My Scarily Erudite Beloved is a an art historian by profession and and recently spent some time in Boston attending the annual meeting of the College Art Association. Out of curiosity I took a look at their website. I was not surprised to find that their website is much better designed than the AAA’s—after all, it’s the website of a professional organization of people with an eye for the visual and physical properties of objects. But what did amaze me was that they had their own official conference blog—something that not even Savage Minds managed to do at the recent AAA. The more I looked at the site, the more and more impressed I became. The site is well-organized and information on it is easy to find, it is clearly oriented towards helping its members find jobs, employees, and fellowships. And most importantly of all, it taked advocacy seriously—the website has an ‘advocacy’ drop down menu which presents the issues the CAA is behind in jargon-free prose.

The art historians are kicking our ass! The CAA has about 13,000 members—roughly the same size as the AAA. And yet they’ve managed to get together a website which, based on twenty minutes or so playing with it, is clearly superior to ours. And don’t even get me started on APSA and ASA…

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My time is up. My fortnight as a guest blogger is ended. Its been a great experience. First, feeling connected to a critical, engaged and international anthropological community. Second, for me at any rate, experimenting with a different kind of writing within and about anthropology. This is only just starting. I wonder whether we will see a new kind of hybrid anthropological arguing emerging which combines the blog process of iterative thinking in response to critical commentary and academic styling. I hope that new collaborative authorships will emerge as a result of connections made in the blogosphere. For this to happen more of us have to make the shift from reading to writing in this kind of space, and hence to a different kind of more immediate relationship between reading and writing than we are used to in anthropology at present.

When we consider the culture of anthropological presentations and knowledge dissemination through writing these don’t seem to have changed much since the birth of the discipline, at least here in the UK. Take seminars for example, the weekly fora which anthropology departments have for the sharing and presentation of knowledge and which typically involve one person reading aloud for an hour a paper which they have produced for production in an academic journal. The audience interacts after the reading, via commentaries and questions which may or may not be taken up later by the author.

The aim is to confront the author’s interpretation: discussion never really moves off the points made in the paper. So if the seminar is a springboard to knowledge its focused on the presenter’s paper, not on taking forward issues which might arise more generally. Of course this happens for individuals who have heard the paper, listening as a proxy experience of reading, but if this occurs it occurs inside their heads. Are we back to the social production of the individualism which I suggested characterised contemporary social anthropology? To what extent would changing our institutions and practices change our knowledge? How can we explain this conservatism of forms?

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A lot of people are upset about Coca-Cola’s purported involvement in the violent suppression of trade unions at its Columbian bottling plants. You can, for instance, visit KillerCoke.org, CokeWatch.org, the Students Against Sweatshops Coke Campaign, or the Spanish language site run by Colombian Food and Beverage Workers. Most recently, anthropologists have joined the fray: the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the Anthropology and Environment Section, the Society for the Anthropology of North America, the Society for Latin American Anthropology, the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, and the Society for the Anthropology of Work have all adopted a resolution demanding a boycott of Coca-Cola until these issues are adequately addressed.

The catalyst for this action seems to be Lesley Gill’s recent essay in Transforming Anthropology, “Labor and Humanrights: ‘The Real Thing’ in Colombia” (PDF download). It is worth reading the first few paragraphs in full: (more…)

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A lot has been said about the resignation of Lawrence Summers. It seems pretty clear from Matthew Yglesias and the Chronicle of Higher Education articles that the main issues were not those of political correctness, as Alan Dershowitz would have us believe, but more mundane issues of university governance, as Timothy Burke comments. Whatever the underlying reasons, the issue that seems to have brought the battle between Summers and the Arts and Science faculty to a head was something called “the Shleifer affair.”

Here is how Time magazine describes it:

At issue is Summers’ handling of a Russian fraud scandal involving a close friend and colleague, Harvard Economist Andrei Shleifer. Shleifer and Harvard were found liable for combined penalties of nearly $30 million in 2004 after they were charged with defrauding a U.S. government program designed to help Harvard economists privatize the Russian economy in the 1990s. The scandal has long been considered one of Harvard’s darker hours, but a new 28-page exposé by investigative reporter David McClintick, published in the January 2006 issue of Institutional Investor magazine, brought new heat on Summers, whom the article describes as going out of his way to protect his old friend and protégé Schleifer, who is still a senior faculty member at the university.

The article in question can be found here. There is a summary of the story here. Now, it may be that this story simply provided good cover for the faculty who wished to oust Summers for other reasons, but it seems that the recent publication of this article had a significant impact. (more…)

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I haven’t been posting much on SM lately because I’ve had another project that has taken up most of my time—formatting my dissertation! Luckily it is now done, or at least in to the dissertation office at the University of Chicago. The dissertation, Making the Ipili Feasible: Imagining Local and Global Actors at the Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea (1.5 meg PDF download) is now available for download at my website, but it is only semi-canonical—there may be changes to the formatting of the bibliography, page numbers, I haven’t checked that the PDF converted without a hitch from the Open Office version, etc. etc. The Official Version will be the UMI version, but that won’t be out for another eight months to a year, so I figured I will put this up. I am a notoriously poor speller and proofreader, so please do not tell me about typos in the final version—it will make me feel bad and might tip off the dissertation office. Anyway you now have 430+ pages of reading to make up for my lack of blogging.

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I returned from London with two things, a bad cold and a copy of the Borofsky book on Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy. It was a good combination, because having the cold gave me the opportunity to stay home and read it. And I read it pretty much in one go. I get the sense from the general aheadness of Minds Readers that many of you have already read it, so I won’t go into the details of what the book is about. In any case, the main positions set out in the book were in the public domain long before it was published.

Aside from the controversy with which it explicitly deals, the book offers fascinating insights into the organisation of anthropology today, indeed it could be taken as a contribution to something one of its own contributors calls for, an anthropology of anthropology. The book is structured around three successive `roundtables’ in which individuals with expertise in Yanomami politics and anthropology give their perspectives via written submissions on the main issues in the controversy. This format serves the book’s purpose effectively, providing clearly contrasting positions which enable the reader to weigh different sides of the debate. But it also sheds light on the individualistic culture of professional anthropology.

Contributors to the round tables write not so much as against one position or another implicated in the Darkness book, but , certainly by round table three, as against each other. Some of this doubtless stems from the way in which the round table format was set up. However, I think it provides an interesting snapshot of anthropology as a discipline concerned with the primacy of individual interpretations over the possibilities for collaborative working or consensus. This normative position is so strong that even in a book which highlights the limitations of single researcher perspectives and fieldwork, the possibilities of collaborative research or teamwork are not considered, although revisits to the same field site by successive generations of individual researchers are proposed.

What anthropologies of anthropology can others recommend? Laboratory Life is a good starting point for academia in general, part ethnography, part career manual for grant attracting scientists. Have we yet subjected ourselves to what we advocate for other sciences?

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Back in the fall, I questioned the feasability of the four-field approach in a Cégep -level course. My problems were largely based on the fact that I had always imitated what my colleagues were doing: starting with 4 weeks of physical anthropology, including physical evolution, our relationship with other primates and modern human variation, then 2 weeks of archaeology. This left me with very little time to cover a large body of knowledge of cultural anthropology, including one week of linguistics, specifically sociolinguistics.

In my previous post, I said that I would try to start backwards. In other words, instead of ending with globalisation and cutting a lot of it out because I was too tight for time at the end, I was going to start with that topic and work my way back to the past. Well, I didn’t wind up doing that. But I did come up with a way of teaching my intro course that pleases me while still fulfilling the four-field approach.

What I’m doing now is integrating the four fields at every step. Instead of spending chunks of the course focusing on one field at a time, I go through the course focussing on topics and, for each topic, I examine the contributions of the various subfields. So I started the semester simply talking about culture. What is it (definitions and descriptions)? What does it do (shape our assumptions)? How do we learn about it in the present and in the past (this is where the subfields come in)?

Now, at week 5 of the semester, I’m moving on to specific aspects of culture such as worldview and religion. Again, we will look at the topic in general while specifying how the different subfields contribute to our understanding of it. And so forth for gender and sexuality, economic systems, political structures, etc. I’m therefore doing things a bit differently than my colleagues, most of whom are more experienced than I am, but I’m quite comfortable with going out on a limb.

I’m pretty sure that there are other people out there who teach their intro courses in a similar fashion and that I didn’t invent this method. I’m curious to hear comments by anyone who uses a similar approach or has taken a course with this approach. Since this is my first time teaching the course this way, I’m anxious to see whether it makes a difference in student comprehension and interest. In my two intro courses this semester, it seems to be working well in terms of catching student interest but I’m not sure if it’s the approach itself or merely the fact that I was able to jump into topics that I’m genuinely passionate about earlier in the semester and therefore win over the students sooner with my own enthusiasm, something that often took much more time when I had to go through the evolution stuff (not that it’s not important, just that I have to fake a lot of my enthusiasm while teaching it). Once I start seeing test results, it will give me a better idea of actual student comprehension.

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My post on anthropology as identity or practice has generated some great responses. Most of those who have commented have touched on questions that recur in what we might reframe as the engaged anthropology (as opposed to applied) anthropology debate. This debate highlights ethical and political dilemmas pertaining to the issue of engagement. Do anthropologists as doers of anthropology (see my previous post) have an obligation to engage in public processes as advocates of the communities with whom they have worked, or is the obligation to engage the broader more amorphous responsibility of an empirical social science which seeks not only to understand the world, but to contribute to how it is perceived and acted upon by policy makers and others?

Conversely, is there an obligation only to Knowledge, to the academic project and to a perception of public obligation as limited to making this knowledge publicly available. These are difficult questions and I do not have answers to them. But they bring me to the theme of this post which examines the relation between different kinds of knowing and engagement in policy processes.

Recent graduates and young job seekers in Tanzania have often expressed to me their frustration with trying to obtain employment in the development sector. `Its know who they are after, not know how’ they comment, remarking how they have sent numerous applications for a range of positions with no success whatsoever. `What you know does not matter in this instance’ , I was repeatedly told. It’s a question of who.

This may of may or may not be an accurate representation of employment practices in Tanzania at the moment. I think that, in reality, the sector is less nepotistic than they imply. Its just that like in academia there are too many highly qualified candidates chasing too few vacancies. In this situation, those who have some experience within the kinds of employing agencies (and hence know who) seem a safer bet to employers than those who have qualifications alone without personal experience of the sector.

I thought of know who and know how earlier this month, while attending a two day meeting of policy makers and representatives of the international community on children affected by HIV and AIDS. I was not attending the meeting as an anthropologist or as someone who does anthropology. Indeed, I do not have anthropological expertise based on fieldwork and ethnographic research on that particular topic, although I do have expertise on rural Tanzania. I was there because I had contributed to some of the background policy analysis which informed one of the meeting themes. Although there were a couple of other anthropologists attending the meeting, they too were there because of their situation within institutions engaged in policy processes around children and AIDS, and not necessarily because they had conducted anthropological research on the meeting themes.

For the anthropologists at the meeting, participation was not determined primarily by disciplinary knowledge, but through knowledge of a different kind: the social relations and institutional nexus of policy and research on children and AIDS. Embedding in social relations brought anthropologists, and indeed other experts to the meeting. In this context, know who mattered more than know how or, perhaps more accurately, know what.

This situation confronts the common sense suppositions about the relationship between knowledge and engagement which is often represented in abstract terms, as if knowledge or research or findings simply filter through and inform policy and public action. They don’t. Whether they do or not depends on the mediation of a host of social and institutional relationships, and on whether individuals engaged in these select or otherwise particular bits of research to make political arguments. Engagement is as much an institutional as an intellectual project. Getting knowledge out and into public processes, whichever side you are on, depends on social relations. Know what, know how, know who.

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Now that I have a new job, I can finally follow through with my promise to discuss the anthropology job interview process.

Having gone through about eight job interviews, I was struck by how neatly the interviews fell into either one of two categories: those where the questions where almost entirely about teaching, and those where the questions were almost entirely about research. As someone who values both teaching and research I worry that I came across as too much of a research-oriented person at the teaching schools, and too much of a teaching-oriented person at the research schools.

Most of the jobs I interviewed for were teaching focused. For such interviews the best advice I can give is to be ready with a list of at least five courses you would teach at that school. It is vital that the list be specifically tailored for that program and the listed job search. The courses should sound exciting, as if you are pitching a product to the students, but you also need to make sure you are complementing the existing curriculum. And also be prepared to say something about your teaching methodology. How do you encourage dialog in the classroom? How do encourage students to do hands-on research? How do you use the web? (more…)

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Last week I presented a paper at an anthropology department in another university in the UK. It was a department where many of the staff had either worked in development, or were working on development as the subject of their inquiry. This was good, because my paper was about development and about the participation of anthropologists in development policy making. Based on recent experience of working as policy maker within the UK government’s aid agency, I argued that anthropologists rarely got involved in policy making as anthropologists, although people who had been anthropologists quite often ended up working as policy makers. Why was this?

I suggested that anthropology and policy making rely on similar conceptual and writing practices, in particular the use of categorical representations. Indeed, both anthropology and policy making are in important ways modes of social ordering, presenting the social representationally. But there are also fundamental differences between them which mean that they can also be seen as the opposite of one another. Whereas anthropology dissembles social ordering through deconstruction, policy making reconstitutes, reconstructs and reorders with a view to bringing into being modified social realities. This has implications for the extent that the practices of anthropology and policy making are compatible. Indeed, when working in the policy field I have experienced what I was doing as practically and conceptually quite distinct from what I have done as an anthropologist.

Engaging in policy making as an anthropologist is difficult. One has to move beyond critique into the kind of reordering which anthropology is more comfortable describing than engaging in. This discomfort, and the general theoretical unease around government across the social sciences more widely, I suggested, accounts for at least some of the anthropological distance from policy processes and from government. As a discipline, certainly in the UK, we have been happier to unpack, critique, comment, translate, explain and witness than to involve ourselves in making policy and in re-envisioning the social.

For an audience committed to understanding anthropology as essentially an identity my suggestion that anthropology was a particular kind of practice was untenable. To maintain that anthropology could be reconsidered as practice, rather than an identity, seemed to imply that one somehow lost one’s anthropological being or status when one engaged in other kinds of practices. The debate then turned to questions of definition and categorisation: who could say that someone was or was not an anthropologist? Were there certain kinds of practices which were not anthropological?

Obviously, to some extent practices and identities go together and what one feels about being an anthropologist as opposed to doing anthropology is highly subjective. Moreover, our identities as anthropologists, whether honed in factory or studio, are deeply felt . Its what makes this a community of Minds and Minds readers. But, having had some seven days to consider the distinction I rashly proposed, I can see some value in maintaining the separation, at least analytically.

Separating out what we do as anthropologists, the special kinds of anthropological practices around ethnography and interpretation (apologies to other fields ) which are largely determined by the institutional contexts which create anthropology as a discipline and profession, from our identity as people who have received this kind of training enables us to perceive more clearly the terms on which we are well placed to engage with the world beyond the University, that is to address what other commentators have called the problem of engagement.

I think some of the problems in dealing with the world outside stem from our adherence to rather narrow anthropological ways of representing knowledge and modes of disciplinary practice , what I have called doing anthropology, which are central to the constitution of the discipline we have built (and which are really interesting and fun and complicated and all the things we as anthropologists love about anthropology). But they are also the same things which make anthropology inaccessible for outsiders and difficult to apply to the kinds of processes in which we claim we would like to be engaged. If we choose to view anthropology as an identity maybe we are less constrained. Anthropology as an identity which encompasses competence in anthropological practices should not preclude our gaining competence in other practices more suited to the engagement we seek. There is much to learn from the outside.

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At one point in my life I heard a professor give a wonderful paper about their academic career at three different institutions and the way that each of them approached the process of educating their members. It was funny, revealing, and very well done. Fear of retribution for drawing such a clear picture, though, meant that the prof in question swore they would never circulate the paper, even to people who had watched them read it. Since I can’t give credit to the original person, and have come up with one more style of my own, I thought I’d try to relive some of the paradigms of departmental approaches to education that we are all familiar with.

First, some departments are organized as factories—students are assembled piece by piece by professors following a highly mechanized and invariant system of activities. These sorts of departments aren’t particularly interesting to work in, and none of us would (I imagine) be interested in working in them. I imagine the department as factory as a space full of enormous lecture halls, scantron tests, and highly quantified metrics used to judge whether each member of the faculty is performing their duty.

Most departments are not organized this way. In some, for instance, a guild model is more common. Like the medieval associations that I analogize them to, departments organized as guilds emphasize that membership has its privileges—members of the guild are protected and encouraged by other members, and all of the guild understands itself to be in opposition to the unwashed masses. I think here of high-prestige departments, or departments with extensive old boy networks (I’m not naming any names!). Indeed, it may not even matter what sort of work you do at all as long as you do it within the hallowed walls of the department. Another option towards understanding the guild, though, would be to imagine particularly tendentious departments with a single paradigm with which all of their graduate students are indelibly stamped.

This is similar to the idea of the department as lab. The focus here is not so much the social network as it is the shared sense of problem. The department has a few charistmatic professors (often with charistmatic grants) and a coterie of students working under them filling in bits of the puzzle that drives the lab as a whole. MAs, PhDs, and other published by students emerges naturally from the central concern of the department. It is not that individuality is discouraged, but the discipline is framed as one in which collaborative research efforts produce field-wide answers to current issues.

Finally, we might want to talk about the department as studio. In the classical artist’s studio, young students observe the master at work and learn from them even as they use their pursue their own unique vision. The community around the studio is intense, connections are made, and various movements are created, break up, and die away. Ultimately, though, the goal is not imitation—there is no point in trying to become another Picasso. The successful students develop a vision and voice that is uniquely their own, albeit one in which the influence of their own teachers can be discerned. Most of the studio community end up spending their careers producing solid but uninspiring landscapes, while a few inspired geniuses produce masterpieces which, while well remembered, do not really build on each other in any way other than providing influence to the next generation.

We speak a great deal about the status of anthropology as a science, but it might be interesting to see how much mileage we get when we conceptualize the science-humanities continuum in terms of organizational paradigms rather than more complex (and abstract) issues in epistemology, etc. etc. I suspect my own alma mater might best be characterized as equal parts guild and studio, with just a touch of factory while programs like UCSC’s History of Consciousness swing more heavily towards the studio model and Oxford, say, towards the guild. What do you think?

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Hi! My name is Maia Green , a UK based anthropologist and, for the next two weeks, a temporary mind. I’d like to thank the Savage Minds team for responding so generously and so quickly to my impromptu offer to join them.

I have never blogged before, although I have often thought about it. When I first began exploring anthropology blogs a couple of years ago there did not seem to be any sites which offered the opportunity for the kind of informed engagement that Savage Minds offers today. Some sites were listlike aggregations of material thought to appeal to anthropologists; others were interesting but very general. If they made use of anthropology they used it to provide a perspective on the worlds they wrote about. They did not apply the same kind of critical reflexivity to anthropology.

My interest in blogging derives not so much from an interest in technology or the new communication possibilities of the web, although these are important. It seems to me that the blog format and blog community of ongoing interactive engagement provides a unique space in which people with an interest in anthropology can engage in debates about issues which are not only problematic for ourselves as members of a discipline, but which are rarely discussed in the public domains of our publications or on our webpages. Different propositions can be explored as moments in a web conversation or thought process than can be articulated in formal submissions to academic journals or associated correspondence.

I think we see the benefits of this new disciplinary freedom in the kinds of debates ongoing within the Savage Minds community; the concerns with issues of engagement, matters of ethics and the public role of anthropology within and outside a rapidly changing academia. As an anthropologist within a university who is also engaged in worlds outside it these are very much my concerns. I welcome the opportunity to share these concerns with others. Please bear with me while I get used to the technology of inputting. Watch this space.

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It is my great pleasure to welcome our latest guest blogger, Maia Green. Maia teaches anthropology at the University of Manchester and is the first Africanist to guest blog here on SM. Her original fieldwork was on the impacts of Catholic Christianity in Southern Tanzania, and her volume Priests, Witches and Power: Popular Christianity After Mission in Southern Tanzania appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2003. She’s continued working in Tanzania in more recent work, but now explores a wider range of institutions and processes, including health sector reform, transformations in anti-witchcraft practices and the practice and culture of international development. Her work also has an ‘applied’ dimension, since she has combined academic anthropology with work as a policy analyst and as an adviser to international development agencies. We’re looking forward to seeing Maia think about anthropology’s engagement not just with policy, but with a variety of different perspectives from outside academia. What better topic to cover on a space like a blog? We’re very happy to have Maia with us and very much look forward to reading her columns. Everyone please join me in welcoming Maia!

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A perennial favorite: the Institutional Review Board and the practice of ethnographic research. I am a member of the Institutional Review Board at my University, ostensibly representing the social and behavioral sciences. Recently the board has undergone a change of leadership and staffing, which means new people and a new round of education about how anthropologists conduct ethnographic research as well as how non-anthropologists do so. For those who don’t know, Institutional Review Boards are a result of the 1974 the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) , which commissioned a report on the use of Human Subjects in Research (known as the Belmont Report) and upon which a code of federal regulations 45 CFR 46 is based, mandating that all research institutions receiving any federal support must oversee research using human subjects. If it isn’t research, or they ain’t human, the IRB is not concerned—otherwise, they must make every effort to 1) know about it and 2) approve it. So far so good.

There are however, a couple of sticking points with respect to ethnnographic research that I have run into repeatedly. One is the requirement of confidentiality. The other is the requirement of written informed consent (and here). (There is also the problem of whether or not there are any reliable standards when it comes to “psychological harm” that subjects might suffer at the hands of unscrupulous researchers—but that is a bugaboo for another post). Now, given the anguish Anthropology has put itself through with respect to colonialism, with respect to complicity in the dispossesion of native people’s land, and most recently with respect Napoleon Chagnon and Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado, one would probably be safe in asserting that we are alone among the disciplines who have made the ethical treatment of humans not just a priorty, but virtually impossible to ignore throughout one’s graduate and professional life. We may not have standards of harm that are easily applied across all cases—but we damn well have discussed, in excruciating detail, nearly every possible kind of injustice man can visit on man.

My new IRB overlords, whom I welcome of course, do not see it this way. As far as they are concerned, anthropology appears to occupy a backwater, in which the lack of standardization, the reliance on individual judgment, and the practice of meticulously examining the finest grain of every encounter we have for its justice or injustice are nothing so much as solid evidence that we are in violation of what are clear and reasonable regulations about how scientific research should be conducted.

Take for example, the requirement of written consent. August authorities such as the Anthropological Association of America and the former head (Project Muse required) of the National Science Foundation Anthropology Section have made clear that written documentation may not be appropriate in all cases—the easy cases are those where your informants are non-literate (duh?) or where you are dealing with individuals who have, for instance, a long history of land expropriation due to the unscrupulous signing of documents by ancestors. In these cases they recommend that some other method of obtaining the vaunted “informed consent” of research participants be pursued. But there are a host of less easy cases: those situations where your informants are naturally or historically suspicious of government and its apparatus for instance, or where the presentation of a form would convert a personable and arduously cultivated relationship into a purely formal one. Should the IRB require the presentation of such forms in all cases—even to the extent of rendering some forms of long-practiced ethnographic research impossible? My new IRB Overlords appear to think so.

Or take for instance, the issue of confidentiality. According to the IRB, the only ethical practice is to ensure confidentiality of information, as a default practice, and if necessary, against the wishes of informants. Sure, if the informant is a public figure and the information is public, and the informant wishes to have it made public, then in that case, there seems to be no problem with allowing the researcher to treat the information as public. But if, for instance, an individual of no particular standing, in negotiating whether to participate in your research project, demands that his words be made public and be identified with his real name—do we have the right, or the obligation, to deny him this request? It seems to me that applying this ethical standard across all cases, regardless of the express wishes of individual informants is as suspect as revealing their confidential information. It is, as we should well know, the moral ideal of anglo-american privacy elevated to the status of universal norm. My new IRB overlords call BS on that.

So what I want to know is: experience anyone? I need examples of research in which either the use of oral/non-written documentation of informed consent, or the practice of allowing people the option to be identified has been approved (recently) by IRBs, or articles and documents that describe, or defend such practices. Ultimately, I would like to pen recommendations for use in every such changing of the guard… because otherwise, institution after institution is set to make the practice of ethnographic research as we know it both increasingly formalized and possibly, increasingly impossible.

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This is probably not an issue taking up a lot of mental and emotional space for most Savage Minds contributors and readers, but it is currently the hot topic at my institution (the University of Alberta). The U of A has a mandatory retirement age for faculty (65), and there is a movement underway—one that probably will be successful—to overturn it.

The principal argument against the policy is that mandatory retirement is simple age-discrimination (which, undoubtedly, it is). The sub-arguments are various, but an important one is that 65 year old people are to a significant extent not as “old” nowadays as they may have been a generation ago—they are healthy, productive, keen of mind, and so on. Again, this is indisputable.

And yet. Having just come off the job market myself, and having lots of friends on the job market, and feeling responsible for rising graduate students who will soon enter the job market, I have some qualms about going all Grey Panther on this issue. As far as I can tell, the academic job market has important “zero sum game” qualities. One domain of limited flexibility is infrastructure (offices and labs): finding creative ways to assume salaries continue for longer and pension-collection is forestalled won’t open up new funds to expand the physical spaces that house active faculty.

I wonder, too, whether the faculty most interested in the abolishment of mandatory retirement now were also among those most thoughtful about the generational structure of their disciplines 10 and 20 years ago: when they were admitting graduate students and attracting undergraduate majors. That being said, I concede that mandatory retirement is discriminatory. So it is a controversy about which I am not quite sure how to feel. Thoughts?

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