The interview that exposed academia’s cluelessness

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Democracy Dies in Darkness

A leading academic’s bizarre response shows how insular college campuses are.

July 19, 2026 at 7:00 a.m. EDTYesterday at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The Princeton University campus in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2018. (Seth Wenig/AP)

It can’t have been fun for the anthropologists when their discipline was singled out as a hive of political groupthink. In fact, they got very angry about the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis.


What readers are saying

The conversation explores a wide range of reactions to Megan McArdle's opinion piece, with many participants criticizing her approach and conclusions. Several commenters argue that McArdle's piece unfairly generalizes from a single example to indict all of academia, accusing her... Show more

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