REPUTATIONALLY BANKRUPT.

Reap what you sow, higher education.  Count Jonathan Turley as among the disgruntled.

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.

The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students.

The pool of young people to recruit future matriculants from is smaller, the job market for symbolic analysts isn't what it once was, and the conversion of critical theories from potentially interesting ways to play with ideas into epistemically closed tight priors take their toll, don't they?  I'm not sure that looking for Republican-leaning faculty is necessarily the right way to identify epistemic closure: the relationship between the academy and the public policy complex probably strongly skews toward Applied Welfare Economics Paradigm.

The Tight Priors, though, aren't conducive to proper skeptical and thoughtful inquiry.

It can’t have been fun for the anthropologists when their discipline was singled out as a hive of political groupthink. In fact, they got very angry about the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis.

The 10 scholars who authored the report, which was released in June, offered anthropology as an example of a field where “we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards … together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” For instance: The American Anthropological Association canceled a 2023 conference panel on the relevance of biological sex to anthropology.

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.

Well, anthropology, what do you expect?

The discipline lost the good of the intellect long ago.  "When cultural-studies types take over anthropology departments and remove science on the grounds that it's a social construct, possibly a gendered rape manual, they have lost the good of the intellect in an assault on coherent beliefs of any kind, the end product being an academic culture in which a university that operates as a subprime party school is no less useful than a university that insists on coherent thought."

I've long suspected that the discipline became special pleading for unhappy people long ago.  "Somewhere, though, anthropology narrowed its focus, turning the attempt to understand the varied ways in which people interact into yet another manifestation of identity politics and vulgar Marxism."

The association's president, Princeton's Carolyn Rouse, doesn't inspire confidence.

OK. So theoretically the field-specific individual reports may be released at some point. How do you feel about the prospect of seeing the anthropology report that Dr. Henrich presumably wrote?

If I’m still the president, and they present it, I should be interested to read it. I still don’t know what he’s doing. I’m a socio-cultural anthropologist, and these people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that. I’ve been relying on wonderful pieces by people who actually know, like Michael Bérubé in the Pittsburgh Review of Books. And then Jason Stanley also wrote something, and it was so interesting, because I realized so much of this is insider analytical philosophy baseball.

They have this weird cut-out for Socrates, as if in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they did this kind of Ivy League dispassionate theorizing. I love Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and she’s somebody I rely on to think through some questions as I do ethnography. You know what’s interesting about ancient Greece, is that the polis, and the place where people used language to deal with things rather than violence, and that new thing that was established, was wonderful. But she also notes that the people who were loud in that space were men, and the only reason they were fed and clothed and everything else is because they had slaves and women. They could have lofty ideals about democracy. But the private space of the home was not a space of democracy. It was a space where men lorded over their slaves and their wives.

One of the critiques I mentioned was that [the Vanderbilt authors] say that the reason we have the humanities is because we want to educate citizens to be able to take advantage of their freedom, and so that’s the value, but we don’t like social justice. But social justice is just another refinement of this question about freedom. We’ve just taken it into the 20th and the 21st century. These questions of freedom, where we are saying, “OK, you can’t just have a group of men who rely on slave labor to feed them. We have to think about the freedom of the people who are putting food on the table, cleaning the toilets.” Social justice is about finding a way to have a democracy where whatever freedom — whatever we mean by freedom, right? — the idea that, like, how can you have somebody who’s not going to necessarily even have the kinds of absolutist free speech that a lot of these people, for instance, talk about.

What any of that has to do with anthropological inquiry I don't know, although those free-associations are worthy of Kamala Harris with two glasses of wine in her.  Megan McArdle attempts to be kind.

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.

But then communicating with outsiders is not what she was elected for.

I await somebody from the academic internet raising hell about that "communicating with normal people" as somehow oppressive, demeaning, and dehumanizing.

Reality will bat last.

Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned that report.

But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they are wrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.

They can get away with this in the classroom. They can play those lines for applause at disciplinary conferences. But in the world outside, “experts say” no longer works. Academics spent years lending their institutional credibility to various political projects. Now they are reputationally bankrupt. If they don’t repair the damage, and convince people to keep writing the checks, many institutions will eventually be financially bankrupt as well.

It's not for lack of warnings that the pooh-bahs of higher education find themselves at that pass.  The best they can do now is learning how to argue from ... Trump???  Rational deliberation, academic administrator style.

Our universities continue to be run by terminally stupid people.