A little chart I made in my spreadsheet program, after doing some thinking about that Vanderbilt report, and specifically that bit they quoted from anthropologist Fernando Villanea:
"The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests"
"All truth is subjective" and "That is the objective reality" just a couple of sentences apart. It seems contradictory, until you realize the first statement is about the "is" domain and the second the "ought" — This is quadrant 3: we cannot know anything about material reality, science is just one of many "ways of knowing" (and a Western colonialist one at that), but the self-evident rightness of our moral mission is objective and indisputable. It's like the inverse of Senator Moynihan's famous aphorism, a worldview where everyone is entitled to their own "facts," but there's objectively right or wrong ways to feel about things.
