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 will happen in the 2026 midterms? Sign up for Margin of Victory The 10 scholars who authored the report, which was released in June, offered anthropology as an example of a field where "we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards ... together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished." For instance: The American Anthropological Association canceled a 2023 conference panel on the relevance of biological sex to anthropology.