Damning David Graeber

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!!

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.