Professor Points to Politics as Yale Fails to Renew Contract

[callady]

Professor points to politics as Yale fails to renew contract

By MATT APUZZO
Associated Press Writer

October 23, 2005, 3:18 PM EDT

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- By all accounts, Yale anthropology professor David Graeber is one of the brightest minds in his field. His books are taught worldwide and the London School of Economics recently asked him to give its annual Malinowski lecture, an offer reserved for the world's most promising young anthropologists.

And he's about to be unemployed.

Graeber is an anarchist whose counterculture writings are nearly as popular as his academic work. He carries an Industrial Workers of the World union card and has been arrested during anti-globalization protests.

So when Yale recently told Graeber not to return next year, it touched off a letter-writing campaign from professors worldwide, some of whom suggested that the Ivy League university is letting politics influence its hiring.

"It's extremely odd that one of the most brilliant anthropologists is being excluded from the department at Yale in such an extraordinary fashion," said Maurice Bloch, a London School of Economics anthropologist and one of many professors to write letters to Yale.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/connecticut/ny-bc-ct--tooliberalforyale1023oct23,0,7672460.story?coll=ny-region-apconnecticut

[Igel]

1. Like denial of tenure or non-renewal of contract for political

reasons is a new thing.

Whether standard politics or field-specific politics or person-related politics, it's always there.

Too far left or right; too much a Chomskyan syntactician or not sufficiently post-modern in criticism; you've pissed off the wrong person and you're blacklisted, or made the right friends and you're in.

[WindRavenX]

2. being denied tenure is usually not related to politics

my favorite biology professor was hillarious, smart, and one the leading experts on dinosaurs, but had a knack for some "incidents" with the freshman girls...

[xchrom]

3. ah -- the winding road of academia.

what i will say is there is an effort at harvard, yale, etc to become more conservative.

republicans and corporatists have been puting extreme pressure on the very elite ivy league institutions to ''get in line'' -- and of course it's easy to point at success when you go after someone as outspoken as graeber.

the other thing i would note -- graeber is yet another very educated person -- as many in the west seem to be doing -- turning to left wing politics.

maybe economic history isn't so dead after all.
globalists take note -- there are resistant forces to your constant propaganda.

[curt_b]

4. Some background

This past spring there was a lot of coverage of this (when his contract wasn't renewed). There has been an ongoing labor struggle at Yale (both non-faculty workers and grad-students. In this case it's definitely political, not a morals case. An interview with Graeber can be found here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/frank05132005.html

Andrej Grubacic who has collaborated with Graeber has said:

"Union organizers are regularly targeted at Yale. When one brilliant graduate student organizer was almost kicked out for clearly fabricated reasons, David Graeber was the only member of her committee with the courage to openly stand up for her at that committee meeting, and then later at a faculty meeting. On David Graeber's behalf, Yale graduate students have initiated a petition which has been signed by almost all graduate and good number of undergraduate students of anthropology.

So, why has David Graeber been given the boot? To begin with the obvious, he is an unrepentant anarchist. David Graeber was one of the spokespeople for the Anti Capitalist Convergence during the World Economic Forum protests in New York. He was an activist with Direct Action Network. He is one of the founding members of the Peoples Global Action infopoint in New York. And he had authored many essays and articles on anarchism. But he never did any organizing or activism on campus.

What perhaps was David Graeber's greatest crime was simply his apparently over optimistic belief that he could remain true to his anarchist principles within the academy. Graeber believes that graduate school should be more than a training camp for becoming a commodity on the academic market."

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7834

[Rich Hunt]

5. wow

That's terrible, of course...but he's getting a lot of free publicity out of it, at least!