Anthropology bigwig defends her field against attacks that it’s moribund, but actually proves it’s moribund.

On June 8 I posted about the “Boghossian Report,” in which ten scholars argued that the humanities are becoming overly politicized—to the detriment of universities and their ideals. The politicization came, they said, mostly from the Left, and involved the promotion of “progressive” social justice rather than a search for truth. Click below to read it:

This was not a scientific survey but a warning based on a collection of observations and anecdotes. Nevertheless, the report has received considerable pushback from humanities professors who cannot accept that their discipline could possibly be politicized. One maintained that because the humanities were in disarray in the first place, it is that disarray that led to their politicization, not the other way around. At any rate, the report was particularly hard on anthropology, singling it out for special opprobrium:

In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see 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.

and:

In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.

For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies” — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy” (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.

Note that one of the authors of the Boghossian et al. report is anthropologist Joseph Henrich at Harvard. More on him below.

Well, Carolyn Rouse, the president of the field’s biggest scholarly group—the American Anthropological Association—couldn’t let that rest, but has been firing back at the Boghossian report. Stephanie Lee interviewed Rouse for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it wasn’t a puffball interview: Lee pressed Rouse hard, and it turns out that Rouse either ducked the questions, was ignorant about the author in her field, and how the Boghossian report was written, and even maintained that science showed there were not two biological sexes.  In the end, all Rouse reveals is that the accusations about anthropology in the Boghossian report are substantiated by one who tries to refute them.

You can read the article by clicking below (the photo is of Rouse), or find it archived here:

All text from the article is indented:

From Lee’s introduction:

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.

Lee’s questions are in bold, and Rouse’s answers in plain text.

First, Rouse says that the Boghossian report was written using AI (not just for research but  “used an LLM to write this”. When pressed for evidence, she quotes an article in the Chronicle  of Higher Education, with Rouse saying, “Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.” But in that article, improperly cited in this report, Appiah actually says this:

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. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.

This does not say that the authors of the Boghossian et al. report used AI to write the report; it implies that they used AI to survey the bodies of text. It’s completely unfair for Rouse to accuse the authors of writing the report with AI.

To see what really happened, I contacted someone connected with writing this report who characterized that this accusation was “completely bonkers” and that the piece was a “most bizarre interview.”  This contact told me that while the report used various analytical tools (including LLMs) to get lists of syllabi, prizes, and so on, this was just the background research. The data were then debated heavily among the authors and the report was, as I expected, written entirely by humans. Rouse has come close to libel in her unfounded accusation. ​

Then Rouse ducks a question about an address given by Akhil Gupta, the previous AAA President:

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?

That’s a non-response. Rouse says that the previous president was misquoted. Lee keeps on pressing Rouse, saying that she (Lee) saw Gupta’s published address and the quote is in there.  Caught out, Rouse bobs and weaves:

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. . . .

 

There’s that “context” defense, saying that Gupta’s quote didn’t mean what we think it did.  Also, everyone knows that free speech is never 100% free: even the First Amendment has its restrictions. Rouse’s example of speech being “connected to something else” is neither an example of the violation of the First Amendment nor does it have anything to do with Gupta’s claim. It’s evasion, pure and simple.

Here Rouse denies that the anthropologist on the report has any reputation:

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.

You’d think that Rouse would have looked up the only author of the report who was in her field, but she apparently didn’t.  He’s not obscure, either. He’s 57, has published five books (including two trade books) and roughly 200 papers. He’s a cultural anthropologist like Rouse, and according to Wikipedia is “a recipient of the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers^[4] and the 2022 Hayek Prize.”  I think he has “a reputation”. 

There’s a lot more, but I want to get to the part where Rouse denies there’s two sexes.

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?

Rouse thinks that whether sex is binary is a non-issue: it’s settled that there are more than two sexes!

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.

Here Rouse is defining sex by karyotype: the chromosomes that someone has. And since there are several chromosomal types (XXY, XO, etc.), sex surely can’t be binary. But sex is defined as whether the individual has a reproductive system designed to produce large vs small gametes, not an individua’s chromosome complement. (These two things, however, align nearly perfectly.)  And even if you use chromosomes, 99.8% of people are born either XX or XY. Finally, what is this “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”?  Who wants to kill these babies?  This is just pure confusion and ignorance mixed with performative assertions and accusations of eugenics.

But Lee, who’s done her homework, won’t let this assertion rest, either, and presses Rouse, who issues a lame response, dismissing a survey of the very organization she heads:

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.

Had enough? I won’t burden you further, but this is a sample of how Rouse refuses to give straight answers, lies about the use of AI in the Boghossian et al. report, and completely gets biological sex wrong.  She is an ideologue who twists the truth to suit her ends, and that’s exactly what Boghossian et al. see about anthropology (another person Rouse praises is her Princeton colleague, sex-is-a-spectrum miscreant Agustín Fuentes, who’s appeared often on this site for his obtuseness about the sexes.

Rouse’s interview is nothing short of embarrassing.  Over at his website Leiter Reports, my law-school colleague Brian Leiter said this:

The CHE reporter Stephanie Lee does a really good job trying to get Professor Rouse to actually answer questions, but Professor Rouse’s responses mostly serve to confirm the doubts expressed about her field in the Boghossian Report.

Brian wrote a lot less than I did above but he has a way of distilling things into pithy but true assessments.