as “what is a woman?” or “how many genders are there really?”
Academia went woke and went woke hard. As a result, they indoctrinated legions of college students into thinking absolutely ridiculous things and believing them as matters of fact.
While wokeness is no longer as ascendant as it once was, the woke are still around, still loud, and still absolute morons with no understanding of the real world outside of academia.
Writing at the Washington Post, Megan McArdle absolutely nails the problem with academia today, and woke is only part of it.
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.
Now, I read Rouse’s interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I swear she actually comes across as more unhinged than McArdle describes.
She claims the entire report reads to her like AI, so I decided to look. I copied the first part of the introduction and pasted it into Grammarly’s AI detection tool. The result? Zero percent.
So not only does it not read like AI to me, but not to actual AI detection software. Strange, right?
Look, Rouse is a loon, but the problem is that she was a recent president of the American Anthropological Association. She was initially talking as the head of the organization that speaks for the entire field, and she couldn’t even defend it.
McArdle knows why, though.
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.
McArdle notes, correctly, that the world has changed and that’s not the case anymore. People are sick of academics acting like they’re better than everyone, then picking and choosing what’s allowed to matter.
We were all supposed to stay locked down in our homes until the George Floyd riots, when suddenly the virus wasn’t all that bad compared to racism—even though there was no evidence Floyd was targeted for his race—and so rioting was totally cool, even without masks.
Rouse herself has actively attacked free speech, including in the interview, all while hiding behind the guise of academic freedom from which she can spew her hateful rhetoric that is anathema to free thought.
Honestly, the entire interview sounded like she wasn’t defending anthropology as lecturing the interviewer for having the nerve to actually take the report in question seriously.
But the report was unremarkable to most people because it simply repeated what we’ve been saying for years. Academia is flawed to its core, existing primarily to advance political narratives under the guise of academic rigor.
Rouse herself, though, was described by The Chronicle as “an anthropology professor at Princeton University who researches race and inequality in religion, medicine, education, and economic development.” In other words, her entire life’s work is about being woke. This is what she does and what she stands for, and when pressed by someone as to why the report was wrong, she couldn’t defend her own field.
Because no defense was possible.
It’s not that anthropology is inherently woke. Properly done anthropological research can be fascinating. All those documentaries about Amazonian tribes or African bush people? That’s anthropology, and it’s genuinely interesting to see how people live and adapt to their environment, especially if you don’t try to make it about how they were exploited a billion years ago or something.
The issue is that anthropology has embraced the woke, as evidenced by Rouse and her “field” of “research” as it was described. They don’t look at cultures and try to study them; they manufacture issues that they can then solve. Rouse herself gets into this by trying to claim that sex isn’t binary because intersex people exist, even though not everyone defines the binary based on chromosomes.
Nor do we take chromosomal mutations as the norm.
My point is that her lack of defense isn’t because she’s a poor individual at articulating the defense, but that the direction things have gone in academia over the years is indefensible. They’ve long believed that we needed them so badly that they could do and say whatever they wanted without pushback, that without them, good jobs wouldn’t come.
But the legions of master’s degree possessing barristas begs to differ. The philosophy majors with their bachelor’s degrees asking if you would like an appetizer with your meal would as well.
And how many of them were told that if they didn’t call out everything the woke see as wrong in every aspect of their lives, then they were terrible people, but now can’t understand why they can’t hold a job?
I feel no pity for Rouse and her colleagues. Let them hate what they want, but let them do it from outside of the ivory towers they seem to believe are their birthright. Let them try to peddle this in a free market, where ideas have to have merit to survive contact with the enemy. Let their “revelations” be pressure-tested by reality before being assumed as factual.
And let them anguish over how pathetic their acts of self-defense are received by those whom they think they’re better than.
We pay the bill. Let those who think they’re our betters suffer as they learn this and many other facts.
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The "not everyone has XX or XY chromosomes" argument is a distraction. It's a birth defect and often results in infertility. There has been no correlation between that and gender dysphoria. But she's so used to people nodding their heads and accepting it that she cannot defend that position.
I used to know someone who was born without a thumb on her right hand but I would never use that to justify someone with Body Integrity Dysphoria having his thumb cut off "because not everyone has ten fingers".
There are many issues with academia and you hit on the one that keeps their egos well fuelled, that is they all think and talk alike. They are for the most part very closed minded and do have difficulty engaging with people who have different perspectives. I was a biology//chemistry major in college in the early 1970’s. I wrote a paper that took a position my professor didn’t agree with. He suggested I add a few references I hadn’t considered and still graded me with an “A” because it was a well researched paper. I tried to do the same in a humanities class the next year and was told that the paper would receive an “F” because I missed the correct answer. By the time I graduated in 1972 the mind virus had also infected the hard sciences. How much worse it must be now.