Jacob Shell

I’m really just bowled over by the interview. She has one of the most coveted jobs in all of higher education and she is completely incapable of defending her field with any degree of sophistication or persuasiveness. Not to mention her responses are transparently in bad faith.

It’s amazing how Anthropology keeps proving that the Vanderbilt report was right about it. The president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) says the field is open to debate. Then she’s asked about a panel on “Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” that the AAA canceled in 2023. The interviewer reports that “the AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ ‘safety and dignity,’ and that its premise contradicted ‘settled science.’” The AAA president says, “we know, factually, that there are different types of ‘sexes’ and ‘genders’” and that teaching otherwise is “the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.” She adds (regarding the panel): “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.” The interviewer: “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.” AAA President: “I don’t believe in opinion research.” The interviewer: “In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote that anthropology contains ‘vigorous and ongoing debates about theory, evidence, ethics, method, public engagement, and the future of the discipline itself.’ Is there any contradiction between those stated values and the cancellation of the panel in 2023?” AAA President: “Rigorous debate with factual information, or rigorous debate with just people who like to troll people on social media? […] I don’t think we’re contradicting ourselves. I think that that panel might never have made it into the program, if it had been peer-reviewed properly.” It was generous of the Chronicle to use a question mark in the headline for this interview.

It’s amazing how Anthropology keeps proving that the Vanderbilt report was right about it. The president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) says the field is open to debate. Then she’s asked about a panel on “Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” that the AAA canceled in 2023. The interviewer reports that “the AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ ‘safety and dignity,’ and that its premise contradicted ‘settled science.’” The AAA president says, “we know, factually, that there are different types of ‘sexes’ and ‘genders’” and that teaching otherwise is “the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.” She adds (regarding the panel): “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.” The interviewer: “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.” AAA President: “I don’t believe in opinion research.” The interviewer: “In the AAA’s response to the Vanderbilt report, you wrote that anthropology contains ‘vigorous and ongoing debates about theory, evidence, ethics, method, public engagement, and the future of the discipline itself.’ Is there any contradiction between those stated values and the cancellation of the panel in 2023?” AAA President: “Rigorous debate with factual information, or rigorous debate with just people who like to troll people on social media? […] I don’t think we’re contradicting ourselves. I think that that panel might never have made it into the program, if it had been peer-reviewed properly.” It was generous of the Chronicle to use a question mark in the headline for this interview.