Somehow, I missed this.
The NYT did an interview with the putatively besieged David Graeber. My favorite line is the following:
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.
I’m not sure where I went wrong. Was it my failure to translate Hieroglyphics, or the fact that I ordered my shrimp warm? Nonetheless, my articles are used in college classrooms around the world–but that aint really saying much…
Is this good or bad press for anthropology?
The thing that gets me about this article is not the mixture of vanity and opulence, but the fact that it paints David’s removal as a result of his leftism, instead of his refusal to play departmental politics (as I said “earlier”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=412).
yes, well, one could be tempted to allegorize all of leftist academic politics by this particular misprision–that leftist academics are better at flaunting injuries to their beliefs than getting jiggy with the Realpolitik, so to spik.
Though couldn’t there be something political about department politics? Imagine, purely as a wild conjecture, a department at least partly composed of ex-Maoists who have “learned their lesson” and are now jiggy (complicit) with Realpolitik (non-boat-rockin’ “collegiality,” as the Bourgeoisie call it). Imagine a sassy, slightly abrasive, anti-GTO revolutionary in their midst. Imagine the resentment. Voila, now not only the personal (as we all always already knew) but the *political* is political. Take that, Stanley Fish!
What the NY Times article doesn’t say, because David himself won’t say it, is that one of the big issues at stake was his support for a Yale graduate student who was kicked out for unionizing. For various reasons David doesn’t want to say this himself (he does play department politics) but the graduate students have been loud and clear on this point.
Yes, as Kerim implies, to “play departmental politics” in this case would have meant to demonstrate loyalty to the senior faculty by being willing to act as an accomplish in acts of vindictive sadism against grad students. That’s what Yale anthropology has, unfortunately, been all about. (I no longer need to play politics so I can be explicit about this now.) Those willing to play along are pushed for tenure. For example, the junior faculty member they were pushing for tenure at the same time as they were trying to get rid of me actually had an outstanding grievance filed against her from a former TA. Those who are decent to grad students, or even defend them, are ejected. In my case I was first told I was “unreliable” – a strange accusation, I thought at the time, considering they never ask me to do anything (they refused to give me committee work, so as to be able to later say I didn’t do any) – and then made it clear what they meant by it when they tried to expel a very brilliant student on ridiculously trumped-up grounds, when in fact it was quite clear they were trying to make an example of her owing to her union activities prior to a big strike coming up a few weeks later. I mean, the person who told her to leave the program outright told her at the committee meeting where she did so that her GESO (union) activities were one of the reasons she was “unfit for academic life”. I was the only professor willing to openly defend her at that time – and later I was accused of “intimidating” the senior faculty member who told her to leave the program – get this – by taking notes at the meeting in which she was told to leave. As I have repeatedly said since: Yale is the only place where the DGS (Director of Graduate Studies) can tell a student “you’re no good, get out of the program” – one junior faculty has the nerve to say “I think she’s a good student, surely we can work out something”, and _he’s_ the one who gets accused of “intimidation”. The place was a total reign of terror, and
Actually, we’ve been trying to go public with this story for months now and no newspaper will touch it.
Similarly with the story about how one of the senior faculty was doing things like calling undergraduates’ parents to tell them their daughter was falling under the influence of a dangerous radical. We keep giving it to the press; they always end up cutting it out of the story. I guess they’re worried about the legal implications.
Anyway, I could go on about the rituals of public humiliation the senior faculty design for junior faculty at Yale, and the bizarre politics of the place – for example, the fact that it seems to be the only department that has institutionalized the habit of writing negative letters of recommendation for its own students – but suffice it to say that this was a department extremely dysfunctional even by Yale standards. In part as a result of the scandal it’s breaking up: at least half the core sociocultural faculty are either leaving or looking for new jobs; it’s been placed under review and presumably, will have to be completely rebuilt now. So in a way justice will be served. At any rate I hope it will because the graduate students there deserve so much better than they’re getting: we have a superb collection of grad students, and it’s a crime that they should have to go through this system designed to crush them, terrorize them, submit them to some weird discipline of enforced mediocrity, and drive a large number of them out of the discipline entirely. It was the graduate students who really mobilized to fight what happened to me – and, I’m proud to point out, the pro- and anti-GESO ones in almost equal measure – and I only hope that with the many excellent and decent senior scholars who have been marginalized there in the past (those who aren’t leaving anyway) they manage to put together a new faculty that’s worthy of them.
David
Oh yeah, and another thing. The shrimp were not on chipped ice! They were wrapped around sugar cane. Great Vietnamese place called Pho Viet Hung – on Mulberry street just south of Canal in Manhattan – amazingly good food and most dishes run you about five or six dollars – at least if you order off the Vietnamese side of the menu. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to encourage a reporter to present a sympathetic portrayal. I will advertise it any time. On the other hand if you’re in New Haven you must definitely eat at Miya’s on Chapel and Howe street. The chef, Bun, has been referred to as “the Pablo Picasso of sushi.”
David
Thanks for the added analysis David, your “rituals of public humiliation” is a great turn of a phrase and sums up many of my still pre-tenure experiences at my department.