Damning David Graeber
by Alex
“Kerim”:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2005/05/13/david-graeber/ and “Biella ‘m4dd0g’ Coleman”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/archives/000744.html#000744 have already publicized “what Yale is doing to David Graeber”:http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=7834 so I won’t repeat it here. I haven’t read “his book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312240457/qid=1116118035/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-6229466-0987309 but I have met David and remember him as funny, articulate, and approachable. What is more, he is also amazingly erudite — an example of the sort of deeply-learned and thoughtful scholar that Chicago Anthroplogy prides itself on. He really _is_ familiar with everything from Mauss to Aristotle to Bakhtin.
I haven’t been very vocal about this because I am at such a remove from Yale, I know that students often have high hopes that popular professors stay even if it’s not structurally feasible, and that Ivy Leagues tend not to retain junior faculty. While my initial cynicism may have worked to block my natural feelings of collegiality with David — we overlapped at Chicago and share the same dissertation supervisor — “this article at counterpunch”:http://www.counterpunch.org/frank05132005.html is, I have to say, pretty damning. The picture he paints of the department seems very probable to me based on my knowledge of departmental politics and really puts Yale in a very bad light indeed.
I am for sure signing the petition.
On the other hand, David is definitely crossing the Rubicon by speaking publically about the nature of the department in public. I don’t think it’s a smart play and I’m shocked at his frankness about topics that are not meant for public consumption. Not that I think he’s wrong or lying, just that saying this in public is probably only going to make the task of getting settled at Yale (if that’s still his goal) even more difficult. I mean — given his estimates of ‘bullies’ to ‘bad guys’ in the department, and the presence of the “departmental faculty list”:http://yale.edu/academics/departments.html and you can more or less figure out who he is speaking ill of if you know a little about the personalities involved.
Which brings me to another thing — in the interview David argues his problems are part of a wider trend in what he calls the shift from the ‘neoliberal university’ to the ‘imperial university’. I don’t think that is true at all. I think that what is happening to him is a manifestation of university politics that are as old as tenure itself — the hot-house atmosphere of an institution with life-long appointments and a small-world network (I’m too polite to say “old boy’s club”) ditching someone who is making waves. What _has_ changed is the mechanisms that David has for redressing this — the global organization of scholars connected by digital genres like petitions, email, webpages, online magazines, the departmental webpage to see who he is dissing, etc.
As a young almost-graduated academic I certainly feel for David, and I hope that he finds an appointment at an institution which will allow him to develop what is already a very interested intellectual trajectory.
You might be right. But I figure I spent seven years making that department look good: raising their relative standing by publishing frenetically, drawing in undergraduate majors, raising their profile nationally and internationally, saying nice things about them wherever I went. Even after the first time they tried to fire me I never said a word against anyone but redoubled my efforts to give a good name to Yale anthropology, organizing the colloquium, trying to make us a center of intellectual life, publishing even more frenetically… They responded by endlessly badmouthing me behind my back and then trying to destroy my career. That seemed like crossing the Rubicon to me. It’s a strange reflection on academic life that if I so much as say what they did to me, without even mentioning names, it’s me who’s seen as having violated a taboo.
David
My point was just an instrumental one — it struck me that the interview enabled some strategic moves and foreclosed others in how you would relate to the department. That’s what I meant by ‘crossing the Rubicon’.
I don’t think it’s a strange reflection at all on academic life that it’s you who’s seen as violating a taboo — rather it speaks to issues about faculty politics we’re all aware of. You are fighting for a fair consideration from the university, and breaking taboos in the process. They are just acting like heels towards a junior faculty member, something that is, unfortunately, not always as taboo as it should be in the university today. You just violated a taboo — they did something wrong.
I wonder what the tenure rate is for junior people at Yale in general? Any idea? It is very very low at Columbia and Princeton and almost non-existent at Harvard.
[...] Uncategorized
A couple days ago, fellow Savage Alex wrote on his own blog about David Graeber, the Yale anthropologist recently fired for his anarchist activism. Not so much, it should be not [...]
The tenure rate at Yale is something like 12%, and that’s
just those who think they have a shot at it – most bail out
earlier. However this isn’t tenure. This was all an attempt
to block a normally rubber-stamp promotion to term associate.
The fact that one doesn’t get tenure anyway might explain
my willingness to make less-than-charitable assessments of
some of my senior colleagues. We’re fighting over a two-year
extension, which is awfully petty in a way, but it’s basically
a matter of principle at this point: if you try to kick someone
out of your department for purely political reasons, you
shouldn’t be able to get away with it without a fight. After
that I’d be looking for a new job in any event.
David
Well, as a wise man once said “one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run — and I don’t mean by demanding and an anarchist studies department, either — and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write.”
If you’re sure you’re not going to be sticking around at Yale and are just raising hell for the hell of it, I certainly hope none of the people who stick out their necks for you get them cut off. Any fire they might draw is basically, as you’ve just admitted, more or less for form’s sake. I’d hate to see a grad student or undergrad have their career damaged trying to keep you on at Yale when in fact you know that you’re doing this for the sake of your principles rather than any expectation that their struggle might effect some definite change.
He’s doing it for the sake of a basic principle, not “his” principles — that one shouldn’t be denied employment in a supposedly open and free academic institution for political reasons and that if denied just cause should be made public. Three things. First David stuck his neck out for a graduate student and he was chopped, which seems to have precipitated this. That’s what’s called “lack of collegiality” in some academic departments. Second, the people supporting David are adults, David’s not coercing anyone (or even really asking anyone to act on his behalf). I seriously doubt this will impact their careers, and if it does they are making principled adult decisions. Third, this is exactly the sort of principle worth fighting for in academia, if principles are not worth fighting for I can’t see what is. Why does it need to effect a definite change! It may make such punitive firings more difficult to undertake in the long run, that certainly seems worthwhile even if David doesn’t get a job. Or it may not but at least David and others can say — “We said this was wrong”.
Please don’t take this personally, but the tone of your comment and your responses seem weirdly concerned about propriety and the job market and tend towards blaming David. A career is only worthwhile if it’s something you believe in, otherwise you might as well be a tax attorney or an advertising executive as an academic. There are enough cowards in academia, and many academic institutions tend to corrupt towards cowardice. David’s stand is not brave in the way that the Barcelona commune was brave — academics overinflate their importance in the greater scheme of things (not David, he’s fully aware that this is not like fighting Fascists) — but for an academic in today’s American climate he certainly is as are many of the graduate students supporting him. Bless ‘em.
Well if my tone seems critical of David I think its clear that my statements have not been. David is to be commended for supporting a student who was being discriminated against for political reasons. And it is a shame that the department is kicking him out because of his exemplary performance as a scholar and educator. I agree with you that what was done to him was wrong, and that the people who are supporting him are principled adults and never suggested otherwise. I have no idea whether there will be repurcussions for them or not since I’m so far removed from the action — given what happened to David it seems (at a distance) to be possible to me. Standing on a point of principle seems to me to be a fundamentally different struggle than actually trying to keep David on at Yale, one with different stakes, stragies, and implications. Given the fact that initial public pronouncements weren’t clear whether he was staying or going, I was trying to articulate that difference.
But, as I’ve said about: while his politics were the proximate cause of his firing, I think the larger story here is not one of increasing McCarthyism of the university but one of how department politics have always worked for more than a century, and the limits and constraints placed on junior faculty. And yes, that is what I find interesting about this. I am in fact coming from this not as a political activist (although I am a supporter) but because of the way it is a fascinating departmental ethnography.
One of the points I was trying to make was that, given his obvious intelligence and savvy, David’s handling of his career at Yale (or what little I know of it) seemed (excuse the lapse into Weberisms), from a purely _zweckrational_ perspective, suboptimal if the end he was seeking was continued employment. If we was pursuing some _wertrational_ mode of comportment — standing on his principles — then while it is unfortunate and wrong that he was fired, it’s also not surprising even though (obviously) it is wrong.
In either case — to reiterate — this makes David a tragic figure, not a stupid or wrong one. Thanks for your measured comments.
Thanks, Aaron. Fact is I had never particularly expected to get tenure at Yale for the simple reason that the statistical chance is infintessimal (about 3%), and as it happened, there was no reason to believe a job would exist when I came up. (And even if one did miraculously open up, it would mean I would be competing against friends.) However, the graduate students had already been in a state of near-revolt owing to the climate of terror and intimidation in the university and my firing was the last straw. They decided to mobilize around this issue as being so flagrant it couldn’t be brushed aside, and I was not about to discourage them. If Alex is really suggesting that I should have paternalistically told them “no, I will not allow you to organize around my firing to challenge the climate of fear and intimidation here, rather, I insist that you continue to be fearful and intimidated because after all, there are reasons to be”… well, I don’t think he would really suggesting that, would he?
I don’t think I’m really that much of a tragic figure. I stuck by my principles even though I knew it might mean trouble, and trouble was what I got. But one of the basic principles of direct action is that if one simply tries to live as one would in a free society – even if it’s so innocuous a thing as trying to be open and fair and decent to everyone, trying to treat everyone like an equal – in the midst of vast inequalities of power, those in power probably _will_ attempt to punish you. Which makes acting that way a kind of act of civil disobedience that exposes the real nature of the system. That’s worth doing in itself. And the fact that the Yale department is so incredibly hierarchical that they’d do it even to someone who is internationally recognized as a scholar, thus thoroughly embarrassing themselves, makes it all the more revealing. On the other hand, the immediate cause of their turning on my wasn’t even that – it was just the fact that I was willing to openly state that a good student was, in fact, a good student when someone was dishonestly and maliciously trying to destroy her career. I think anyone who’s suggesting that this is not simply outrageous, and that a decent person should have considered doing anything else, really should reflect on what chain of logic could have got them there.
DG
Wow — this is the thread that won’t die. Obviously, asking for or denying help is not paternalistic. And I’ve never suggested that you do anything at all — how could I, given my ignorance of what was happening at Yale (most of my comments have been me wondering what is the case, after all)? I’ve mostly wondered what the situation was and what the implications were for you and your supporters. Thus it should be patently obvious that I’ve never suggested that you command your students to live in an atmosphere of fearful intimidation and like it (!) so the answer to your first question is, as you’ve clearly suggested, ‘no’.
I guess when I think of tragedy, I think of a situation where doing what you think is right leads to terrible terrible outcomes because your situation involves a conflict from which you can’t escape. Antigone is forced to choose between honoring her brother or obeying her king, Orestes can only avenge his father’s death by murdering him mother, and so forth. As far as I can tell, you were caught between the demands of your principles and your personal success. I’d never say you made the wrong choice, David. But I would say it was tragic you had to choose.
Well, I was responding to the implication that I was somehow responsible if students who “stick their necks out for me” get their careers damaged, at least, if they falsely think they are doing it to keep me at Yale rather than because I am acting on principle. I suppose I should have replied that students know perfectly well what the situation is. Some have apparently gone so far as to ask the dean to place the department in receivership – not, of course, mainly because of me. Rather my case, and the international publicity it received, provided proof they could wave in superiors’ faces of how broken the department really is.
As for tragic – I appreciate the assessment. I guess what I really meant was: it remains to be seen if the results are going to be all that bad. I mean, I was going to be on the job market anyway, this year.
David
I am trying to renew contact with David Graeber and am assuming I can no
longer contact him via his Yale email address. David, if you see this comment can you email me? I hope you still have my email address.
Daniel Drezner, center-left but sometimes leaning a wee bit center-right got fired from Chicago with far better credentials (and a more sophisticated CV and prose style than David.) Where’s the outrage? Did AP run a sympathetic article (claiming he’s important to the field, without significant quotes from peers…as if running a PR campaign cribbed from exactly the same phrase on Indymedia, et al)?
I’ve googled DG and have to say (after more than 3 decades in academia and tenure from a NE university with the lowest t-rate in America) I’m not impressed by his writing, thinking, political maturity or anything else. (Not that anthropology is much of an academic discipline in any event.) DG’s webpage at Yale doesn’t indicate much scholarship; the highly anecdotal, narrative-driven anthro racket allows the ‘voices’ of whatever selected victimized group to speak, without any analysis or context; hence the easy fraud of field founders Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Anyone with a tape recorder can churn out reams of publications without any ‘footnotes.’ So, I don’t see the prolixity he’s bragging about–or why there isn’t more of the Madagascar-type verbiage. I can’t understand why he continues to insist that he publishes frenetically (sic.) For whom? Does writing for anarchist or left-wing rags that aren’t peer-reviewed supposed to earn the esteem of fellow scholars? Of his colleagues in the department? Of Yale? Isn’t it a bit disingenuous for an anarchist to cry foul when denied employment for a capitalist-supported (and capitalist producing) center of learning like Yale? The whole post post-mo Marxist racket evinced by what I have found by DG wouldn’t pass muster in philosophy or even more amenable history departments. It’s more like scifi than poly-sci. I’m surprised, even shocked, at only one part of his sob story: it’s that he got hired at Yale (and once renewed)! DG, don’t worry. Those ‘thousands’ of US university Marxists are waiting to support you and snap you up for their universities. We both know there aren’t any conservatives in academia!!
You do not have to be a leftie to be gullible but it does not insulate from being gullible, especially when a self-styled rebel plays on all the ugly things you would like to think about Ivy-league academics. Just remember, all the evidence you have in support of Graeber’s assertions (all of them) is his assertions.
When I first read these last two comments I thought that they were both sufficiently absurd and their author’s biases so obvious to readers that there is no real point in arguing with them (the Graeber case has not been discussed in legitmate news venues? Please!). However as I reread Jane’s comment one thing strikes me that simply cannot be ignored: It does a great injustice to Gregory Bateson who was, along with Reo Fortune, a scrupulous ethnographer who does not deserve to be called a fraud. Ok, maybe the parts of his life where he tried to take acid and talk to dolphins or whatever. But Naven was and is an important ethnography and Bateson’s work in PNG (and, I assume, other places) was quite good.
jane says:
“Daniel Drezner, center-left but sometimes leaning a wee bit center-right got fired from Chicago with far better credentials (and a more sophisticated CV and prose style than David.)”
Here is what Daniel W. Drezner, currently still an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, says about himself:
“I’m a small-l libertarian Republican who studies international relations, which means I’m frequently conflicted between my laissez-faire instincts and my clear-eyed recognition that there is no substitute for nation-states in world politics.” (http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002397.html)
Centre-left? Leaning a wee bit centre-right? If all of jane’s comments are as informed and precise as this then I’m not surprised she cannot see anything wrong with DG being fired.