Freakonomics Radio

Podbit · Freakonomics Radio

679. Why Does Vanderbilt Keep Winning?

Explore episode Jun 26, 2026

Where this was said

Evidence of Bias: Syllabi, Anthropology, and the Chilling Effect

At 19:35 · chapter starts 18:15

This is the most evidential chapter in the episode, and arguably the most contentious. Diermeier walks through three manifestations of ideological subordination of scholarly standards. First, the American Anthropological Association declared it a professional standard to put research in service of dismantling colonialism — a striking thing for a professional body to impose. Second, a Claremont study using large language models to analyze syllabi found that 94% of criminal justice syllabi included The New Jim Crow without a single scholarly criticism. Students think they're seeing the state of the field; they're seeing curated ideology. Third, the chilling effect on junior faculty and graduate students creates a 'party line' atmosphere that is anathema to a university's purpose. Dubner challenges whether the criminal justice curriculum is just responding to real racial history. Diermeier's rebuttal is methodological: the job of a university is to test assertions against evidence, control for confounding factors, and actually do the hard scholarly work — not to assume conclusions are established facts.

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