The Politicization of Scholarship and the American Anthropological Association

As I occasionally do, I am cross-posting an article by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder of the Amcha Initiative, which is dedicated to exposing and confronting campus anti-Semitism.

This article has to do with a recent study commissioned by Washington University of St Louis and Vanderbilt University that concludes that every discipline in the humanities and social sciences that was examined is guilty of substituting political criteria for proper scholarly criteria, resulting in a deterioration of scholarly standards. The study also highlights anthropology as a prominent example.

Not surprisingly, this drew a sharp rebuke from the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Both the study and the response from AAA are linked in Rossman-Benjamin’s article, which appears in the Washington Examiner.

What is most striking about Rossman-Benjamin’s article is that she points out that the AAA itself provided People’s Exhibit 1 to the charge when it became the first major professional organization in an academic field to endorse the academic boycott of Israel, one of the most politicized topics in American academia today, if not the most. The impact on Jewish students of this massive academic campaign against the Jewish state of Israel has been well documented over at least the past two decades-including on this site.

There is little I can add to the above-mentioned links, and this is purely anecdotal, but I vividly recall when I attended two presentations on the same date (February 8, 2011) at the University of California at Irvine when an anthropology professor by the name of Jeff Halper spoke. Halper, an American Jew who emigrated to Israel, has repaid his adopted country over the years by traveling the world and condemning Israel in terms of its treatment and relations with the Palestinians. On the second occasion he spoke that date, he warned the audience about a secret weapon the Israeli’s allegedly possessed called spectral dust. According to Halper, when this substance was programmed with the DNA of an Israeli target and released into the atmosphere in a particular area, it would locate the target individual (presumably a Palestinian) and kill him or her. I should add that in his earlier appearance during the day, he was the guest lecturer of a UC Irvine professor’s class.

To me, this is an example of what the above study is all about.