Exhuming the AcademyThe politicization of science that is destroying entire fields will baffle future anthropologists.
By Mason Goad
April 15, 2022
On the East Coast, many have been following the suspension of Ilya Shapiro from Georgetown University, now lasting longer than an entire SCOTUS confirmation process. His accusers, law students, have called him “racist” and demanded that the university reserve for them a space to cry. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, a similar assault on free speech has resulted in a lawsuit, but that story, despite a relative lack of coverage, displays a much deeper problem facing the academy today: the politicization of scientific research.
Elizabeth Weiss, a tenured professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, is the plaintiff in this case. Her story is lamentable. In 2020, Weiss and James Springer published a critique of repatriation laws, which govern the return of Native American skeletal remains, a topic Weiss discussed at length with the National Association of Scholars. Activists denounced the book as “scientific racism” and shortly after its publication Roberto Gonzalez (Weiss’s department chair) and Dean Walter Jacobs of the SJSU College of Social Sciences held a symposium in response to the book: “What to Do When a Tenured Colleague is Branded a Racist.” Gonzalez called Weiss his “racist colleague,” adding that her work “borders on professional incompetence.”
Weiss wrote an op-ed in August arguing against a proposed mandate to re-bury skeletal remains. Once again, she was denounced as a “racist” and there were many demands that Weiss be punished for her position. A month later, excited to return to the university’s skeletal collection after the COVID-19 pandemic, Weiss tweeted a photograph of herself holding a skull, with the caption: “So happy to be back with some old friends.”
The university’s provost, Vincent Del Casino, was outraged by the photo. He wrote that it shocked the university’s indigenous community, and claimed that there were “many things in the image itself that do not align with the values of SJSU.” The claim is dubious, as a similar photo of another professor was shared for a recent faculty award—although the original page appears now deleted—and Weiss’s photo on the department’s webpage shows her working with the skulls. Regardless, Weiss was barred from accessing the collection of which she was curator.
As bad as the assault on Wiess’s free speech is, there lies a deeper problem in the politicization of scientific research. Weiss understands this problem all too well, and wrote about it in a recent article for Aero. She explained that social justice activists have intruded in her field of biological anthropology (probably for funding more than anything else) and are insisting that scientific researchers work towards political goals such as decolonization by “writing back” against “colonial mentalities.” As an example, Weiss criticized one paper recently published in a peer-reviewed journal, which argued for changing taxonomic names honoring discoverers. Why? Generally, those discoverers were white men. Continued use of the names supposedly perpetuates “colonialism” and “white supremacy.”
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/15/exhuming-the-academy/
