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US Vice President\u00a0JD Vance said<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cUniversities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth,\u201d\u00a0and quoting Nixon, asserted that \u201cprofessors are the enemy.\u201d 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 \u201ccorrupted\u201d 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\u00a0in an effort<\/a>\u00a0that supports the anti-intellectual frame and specious arguments of these attacks. While the authors of the\u00a0Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences<\/a><\/em> explicitly\u00a0deny this as their goal<\/a>, and despite their intent not to \u201cpromote politicized scholarship from the right, let alone stigmatize and punish serious scholarship from the left,\u201d this is exactly what the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0ends up doing<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0argues that \u201cleftist\u201d scholars in certain disciplines are destroying the social sciences and humanities via their emphasis on \u201canti-racism (the eradication of racial hierarchy), feminism (the rejection of patriarchy), \u201cdecolonization\u201d of the academy and of society more generally (undoing the legacy of imperialism)\u201d and the push for \u201cfull equity for gender and sexual minorities.\u201d The\u00a0Report<\/em>\u2019s list of \u201cbad\u201d epistemologies matches almost perfectly to those areas of the academy that folks like JD Vance and the Heritage Foundation have labeled as \u201canti-American.\u201d The\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0does not examine any right-wing scholarship or criticize its methodology or political framings.<\/p>\n Regardless of if one\u00a0likes<\/em>\u00a0a 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\u00a0Report<\/em> itself clearly states that these facts are not an issue and that \u201cthere 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.\u201d If this is the case, why does the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0argue that scholars of anti-racism, decolonialism, and feminism are destroying the academy?\u00a0<\/p>\n The actual assertion of the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0is not that these approaches are in themselves harmful, but rather that \u201ca 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\u201d is what is harmful. Basically, the\u00a0Report <\/em>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\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0goes on at length in an attempt to make the case that this dynamic is most dangerous among scholars in the \u201cprogressive left,\u201d and that it is ubiquitous and hegemonic in Anthropology, where \u201ca 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, anthropologists are so rabidly political\/social justice-y that our work and departments need to be evaluated and potentially remediated. The\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0specifically suggests that universities undertake \u201can 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.\u201d<\/p>\n When the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0attempts to support its assertions about Anthropology, the result is subjective, selective, and not at all convincing. It\u2019s clear that much of what the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0presents as field-degrading \u201csocial justice scholarship\u201d are primarily epistemologies and other disciplinary dynamics the authors of the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0don\u2019t like.\u00a0Elsewhere<\/a>\u00a0I demonstrated the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u2019s lack of quantitative data or substantive analyses to support its claims about anthropology (and see\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and\u00a0here<\/a>, or similar critiques of the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0from other disciplinary foci). Basically, the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0offers 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 \u201cpostmodernist\u201d and overly \u201crelativist\u201d anthropologists are shutting down scholarly inquiry and ruining the discipline.\u00a0<\/p>\n Given the prominent role the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0assigns to malfeasance in Anthropology and the shoddy state of the \u201cevidence\u201d in support of their assertions, one must ask if, and how widely, the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u2019s authors read articles in anthropological journals, attend anthropology conferences, or even just hang out with anthropologists? Joe Henrich, the lone anthropologist amongst the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0authors, 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\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0authors have any engagement with the scholarly output and intellectual or pedagogical life of the field of Anthropology. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s 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\u00a0Report<\/em>\u2019s core assessment seems to hinge on a belief that some mythical standard- issue, postmodernist thinking underlies most of the the discipline\u2019s content (see\u00a0Henrich 2022<\/a> drawing on\u00a0Pluckrose & Lindsay 2020<\/a>). Debates about postmodernism are certainly not new in anthropology (e.g.\u00a0D\u2019Andrade 1995<\/a>), and there are many ongoing points of critique\/debate about what anthropology is and should be (e.g.\u00a0Segal and Yaganisako 2005<\/a>,\u00a0Harrison 2008<\/a>,\u00a0Jobson 2020<\/a>, and many more) but the\u00a0Report<\/em>\u00a0does not engage any of that.<\/p>\n