The interview that exposed academia’s cluelessness
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.
