NYT does Graeber
[Graeber’s anthro colleague has a point - almost no one ever gets tenure at Yale. Still, since they’ve given him a year’s sabbatical, he must have something on them.]
New York Times - December 28, 2005
When Scholarship and Politics Collided at Yale By KAREN W. ARENSON
David Graeber pulled a green object shaped like a Champagne cork out of his pocket.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked recently. “It’s a plastic bullet.” The bullet, he said, was fired by the police in Quebec City during a protest against globalization in 2001, grazing his head.
Battles with the police are a fact of life for Dr. Graeber, an associate professor of anthropology at Yale and a self-proclaimed anarchist. It was his battle with Yale that surprised him.
The university notified him in the spring of 2005 that it would not renew his contract next year. Yale gave no reason, and officials said they could not discuss the dismissal because personnel matters were confidential.
But to Dr. Graeber the reason was obvious: his politics. He appealed, and supporters around the world wrote letters on his behalf, some calling him one of the most brilliant anthropologists of his generation.
This month, Yale, which says that personal political beliefs “are not a consideration” in appointments, amended its decision; it offered Dr. Graeber a paid sabbatical if he would drop his appeal. He accepted.
“So many academics lead such frightened lives,” he said. “The whole system sometimes seems designed to encourage paranoia and timidity. I wasn’t willing to live like that.”
A Yale spokesman and three of Dr. Graeber’s colleagues declined to comment about Dr. Graeber, repeating that personnel matters were confidential.
Dr. Graeber said that criticism of his behavior - like coming late to class and turning in reports late - did not surface until his politics became visible.
“They couldn’t criticize my research or my teaching, so they talked about my community work,” he said.
In theory, Dr. Graeber agrees that an anarchist professor might have problems in establishment institutions. In a online article, “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” (www.prickly-paradigm.com), he declared, “Being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run.”
But Dr. Graeber, 44, a slender man with tousled hair and a chipped front tooth, says: “I’m not really an anarchist as a professor. I’m a very conventional professor really. I do much more lecturing, for example, than sitting around doing free egalitarian discussion.”
Known in anthropological circles for his work on value theory - how societies determine what is important - and anarchism, he said he had tried to compartmentalize the two sides of his life: “I figured I’d be a scholar in New Haven and an activist in New York.”
Over barbecued beef wrapped in grape leaves and jumbo shrimp on chipped ice, he described his path from a teenager who translated hieroglyphic passages that had never before been translated to a scholar whose books and articles are used in college classrooms around the world and an anarchist who is a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Dr. Graeber said his comfort with anarchism stemmed, in part, from his family - his father fought in the Spanish Civil War and his mother was a garment worker. “Anarchy wasn’t dinner table conversation,” he said, “but it was on the horizon.”
And as an anthropologist, he said, he realized that “throughout most of human history, people got by without centralized governments.”
In Madagascar, where he worked on his doctoral thesis, he lived in an area where “state authority had effectively disappeared,” he said.
He began his anthropology studies at Purchase College of the State University of New York.
Judith Friedlander, an anthropologist who taught him there and is now at Hunter College, said he was “hands down, the most brilliant student I ever had.”
At the University of Chicago, he won a Fulbright fellowship and completed a Ph.D. thesis on magic, slavery and politics in Madagascar. Two years later, in 1998, he joined Yale as an assistant professor, even though junior professors there were not on a tenure track.
“I figured it was the best temporary job you could possibly have,” he said. “For 10 years, you don’t have too big a teaching load. It had lots of prestige. And the pay was O.K.”
He added, “I’m up to about $63,000.”
He was by many accounts a prolific writer and popular teacher. Although he sometimes came late, his classes were crowded.
Joseph Hill, a Yale graduate student in anthropology who supports Dr. Graeber, described his classes as “highly interesting and provocative.”
He added: “They are all over the map, which makes it hard for some students to follow. But students who like to see how diverse little facts and grand theories come together actually find his lectures very well put together and easy to follow.”
Dr. Graeber’s first three years went well, and he was given a second three-year contract. By then, he had become captivated by direct political action. He said he found the large protests against globalization in Seattle and Washington “transformative - 30,000 people and no leadership. People coming to a consensus without anyone running the show. You wouldn’t think it could happen, but it does. And it’s compelling.”
He joined groups like the Direct Action Network, and his political activity became more visible. He was an organizer and spokesman for the protest against the World Economic Forum in New York in 2001. And he was one of several hundred people arrested during a protest against the International Monetary Fund in Washington in 2002.
When he returned from a sabbatical for his second three years, he said, some colleagues would not talk to him. Three years later, he was given two years instead of a standard four-year contract and told to contribute more and be more careful about things like arriving at class on time. “I was told I was unreliable,” he said.
He said that after that critical review, he directed a colloquium series, took part in more meetings, taught more and was more careful about promptness. But he also had disagreements with senior colleagues, including defending a student active in the graduate student unionization movement.
Yale decided in the spring not to give him two more years, prompting outcries. More than 4,500 people signed petitions in his support. Maurice Bloch, a noted anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who says Dr. Graeber is “the best anthropological theorist of his generation,” called on Yale to rescind the dismissal.
“I know nothing about the circumstances which have led you to your decision,” he said, “but I cannot believe that a university such as yours cannot cope with erratic behavior or that it can afford to lose so extraordinarily talented a colleague.”
But some of his colleagues say it was not really about Dr. Graeber’s politics. Linda-Anne Rebhun, an associate professor in anthropology at Yale who recently failed to win tenure, said the problem was “the Yale system” that has forced many junior faculty to leave.
“It says something about Dr. Graeber’s sense of politics,” she added, “that he seems to take this as an individual, personal thing rather than taking a more anthropological view of the nature of the system that affects all junior scholars at Yale.”
Mr. Hill said that while politics may not have been the overt cause for Dr. Graeber’s dismissal, his anarchistic manner was undoubtedly a factor.
“I don’t think senior faculty sat behind closed doors and actually adduced the fact that he’s an anarchist in making the case against him: ‘All in favor of the anarchist say aye,’ ” Mr. Hill said. “But it seems to me that he was fired at least in part for being who he is, a large part of which is his egalitarian philosophy and practice of life, his contempt for authority.”
Others said they were not surprised that Yale did not want to keep him. “I actually think places like Yale are not for people like David Graeber,” said Stanley Aronowitz, a left-leaning professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “He’s a public intellectual. He speaks out. He participates. He’s not someone who simply does good scholarship; he’s an activist and a controversial person.”
Dr. Graeber said he planned to use his paid sabbatical year for research, writing, activism and a job search. He said that he had already had some nibbles and that he was leaving Yale with his “integrity intact.” He says with some satisfaction that while his department did not renew his contract, “I’m better known than most of them.”
January 2nd, 2006 at 8:36 pm
An online article? It was published as a paper book.
January 4th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Actually, the full quote from the paragraph where I’m cited as saying “For 10 years, you don’t have too big a teaching load. It had lots of prestige. And the pay was O.K.” went on to say, “so if they kick you out after that, I didn’t think it was much of a problem. You’re chance, as an incoming junior professor, of getting tenure at Yale is something like 3%. I accepted that.”
The point was that this wasn’t a tenure case. I never expected those guys would give me tenure - particularly with my activism. The article is slightly ambiguous about what actually happened because it was complicated but I thought it made it perfectly clear this wasn’t a tenure case. What happened was they tried to cut me off during what would normally have been a routine, rubber-stamp promotion to term associate, and then, when they were blocked by the dean (who told them you can’t fire someone with exemplary scholarship and teaching reports simply because they sometimes come five minutes late to things or because you claim they told a student something you said about them in faculty meetings without at least warning them first) gave me a year to improve my “reliability”, and then after I did all sorts of service work, fired me anyway, refusing to give any reason whatsoever. Both the way I was fired and the lack of reasons are extremely unusual, while being denied tenure is just par for the course. If you put on top of that:
a) that during the WEF protests, where I was quoted in the papers as an organizer, one of the senior faculty in my department was actually attending
the meetings
b) that same senior faculty member later did things like call the parents of an undergraduate who took several courses with me warning them their daughter was falling under the sway of a dangerous radical
c) that same senior faculty member led a campaign to get me fired, up to and including doing things like telling vulnerable international students they
were likely to flunk their qualifying exams (and hence be deported) and then asking them to write negative evaluations of my teaching, and even had the only such student who agreed to do so disrupting my classes attempting (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to fabricate some kind of incident
d) that that senior faculty member’s protege attempted to kick out a very brilliant, straight-A graduate student on trumped up grounds right before the major strike last year (she wrote a bad letter of recommendation for her and then accused her of ethical violations for not sending it with her grant application), and in the meeting where she tried to kick her out, as much as openly said that that students activities as a GESO (union) organizer were one of the reasons she considered her “unfit for academic life” - and I was the only member of said student’s committee willing to openly and publicly defend her.
e) that the first senior faculty member then went around saying that the fact that I had taken notes during the meeting in which her protege tried to kick out the union organizer constituted a form of “intimidation” (!) and that this alone was reason enough to warrant denying me reappointment…
f) that I was also informed by the head of my review committee that one of my problems was that I had too many publications and too much support from graduate students (whereas certain other junior professors, who had actual outstanding complaints against them from graduate students, were being aggressively pushed for tenure by those same senior faculty who were most aggressive in trying to get rid of me)
well, you get the idea. This is NOT a tenure case. The Wall Street Journal made the same mistake - and I am asking them to print a retraction. I really would of thought better of you, Doug, especially since I thought I’d explained some of this personally to you before. But I guess the details had slipped your mind? Or maybe I never did tell you, you missed all the discussion in Counterpunch and elsewhere, and were confused by the Times article. At any rate, insofar as tenure is concerned - the senior faculty who opposed me seemed quite frantic in their efforts to get rid of me before I could come up for tenure, because tenure, while extremely difficult, also involved extensive outside review and evaluation - and every time I come up for outside review and evaluation I receive top marks. So it would have been at least embarrassing to them to deny me tenure when the outside reviews would have found me much more qualified than those they did, in fact, want to push. Hence they were willing to go out of their way to block me in these strange irregular ways to create a situation where I was only being reviewed by members of the department and then refused to give any reasons for their decision.
David