Politics & Power Quote by Clifford Geertz

There is a telltale hedge at the heart of Geertz's praise: "I think" and "still seems". For a scientist-anthropologist who built a career on interpreting symbols and local meanings, that verbal softening is the point. He's not delivering a patriotic slogan; he's offering a field report. The line reads less like boosterism than a cautious assessment from someone who has watched institutions up close and knows how quickly "best" becomes a self-flattering myth.

The specific intent is comparative, not absolute. Geertz is weighing systems the way he weighed cultures: by asking what they enable. "American university system" gestures to an ecosystem more than a campus: decentralized governance, mixed public-private funding, competitive hiring, and a sprawling research infrastructure that can absorb oddball questions and long projects. In Geertz's world, that slack matters. Anthropology doesn't thrive under rigid curricula or purely utilitarian mandates; it needs room for interpretation, interdisciplinarity, and the occasional unprofitable obsession.

The subtext, though, is defensive. "Still" acknowledges that the American model is contestable and possibly slipping - bureaucratization, commercialization, culture war scrutiny, adjunctification. Saying it "seems" best is a way to endorse the system while admitting the evidence is time-bound and politically fraught.

Contextually, Geertz spoke from the postwar American research boom that made U.S. universities magnets for global talent and funding. His measured confidence doubles as a warning: this excellence isn't a birthright. It's a fragile arrangement of freedoms, resources, and institutional tolerance that can be dismantled faster than it was built.