Some good points in this CHE essay by an anthropologist (although I could have lived witihout the references to Luhmann and Sloterdijk):
For the last decade or so, we have witnessed a period of renewed moral activism — think Occupy Wall Street, the Black Lives Matter movement, and #MeToo, to say nothing of student demands for safe spaces and a heightened sensitivity to potentially offensive expression. Campus monuments honoring slave owners, perpetrators of genocide, colonialists, and racists are removed; department buildings and ethnographic film festivals are renamed. My own field of anthropology has been in no way immune from the generalized sense of renewed moral exigency. In 2020, the American Anthropological Association officially institutionalized its members’ morals by prioritizing proposals for executive sessions that promote anti-imperialism, anti-ableism, anti-transphobia, etc. American cultural anthropology is now a moral-political project invested in promoting the values of progressives in the United States rather than in observing and reflecting on human life in a less ethnocentric fashion....
Shouldn’t anthropologists be primarily concerned with telling true from false? I am looking for ways of writing about human beings that do not mobilize the readers’ empathy with one group at the expense of their empathy with another group. Is it really necessary for anthropologists to regularly tempt readers already struggling to abstain from self-righteousness? Why dangle in front of them identification with an author who denounces, and thereby elevates his readers above, racists, sexists, capitalists, neoliberals, imperialists, neocolonialists, and scientists whose naturalist worldviews cement an unjust status quo? Even the devil needs an advocate, especially in increasingly polarized societies all too ready to frame people of different persuasions as immoral....
I can attest that, when the New School recently decided to brand its vision of academic life as one of “engagement,” nobody spoke up in defense of the ivory tower as a place to gain distance, put things in perspective, and resist and modify prevalent views — including the view that ivory towers are socially irresponsible relics of a now untenable academic or artistic self-indulgence. This roaring silence is hardly surprising for a university that has long understood itself as promoting progressive thought and fostering a cosmopolitan spirit by providing refuge to persecuted scholars. And market research confirmed that it was in the best interest of a tuition-driven institution to promise to prospective students engagement rather than life in the ivory tower.
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