Earlier this summer, 10 accomplished scholars released their controversial “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” They had been tapped by the reform-minded presidents of Vanderbilt and Wash U to evaluate the disciplines in question and concluded they had undergone “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria.”

In a grimly predictable response, the usual suspects quickly denounced the paper (dubbed the “Vanderbilt report”) in the usual outlets. But things got a lot more entertaining when Princeton’s Carolyn Rouse, president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), sat for an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education that deserves its own chapter in the annals of academic malpractice.

The Vanderbilt report had flagged anthropology as an example of “the most extreme cases” of all the fields studied, deeming it “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity” and indicting it for “a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” Rouse, a scholar of race and inequality who went viral a decade ago for a lecture titled “F&*# Free Speech,” was eager to push back and had published a response to the Vanderbilt report on the AAA website, deeming it “factually wrong” and presented “without meaningful engagement” with the field.

Following this defense, the Chronicle’s Stephanie Lee invited Rouse to discuss the Vanderbilt report. The result was a shambolic demonstration of academe’s worst excesses in 2026, sometimes veering dangerously close to outright parody. (I credit Lee for resolutely trying to get Rouse to answer her questions.) Serious figures described Rouse’s performance as “disastrous,” “nonsensical,” “clueless,” and evidence that she’s  “beyond the reach of rational discussion.” The interview deserves to be read in full as a portrait of social science’s contemporary travails, but I thought it worth distilling a few highlights.

Lee starts by asking Rouse for her “top-line reaction” to the report’s indictment of anthropology. To Lee’s obvious confusion, Rouse replies, “They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments . . . I can’t defend anthropology, because this is such a poorly researched report that’s so unreflexive [sic], lacking in any rigor, and it reminds me of why scholars need to pull back from AI.”

Lee seeks clarification, asking, “It reads to you like they used an LLM to write this?” Rouse cites a recent interview with the Vanderbilt report’s authors, saying, “Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.” When Lee directs Rouse to an interview excerpt clarifying that the authors used AI for data collection but not in authoring the report, Rouse insists, “Even before we read that, we were all thinking, ‘This reads like they used AI.’” Rouse never does get around to answering Lee’s original question about the report’s critique of anthropology.

Lee mentions that one author of the Vanderbilt report intends to publish a follow-up paper on anthropology and asks Rouse about that prospect. Rouse’s answer quickly spins off into parts unknown, riffing on Socrates, Hannah Arendt, and the Greek polis:

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.

There’s more, but you get the idea. Perhaps Rouse’s fellow anthropologists deem this profound, but to me it reads more like a speech Donald Trump would give if he were the president of the AAA.

A couple of questions later, Lee says, “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.’” Noting that the Vanderbilt report deemed this statement “a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding,” Lee asks Rouse, “Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?”

Rouse ducks, incoherently explaining, “Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil.” Rouse adds a priceless (if confusing) analogy: “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.” For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, she then detours into a long monologue about her research:

I have been studying declining white life expectancies in a rural community for 10 years. I’m finishing up. I have two films and a book that are coming out, and I’m a Black woman entering this space, and what are my motivations? What do I see? What do I not see? What do they tell me? What won’t they tell me? For the most part, I only want to do work in places where I feel a sense of hope, and where I like the people — “like” in the sense of I respect them . . . Again, I am a Black woman from an elite institution. They know that. They know I’m wealthier than they are, and so there’s a lot going on in these encounters that I need to unpack.

Lee gamely tries to get Rouse to just answer the damn question, saying, “I wanted to understand how this ties back to the quote that the Vanderbilt report pulls. When you’re doing that kind of fieldwork, do you feel like your ‘political project’ — to use his words — is to ‘challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism’?”

Rouse again dodges, offering only, “That’s what he said. Yeah, that’s not what I said.”

Poor Lee. She tries again: “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.’”

Rouse: “It’s a cherry-picked quote. They misquoted him, that’s what he says.”

Yup. It’s a verbatim quote from a published presidential address, and Rouse insists that they misquoted him.

A bit later, Lee asks Rouse about her charge that “substantial” research contradicts the Vanderbilt report’s depiction of anthropology. Lee asks for “a citation or two.” Rouse’s response reads like she’s pranking us:

Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization . . . [W]hat is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? . . . To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.

I picture Lee blowing little spit bubbles as all this unspools. Rouse never does provide any citations refuting the report.

Perhaps the interview’s signature moment, though, is Lee’s exhausting attempt to get Rouse to address the AAA’s 2023 decision to cancel a conference panel on biological sex because it would harm members’ “safety and dignity” and contradict “settled science.” Noting that Rouse was elected president of the AAA shortly after that incident, Lee asks, “Do you regret today the fact that the AAA canceled that panel, or the justification that it gave for canceling it?”

Rouse could have said, “Whoo-boy! We were all so much younger and crazier back in 2023. Yeah, I’d like a mulligan on that one.” She would have sounded a little bit sane and that’d be that. But that’s not how Rouse answers, not by a long shot. Instead, in response to that query and five subsequent follow-ups, she goes to weirder and weirder places. Her initial answer is:

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.” . . . 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.

Lee tries another tack. She cites a 2025 essay by Rouse titled “Meaningless Speech and Political Capture,” which argued that certain claims, including the idea that “there are only two sexes,” are examples of “nonsensical speech” that don’t belong in the classroom. Lee asks how Rouse or the AAA should decide what constitutes “nonsensical speech.”

If you can make sense of Rouse’s response, more power to you. She replies:

So I think those are two things. One is nonsensical, one is discussion about dehumanization in the classroom. I can’t have somebody in the classroom who is, let’s say, was born with some kind of condition that means that they are nonverbal, but super smart and super capable, and in a wheelchair, and then have a debate about whether or not they should have been aborted . . . So we humanize people, and we’ve done that since we pushed back against eugenics in the early 20th century, the discipline. So I’m not going to relitigate these things with my students.

Rouse goes on at some length, touching on “reactionary data,” internment camps, and notions of racial inferiority. Lee tries once more to elicit an actual answer, asking, “Just to connect the dots, the matter of binary sex—to you, that is as done with, or over with, as Japanese internment or eugenics?”

I found Rouse’s answer incomprehensible. Maybe you can do better. Rouse says:

OK, so one is dehumanization, the other one is factual. So I still don’t know what people mean. If binary is two things, male, female, XY, XX, and we have more than that, then doesn’t that mean it’s not a binary? I’m just confused about that. That’s just a factual thing. There’s the work on race and biology, people don’t understand. It takes me a whole semester of my race and biology class, and when they get it, they get it, and they’re like, “Oh my goodness,” they can’t believe how wrong most of what they have been taught is . . . So I disabuse students of a lot of presumptions, so we’re not an echo chamber, we’re not a podcast, we’re not funded by this mysterious organization called Antifa that doesn’t exist.

Decades ago, Jon Hein of the Howard Stern Show coined the phrase “jump the shark.” It referred to the infamous season five episode of Happy Days in which a leather-jacketed Fonzie jumped over a shark while on water skis. The phrase became shorthand for the moment when it became clear that a TV show had lost its way.

If there’s any justice, Carolyn Rouse’s performance will be remembered as a shark-jumping moment for the academy. She’s crafted a totemic illustration of bad faith, Nixonian obfuscation, self-indulgence, and reflexive politicization. Mix all the many criticisms of the humanities and social sciences in a test tube and shake gently, and you’d wind up with Rouse’s display. If it weren’t so laughably sad, it’d be kind of impressive.

If Rouse didn’t exist, satirists would be hard-pressed to invent her. Editors would say, “A bit too on the nose, don’t you think?” Welcome to anthropology on water skis.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”